ASB CEO Vittoria Shortt talks about her tough childhood, banking, being NZ’s top paid female executive - Money Talks

Vittoria Shortt, chief executive of ASB Bank. Photo / Supplied

“It’s not something I think about a lot or if at all,” says ASB boss Vittoria Shortt about lists that rank her as New Zealand’s highest-paid woman.

“The days are filled with other things that feel important so I don’t think about that. The only thing I would say is there’s a lot of commentary around women in leadership positions and it’s certainly nice to have some of my female colleagues reach out and recognise it as a positive thing.”

Talking to the Money Talks podcast, Shortt reflects on wealth, success and a passion for banking.

But she also explains how growing up without money taught her how destabilising a lack of financial security can be.

Shortt grew up in a normal middle-class environment in Kohimarama. Her mother was a teacher and her father ran a small business.

But when that business ran into difficulties there were some tough times.

“Growing up at home, we were in real financial difficulty,” she recalls. “I remember going up to the dairy, we didn’t have any food in the house. But we had a whole bunch of bottles - I’m showing my age - you know how you could take glass bottles up to the dairy and swap them out for something?

“I remember dinner that night was taking the glass bottles up to the dairy and getting some sausages and the other bits and bobs and that was dinner.

“There was a sense of knowing that maybe other kids had some more money going on in the household,” she says.

Shortt says her parents shielded her from most of the economic pain but she recalls the emotional stress it caused.

“It’s kind of hard to know when you’re young and growing up exactly what causes what, you know. You listen to your parents talk around the kitchen table and sometimes it’s hard to make heads or tails of it,” she says.

“But the thing that I learned pretty quickly is how destabilising it is how much emotional pressure and stress comes from money decisions and the things that went from there that happened in our family.

“And so, early on, it was less about what was going on in the economy, or the environment, or the business. And it was a lot more around the emotional impact.”

Shortt did well at school and university studying accounting and management. But she says making money was never a goal in itself.

“It’s never about that,” she says.

“If anyone ever asks me about that, it always goes back to choosing things that you’re passionate about and that you love doing. Don’t go and choose something because it pays. You don’t want to be getting lots of money and then hating your job every day.

“If I wasn’t a banker, I’d be a farmer. I love the outdoors and I think that’s one of the beautiful parts about the country. There are so many mountains to hike, beaches to enjoy, you know, it’s, it’s a big part of, I think, Kiwis and who we are and what we do.”

After university, Shortt’s first job was with business consultancy Deloitte - initially on the accounting side of the business.

“I quickly moved into the corporate finance team and really enjoyed that work. At the time we were doing commercial litigation, due diligence, valuations of businesses and M&A [merge and acquisition] kind of activity.”

“I loved the M&A work I was doing and that’s when I decided to go in-house M&A for Carter Holt Harvey.”

Shortt worked for the giant timber processing firm in its NZX-listed days under then-CEO Chris Liddell.

“So I started doing in-house M&A, the buying and the selling of the businesses, and there was quite a lot of that occurring at that time under Chris’ leadership. But then I always wanted to stay on and see how those businesses went. I always became fascinated in the strategy behind the merger or the divestment,” she says.

“Rather than buying and selling businesses, I wanted to get more into, um, understanding how they ran.

“So I asked if I could get out of the M&A team and I went into the sawmilling division and a terrific role there. It’s as gritty as you get. It’s deconstruction manufacturing. That’s really challenging work.”

Shortt recalls the ups and downs of what was a tough time for the industry. “[There were] periods of making cash losses, making difficult decisions like shutting down plants, which could be the only main employer in a small town,” she says. “I saw how people lead through that. So it was my first foray into business and management at a reasonably high level where you’re actually having to make decisions. And it really lit a fire for me.”

In 2002, Shortt’s husband sold his business and the couple decided to move to Australia.

It was there she made the leap to banking, an industry in which she has thrived over the past 20 years.

Shortt still loves it.

“People sometimes look at you a bit sideways. It’s like, you love banking?! And I do, I genuinely do.”

She is aware of the stereotypes, that it is a bit grey and boring, but says it is nothing like that.

“Firstly, I just think about the impact that we can have, you know, powering up economies, helping businesses, helping people through the difficult times, you know, is important.”

She says there’s the innovation and rapid technology that goes to the heart of modern banking. And then there is the politics and public debate about regulation and competition.

Shortt doesn’t get into the details (the Commerce Commission is currently conducting a market study into personal banking; it published its draft report in March).

But she is not shy of making the case for ASB’s Australian-owned parent company – Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

“I think there are some absolute benefits to being owned by large Australian banks and I think those are not well understood,” she says.

“Firstly, accessing capital markets. Because New Zealanders like to borrow more than they save. ASB is going to go offshore and raise billions of dollars in the open markets; having the Australian-owned banks behind you is an important dynamic there.

“That adds real value to the New Zealand marketplace, in my mind. The other thing would be the level of investment that the larger banks can make in Australia means that we get huge benefits of things like cyber security, for example. So we’re able to tap into the technologically amazing capability that I believe has real value.

“So a lot of benefits, I would say, but bring on the competition.”

Having spent many years in Australian banking, Shortt sees some key differences in the way they look at money across the Tasman.

“I think there’s some similarities. I think one thing that I’m really envious of though, when I think about Australia, is the superannuation part of that system,” she says. “I think the ability to help people save for their futures, then the ability of those organisations to invest the money, boy, that’s really setting up the country for success.

“I would call out that as being something that’s very positive about the Australian system.”

Often New Zealanders are looking across the Tasman, looking at higher wages, higher productivity, and, you know, feeling a bit jealous, she says.

It’s a bigger economy, it’s got natural advantages like mineral wealth.

“A lot of my friends will say, there’s great wages over there. There’s a lot of tax over there too. I think that’s a very important dynamic. A lot of New Zealanders want the benefits of the infrastructure that they see in Australia, but they don’t like the idea of the tax that actually has to pay for that,” she says.

“When you go over there and you’re paying stamp duty on a lot of things, you’ve got capital gains taxes. So you can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

Compulsory superannuation was introduced by Paul Keating in 1992 and Australians now have savings in excess of NZ$4 trillion.

“It is a very difficult thing to introduce,” Shortt says. “But again, you can’t move forward without making some of these tougher decisions that set you up for the future.”

In the end, it comes back to the value of saving, Shortt says.

That passion for saving probably isn’t surprising from a banker who recalls her first memories of money involved slotting it into a yellow ASB elephant “piggy bank”.

Shortt says the money advice she took from her mum as a child was “spend half, save half”.

“I was always saving because financial independence mattered more to me than anything else, just because of the family situation,” she says.

“So having that buffer, knowing the money was there, giving you some freedom.”

It’s something she’d like to see on a national level.

Despite the tough economy right now, Shortt says she has been surprised by the resilience of Kiwis.

“We haven’t seen . . . like after the GFC, there was a big rise in mortgage defaults and things like that. I mean, it’s obviously tough. We’re not saying it isn’t and it’s building,” she says.

“We’ve just got more ways of helping our customers. We’ve got an enormous balance sheet at ASB, we’ve got a lot of runway in terms of supporting our customers through. And in fact, during Covid, we grew a lot of market share in business lending because we decided that we wanted to support businesses through that period.

“I do feel optimistic about it,” she says. “I’m an optimist by nature, by the way. But again, I feel optimistic. Why? Because I think we’re working better together than ever before. debt levels are lower. I think that’s meant that there’s more resilience in the system than there was leading into the GFC.”

Listen to the full episode to hear more.

Money Talks is a podcast run by the NZ Herald. It isn’t about personal finance and isn’t about economics – it’s just well-known New Zealanders talking about money and sharing some stories about the impact it’s had on their lives and how it has shaped them.

The series is hosted by Liam Dann, business editor-at-large for the Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.

Money Talks is available on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.