Outgoing ANZ CEO Mike Smith recast, to some degree, the bank's endeavours in the Asian region in an exit interview with Banking Day this week.*Reflecting on more than eight years service at ANZ, Smith responded to a simple question: "Where did you want to get to in Asia and how far did you get?""We used to have just a bunch of outposts," Smith said. "Now we have a real business, it's an integrated business into our institutional and corporate bank."One of the mistakes we made was talking about Asia instead of our institutional and corporate business, because we couldn't do what we do in Australia without the franchise in Asia. Or we couldn't do what we do in Asia without the franchise in Australia."Our global markets business is a classic case of how that operates. That is now more than three times bigger and three times more profitable than in 2007."And half of it, in fact more than half, about 55 per cent comes from Asia, the dealing rooms in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai."Where would I want to be? I put a target of 25 per cent out there and we got there. I think we got further than I thought we could and that was basically off the back of the crisis."We hadn't anticipated how many [banks] that withdrew would withdraw."We are now ranked as the number four corporate bank in Asia. In 2007 it used to be ranked 27."* This interview was filmed by ANZ's BlueNotes, at our request, and excerpts will be available online later today via the BlueNotes portal.