Women in Finance: Leading from the top at ANZ

Q. As the general manager, retail broker, you’re a senior leader at ANZ. What was your career path?

In my bio, it talks about me being a career banker and that’s pretty well true. I started out very early.

ABN AMRO – a Dutch bank that was a merchant bank at the time in Sydney – offered me a management traineeship. It was a fabulous, 12-month learning program. I started on the foreign exchange desk where I did operations on foreign exchange and interest rate sales, then I did settlements, I did leasing, I did trade finance, I did relationship management… I did everything! After that, I got a job in the relationship management team in ABN and I was working in specialist lending.

I then joined ANZ and my domestic banking career took off… I took some head office roles and built some tech and delivery teams and I really broadened out my experience across the bank. Now I get to do a bit of both – running the existing business and having a role in what we’re building in ANZ Plus in the future.

I went into finance thinking I would not be here for the duration of my career. I thought I would have many careers, and I have, but it’s all been within the finance sector and within banking!

Q. What skills have helped you grow over your career?

The management training gave me confidence in my technical skills, the foundations of my experience. But… I realised that opportunities are there for the taking, but you just have to step into it. So, I grabbed that with two hands. That was really a stepping stone for me in my career.

You can do lots of different jobs if you’ve got a good, curious mindset and you have the ability to be a little bit brave, bold, and authentic… If you have a good, curious mindset, nothing’s off the table.

Q. What else do you credit to your success in your career?

I had a role model in my mum. She didn’t expect to be a business person, but ended up, through her circumstances in life, having to be. Through her tenacity and resilience, she ended up being an owner of that business. I watched her and saw what that resilience and tenacity can really deliver. The expectation that women can’t do certain things was just not demonstrated to me.

At ANZ Bank, I’ve also been fortunate to have had some really good sponsors along the way – those who have challenged me to go and get some breadth in my experience (and supported me through that), recognising the skills I would need.

When I had my children, I also had people who supported me when I wanted flexible working arrangements. I worked part time for 10 years, but it didn’t really slow me down in any way. So, it’s about having the right leadership and support around you.

Q. How is ANZ supporting women in leadership and women in finance more broadly?

ANZ runs programs for women as they come through into senior leadership at the bank, including a program called Notable Women. It’s all about how you build your brand and presence, both internally and externally. It’s been really supported from the top-down and you can see the difference it’s made in terms of the leaders that we have and the impact that has on the business.

So Doyenne started as a way to take something that we’d done internally (that was really quite successful) and make that available to some selected female brokers, who we thought this would be of value to.

It started with a very specific problem: female representation in a public space and within our sector.

Q. What does Doyenne mean and what does it entail?

Doyenne is a French word that means ‘most prominent woman’ or ‘most respected woman’ in their field of expertise.

We started the program in 2018 and have reinvigorated it as the needs of brokers have changed. Now, we are partnering with Jane Counsel and Thrive4Women for a six-week, intensive program around really understanding the strengths of your business.

Last year, we had 15 Doyennes – really talented female brokers who we wanted to support and invest in continuing to propel their business forward. These women are often business owners and grappling with trying to balance the running of their business and growing their business. So, we spend time working in a small group on their business, or on their unique challenges, to try and make sure that they get really good, focused support to help them propel their business forward.

Q: What advice do you have for fostering female-friendly workplaces?

It starts with recruitment. I think the MFAA has done a really great job of identifying that even the way you advertise a job should be written in language that is gender- neutral.

Also, making sure that you try and identify where there are biases and then making sure that you’ve got flexible practices for people for their various circumstances… That certainly helped me when I needed to work part time.

If you create the environment and you’ve got the right people, they will deliver for you.