NAB goes Fargo

March 17 was a day of high embarrassment for National Australia Bank and its relatively new chief executive Andrew Irvine. That morning, he was forced to announce the shock departure of his CFO Nathan Goonan to be Anthony Miller's CFO at Westpac. 

Undeniably caught off guard by Goonan's resignation, Irvine had been deep in the process of lining up his friend and former colleague at the Bank of Montreal, Andrew Auerbach, to run NAB's business and private banking division – so the exit of its serving boss, Rachel Slade, was fast-tracked and announced that morning, too.[[We know Auerbach's appointment was cobbled together post-haste, given Slade was scheduled to speak at an AFR conference the next day (March 18).]] 

Thirteen months into Irvine's tenure, the market is genuinely wondering if NAB's executive management is any good. We certainly know what Goonan thinks. As Eddie McGuire would've warned him, Collingwood fans are treated with disdain in Sydney, yet Goonan would rather commute to Kent Street (from Barwon Heads!) than toil a moment longer under Irvine at Docklands.[[It's worth noting that between his two stints at NAB, Goonan worked with Anthony Miller at Goldman Sachs.]] 

As for Auerbach, his is arguably more a social than capability appointment. Irvine describes him as "one of the people I've enjoyed working with the most (in my career)," but he is much more a wealth guy than a business banker. While Auerbach spent six years as a senior leader in BMO's personal and commercial banks, he was running their sales channels.[[NAB says that one of Auerbach's (many) roles at BMO was broadly equivalent to the job he's taking at NAB, and included responsibility for commercial loans up to $100 million, though that is inconsistent with Auerbach's work history as particularised on his LinkedIn profile. Irrespective of the discrepancy, it is a tough argument to mount that Auerbach possesses deep experience as a business banker.]] By his own description, Auerbach is a financial planner cum private banker. "My background, as you know, professionally, is on the wealth management side," he told the house podcast of Delisle Advisory, the dealer group he established after leaving BMO in 2022.[[Auerbach also said, "I'm a CFA charter holder, certified financial planner… though when I had the opportunity at BMO to run the personal and business bank there, I was running the sales forces, the distribution channels in the personal bank, the branches across the country, as well as the business bank in terms of the folks dealing with the business owners".]]