Narev just weeks away from being 9/11 victim

Ian Narev appeared in the 1979 TV series Children of Fire Mountain. Photo / Supplied

Commonwealth Bank of Australia's new boss has always been a high-flyer.

He was aboard a plane waiting to take off at New York's JFK airport on September 11, 2001 when two Boeing-767s ploughed into the World Trade Centre, blocks away from his office at consultancy firm McKinsey & Company.

The disaster struck a fortnight after Ian Narev had finished a six-month stint working with a client on the 60th floor of one of the towers.

Back in New Zealand 22 years earlier, 12-year-old Narev was a child television star, and appeared in the 1979 series Children of Fire Mountain.

From Auckland Grammar School in 1984 he went on to claim a senior law prize from Auckland University, a scholarship to continue his studies at Cambridge.

He graduated as the top LLM student in 1994 and went on to gain a second masters at New York University in 1998.

In the same year, Narev joined high-powered management consultants McKinsey and began working with some of the United States' largest financial institutions. He shifted to the firm's Sydney and Auckland offices in 2002 before becoming the head of McKinsey's New Zealand operations in 2005. In 2007, he moved to Australia as group head of strategy for Commonwealth Bank.

A year later he was in charge of the A$2.1 billion acquisition of the Bank of Western Australia and investment in Aussie Home Loans. He was appointed Commonwealth's group executive of business and private banking - a division with 4000 staff that generates A$1 billion in profit - in 2009.

Narev is also a director of ASB Bank, a position he may not be able to stay in when he moves into the role of chief executive at CBA in December.

He said yesterday he was honoured at the appointment and looked forward to taking the bank through a time of rapid economic change.

He called parents Robert and Freda Narev with the news yesterday.

"It was a matter of public knowledge that he was one of the candidates, but we didn't hear about it until [this morning].

"He rang us before the news broke and told us about it," Bob Narev said from his home in Orakei.

Mr Narev said his son was looking forward to the new role but knew it would be a "significant challenge".

However, based on his record, Bob Narev had no doubt his son would be up to the job.

Ian Narev lives in Sydney with his wife and two daughters.