Three months into her job as chief executive of Westpac Gail Kelly is ready to make some changes. Speaking yesterday at the presentation of the bank's results for the six months to March 2008 she said there were aspects of the business that disappointed her. Kelly said the bank's systems supported products not customers. This meant it was not easy to do business with the bank. She said: "Our processes were not designed for customers. We are scoping out some redesign work." She said the tailoring of products and segmentation of customers was more limited than she "would have liked" and there needed to be better integration of wealth management and banking. She said she was disappointed with the bank's performance in attracting deposits and said she had a team at work on changes in that area. Kelly also believes there has been insufficient investment in the distribution network. She wants to put more into staff training, "tools" and better branch-level metrics. She plans to devolve authority from the regional centres and product groups to the branches and business centres. Kelly said she was "on a mission" to encourage some "boldness" amongst the staff and to cut through some of the red tape in the organisation. As expected from the ex-St George boss, she wants the customer satisfaction ratings to improve. Being "in the middle of the pack" is no longer satisfactory. Her praise of the bank was mainly to do with what she described as its "robust risk management and financial framework" and its "excellent governance". She said those strengths had helped the bank get through the volatility of the past six months or so in very good shape. Yesterday the bank reported a net profit of $2.2 billion for the six months to March, an increase of 34 per cent over the previous corresponding period. Adjusting for several one-off items, including the proceeds of the Visa IPO and the sale of 40 per cent of BT Investment Management into an IPO, cash earnings for the period were $1.8 billion, an increase of 10 per cent over the previous corresponding period. Cash earnings per share of 98.2 cents were up eight per cent. The bank's return on equity slipped from 23.6 per cent in March last year to 22.7 per cent. The net interest margin was down 20 basis points from 2.25 to 2.05 per cent. Net operating income was up 12 per cent to $5.4 billion and expenses were up eight per cent to $2.4 billion. The cost to income ratio came down from 45.9 to 44.4 per cent. Among the business units the strongest growth in earnings came from business financial services, up 13 per cent to $538 million (the biggest contribution to earnings). The New Zealand contribution was up 12 per cent to $244 million, consumer financial services was up 10 per cent to $441