Atypical banker took a roundabout road to top

By RICHARD BRADDELL

Mark Tume's parents were stunned by his audacity when, a year out of school, he announced that he wanted to go to university.

Not that his working-class parents were anti-education. But his freezing-worker father and his mother, who came from a family of Wanganui plumbers, thought School Certificate and a trade were enough. If he stayed in the Air Force, he would get the trade and be set up for life, they reasoned.

The strategy may have been sound, but by setting his sights higher, 40-year-old Mr Tume has risen to senior positions in banking and is now head of funds management at BNZ Investment Management.

Dressed in business casual, he conforms only loosely to the traditional buttoned-down image of a banker. His office could be mistaken for that of an advertising creative type - or even a journalist's if there was more junk strewn around.

Finance and equity management textbooks overflow on to his desk from a bulging bookcase, while Harley-Davidson memorabilia keep company with a cappuccino machine and a punchbag. (Still a keen surfer, Mr Tume used to be a competitive boxer.)

But his office also suggests that the drive that has taken him to senior positions in banking has its roots in his iwi affiliations - the Taranaki Maori Trust Board gave him a grant to go to university.

Having made it to university, he chose a commerce degree, but then took as wide a range of subjects as the university would allow, with two papers in philosophy being among those he most valued.

The degree completed, a career in banking was not even near the horizon. Instead he was off to Australia, working as a labourer, something he continued to do, along with truck driving, after his return to Wanganui.

But it was not long before a mate had him off to Taranaki, which was booming from oil exploration and Think Big energy projects.

Soon he was married, but while the business he had established, production testing oil wells, was still far removed from banking, fresh study, this time of financial futures, saw him moving closer to the world of money.

Perhaps he wanted to invest only in futures, which were still very new. But correspondence to that effect with ANZ resulted in his first banking job: dealing foreign exchange in New Zealand's recently deregulated market.

Then to Barclays Bank, which in the aftermath of the 1980s financial boom had been bought out 100 per cent by its British parent.

A move to the BNZ in 1994 to re-establish its swaps business "transmuted" into several activities. These included extending a relatively small corporate swaps book so it could support the fixed-rate mortgage lending that was to displace variable-rate lending in the middle part of the decade. The goal was to use financial "synthetic" instruments to overcome the risk inherent in lending long on a fixed rate when funding is short term.

"The bank didn't have a powerful offering in fixed-rate mortgages or one where we could strap fixed-rate derivatives to the side," Mr Tume says.

His task was made possible by the rapid advances in technology. It was only a short while before at ANZ that the dealing team, used to doing their trading calculations on Hewlett Packard calculators, had left a new 286 computer idle because no one knew how to work it.

But the job grew, and fixed-rate mortgages became commonplace. And in 1996, Mr Tume was handed responsibility for managing the BNZ's $20 billion balance sheet.

Having worked himself out of a job, he moved into funds management, for the first time coming into contact with equities, one of the few financial instruments he had never traded.

And it was this job that brought him back into contact with his wider iwi affiliations, the last time being when he got his grant to attend university.

While his family had interests in the Ngati Tuwharetoa trusts, the iwi became conscious of him only when the bank tendered for a financing project.

The bank did not become involved, but Mr Tume established links with Tuwharetoa leaders, and is now involved in a number of family interests in the Lake Taupo Forest Trust and a wholly owned subsidiary.