Westpac’s lost decade
Over a decade, Westpac has lurched from one personnel blunder to the next. But like choosing an ugly bridesmaid, every chair and CEO dreams of finding someone worse to make him look better. The bank’s arrival at Steven Gregg is simply another outworking of that truth.
Westpac's board of directors signed off the bank's last set of full-year accounts on Sunday November 3, releasing them to the ASX the following morning. In the 2024 annual report, also released that morning, Westpac chairman Steven Gregg wrote that his board colleagues Nerida Caesar, Audette Exel, Nora Scheinkestel and Margie Seale would at the December 13 annual general meeting "stand for re-election with the board's support."
Forty-eight hours later, on November 6, Westpac announced Scheinkestel's resignation – effective immediately – and the retirement of Exel at that same AGM. The twin departures weren't merely a volte-face; they were also conspicuously premature: both women had only joined the board in 2021. It is well understood in Company Director Land (a magical realm virtually as cosseted as Margot Robbie's Barbie Land) that when you sign up as a Big Four bank director, you're implicitly signing up for a decade.
Westpac offered no explanation as to why the company's public plan for board continuity had been very suddenly torn up. The contradiction of Gregg's statement, and the directors' intent, of two days earlier was not even addressed in its announcement. Scheinkestel said she was leaving (that very day) "knowing the bank is now in a much stronger position" than three years earlier. Exel declared it was "now time for me to focus on building and growing the Adara Group", the firm she'd been building and growing for 25 years while happily serving in other roles. Gregg thanked them both for their contributions and doubtless imagined that would suffice. And he was almost right!