Hartzer completes his ascendancy

In plumping for Brian Hartzer, Westpac's board have picked as CEO one of the proven innovators in the local banking industry.

Hartzer's return to ANZ in 1999 as head of consumer finance (after a second stint with consultants First Manhattan) heralded the beginnings of a turnaround in thinking inside and outside banks toward the industry.

ANZ's legacy as the fourth in an oligopoly of four and a history as a commercial lender obliged the bank at the time to search for ways to progress its retail franchise in a sector still burdened by the community perception that "banks are bastards."

The introduction of ANZ's "all you can eat" pricing of $5 a month on its everyday bank account in 2003 represented, at the time, a breakthrough in product pricing.

In a 2008 interview, Hartzer said: "I got here [ANZ] in 1999 … I had been here in the mid-'90s and worked with the bank then, and in the '90s the focus was very much around driving financial performance through raising fees and cutting costs. That had a flow on into customer satisfaction and community engagement, which put us and the rest of the industry in fairly dire straits going back to 1999, 2000.

"We then recognised that we, along with the rest of the industry, had got it wrong and needed to rebuild the relationship with our customer base. We led the restoring customer faith thing. That was incredibly effective at regenerating energy in the network, in particular around customer satisfaction and community engagement."

Hartzer left ANZ in mid-2009 to head up UK retail for the Royal Bank of Scotland, less than year after the rescue of that bank by taxpayers. He returned to Australia, via Westpac, in early 2012 against a background of industry chatter of an early end to Gail Kelly's tenure as Westpac CEO.