Speaking at the American Chamber of Commerce in Melbourne yesterday, NAB chief customer officer Andrew Hagger described his efforts to bring the bank’s wealth division and retail banking arm “under one umbrella”.
Mr Hagger, who took on the new role of ‘chief customer officer – consumer and wealth’ in August, described the unification of banking and wealth within NAB as a “very tall, very steep mountain to climb”.
He pointed to the sale of 80 per cent of NAB’s life insurance business to Japanese insurer Nippon Life in October 2015 as a move that has allowed the bank to “focus more on our core expertise”.
The transaction has also freed up NAB’s capital to be invested in areas like superannuation, investment and advice, Mr Hagger said.
“Secondly, by merging five of our super funds into one, we created Australia’s largest retail super fund, MLC Super, with $70 billion of funds under management,” he said.
“This was a bold move – but an important one. It will make it far easier for our customers to move between retirement products in the future and it will ultimately deliver real value for them through this scale.”
Mr Hagger compared establishing Australia’s largest super fund to “creating a new country, building a city infrastructure and writing a new national anthem all at the same time”.
“But I can tell you that despite all that hard work, we are still a long way from the top of the mountain. For all that work we’ve done, we’re still only at base camp,” he said.
