Horn's unfinished business at ANZ

By KEVIN TAYLOR

Dr Murray Horn leaves unfinished business at ANZ New Zealand.

Improving customer satisfaction had been one of Horn's aims as managing director. But he is leaving to head the ANZ group's global institutional banking in Sydney in December.

He said yesterday he had achieved only "two-and-a-half" of the three things he had wanted to achieve while heading ANZ in New Zealand.

He had wanted to turn around ANZ's financial performance, and staff and customer satisfaction.

ANZ now operates with a 1.4 per cent return on assets compared with 0.7 per cent when he joined in 1997. "It has been a great turnaround. We have gone from the worst-performing financially to the best," he said.

And staff satisfaction had been boosted from somewhere in the 40s to the 80s.

But Horn said more needed doing with customer satisfaction, although that was turning as well.

"We've had a couple of very good surveys. ACNielsen ranks us third equal, and Auckland University ranked us biggest improvement," he said.

"I would have liked to have seen that through. I would like to have seen us have the highest customer satisfaction in New Zealand.

"In terms of customer satisfaction I think the cheque's in the mail."

Horn is also chairman of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, and his replacement has yet to be chosen.

In his Australian role he will be responsible for ANZ's major corporate and institutional customers globally. He will be replaced in New Zealand by Greg Camm, the Australian managing director, mortgages, for the ANZ Group. Camm worked in New Zealand as general manager of retail banking at ANZ between 1993 and 1996.

Horn said Camm would make the bank in New Zealand more autonomous, and carry on the work in turning around customer satisfaction.

Before joining ANZ Horn spent almost 20 years with the Government, and from 1993 to 1997 was Treasury Secretary.