Christopher Niesche: Westpac faces difficult times ahead

Outgoing Westpac Australia boss Brian Hartzer. Photo / AP

COMMENT:

We don't know what Brian Hartzer will be doing on Monday morning. Perhaps he will be having a leisurely brunch with his wife or taking a walk along the beach in Sydney's harbourside Vaucluse, where he bought a A$12 million ($12.6m) mansion a few years ago. Or perhaps he'll be seeing his financial adviser or consulting lawyers.

The one thing we know he won't be doing is putting on a coat and tie and showing up for work at Westpac, for Monday is the day his sacking, in the wake of the money laundering scandal, takes effect.

Hartzer's departure and those of Westpac chairman Lindsay Maxsted and director Ewen Crouch mark a new level of corporate accountability. Their exits show just how far the banks need to go to get back on track.

Westpac is accused by the anti-money laundering regulator of 23 million violations of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act in transactions worth A$11 billion. The allegations include that the bank ignored patterns of transactions consistent with child exploitation.

Austrac requires banks to report foreign transactions. Westpac's failure to report 23 million of them accounts for most of the violations. Undoubtedly the vast majority of these were legitimate transactions, but some might have involved payments by Westpac customers that involved child exploitation.

The initial response from Westpac's leaders was to try to tough the crisis out.

The bank reached for the crisis PR playbook. It apologised; it scrapped executive bonuses and cancelled the Christmas party; it donated to charities for children; it shut down the LitePay funds transfer platform that was at the centre of the scandal and announced an independent inquiry into what happened.

Hartzer faced down calls from investors, politicians and commentators for his resignation, saying he wanted to "get to the bottom" of the underlying failures and lead the bank out of the crisis.

But in an environment of heightened expectations of executive and director responsibility it all came too late. There is also the added element that no amount of expert PR spinning can erase the tarnish of the phrase "child exploitation".

But Hartzer and the board should have known about the Austrac issues long before they found out.

In its statement of claim, Austrac asserts: "Since at least 2013 Westpac was aware of the heightened child exploitation risks associated with frequent low value payments to the Philippines and south-east Asia both from Austrac guidance and its own risks assessments. In June 2016 senior management within Westpac were specifically briefed on these risks with respect to the LitePay channel."

Although Austrac said it had warned the bank in December 2016 about its vulnerabilities around the reporting of suspicious payments connected to child exploitation, Hartzer revealed the first he'd heard of it was on November 15 this year. Maxsted similarly said the board simply didn't know how this information didn't reach senior executives and the board.

This simply wasn't good enough.

Next test for Westpac will be its annual meeting on December 12. Photo / File

It is unreasonable to the point of ridiculousness to expect the chief executive and the board to know about every operational detail in an organisation with 1200 branches, 35,000 employees and 14 million customers.

But we should expect the bank to have systems in place to escalate these potentially damaging issues up the chain of command, and for extremely important issues to reach the top of the company. This is their job as overseers.

Secondly, the board and management need to be responsible for creating a culture where failures are admitted and problems highlighted and dealt with. It is a huge indictment on Westpac that when lower level staff became aware of the issue not enough of them said "hang on, we need to do something about this" and those who did were ignored.

Westpac faces difficult times ahead. It has an interim chief executive and only one remaining director with extensive experience in retail banking. It is facing a fine of at least A$1b and numerous other investigations from other regulators, including the corporate regulator the Australian Securities & Investments Commission and the banking regulator the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. It has suffered huge brand damage that will hurt its standing in the eyes of customers and politicians.

Its next test will be the annual meeting on December 12, where investors will have the chance to make their feelings heard by voting against the bank's remuneration report. If they do, it will be the second "strike" against the remuneration report, giving investors the chance to vote to spill the entire board and vote for new directors.

It's hard to imagine too many investors wanting to go this far. The bank has already had A$11b sliced off its market capitalisation – more than 10 per cent of its value - and investors know, having lost its chief executive and with the chairman soon to depart, Westpac will need continuity.

But that the sacking of the board is even being contemplated shows just how much more Australians expect of its corporate leaders than we did only two or three years ago.