Transcription
[Music] From The Australian, here's what's on the front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Thursday, September 11, 2025.
If you work in banking, watch out. Thousands of jobs are being cut as bosses prepare for a leaner future and shred projects that aren't working. Today, the man swinging the axe at Australian banking's biggest employer, ANZ. They call him Nunageddon.
Obviously, [Music] this is a very, very special moment to me. It really means a lot. Nuno Moss is an adventurous 57-year-old ocean swimmer who's just moved his family to Australia. And when he was announced as the incoming chief executive of ANZ Bank in 2024, you could feel the energy radiating through his warm Portuguese accent.
My grandfather was an Indian and he actually in his 30s he moved to Africa where he met my grandmother. She came from Portugal. I met my wife in Peru. She's Peruvian. And we have two boys. One was born in Spain. The other was born in Brazil. And actually at home we always speak three languages every single day. And well, I can't forget our two dogs. One from the US and the other from Mexico. We are kind of United Nations at at home.
He made his career from his start straight out of uni at Portugal's central bank to a globe-trotting banking career, sound like one long fabulous dinner party. After living in nine markets from Asia to the Americas, Australia feels a perfect country to live, to be happy, and to develop new friends and new professional uh connections.
By the time his feet were under the desk vacated by former boss Shane Elliot, Moss was sounding a little more weary. "We have to run faster and at the same time with more excellence, operating at its full potential."
Here's what that meant. The ANZ will cut 3,500 of its 43,000 staff, plus another thousand contractors. The unions have gone ballistic. "A staggering, catastrophic announcement for so many staff who work here within the ANZ banking organization." And suddenly, he has a new nickname, Nunageddon.
Eric Johnston is an associate editor with The Australian. The mood has changed at ANZ. ANZ was known as a really warm and friendly and fuzzy bank. For example, they even had meditation training courses many years ago under a former chief executive, John McFarlane. They had a more international perspective, but they were a very warm and friendly institution, and that sort of allowed a lot of flexibility for their workforce. And what we've seen is a sudden shift. And now that shift means people are coming back to the office.
Last week, I sat down and went down to the Docklands headquarters and just worked out of there for a few mornings. No one asked a question. No one, no one knew who I was. Had anyone invited you to come with your laptop? No. No. But they do great coffee. Fantastic coffee. And you just sort of park the corner there and look, people were there, people were working, people were really well-dressed. And that's one of the things when the new chief executive came in, he had complained that Australians didn't look like bankers because people were really casual, dressing down and so on. So suddenly, I'm noticing a lot more ties, a lot more suits are on. People were back, people were in the office, and they knew there was anticipation in the air that something big was going to happen. And it...
Now, on paper, this bank is doing quite well. It made over $6 billion cash profit. Reported that this year. Nuno Moss is on a $2.5 million salary with a $2.5 million bonus, which I guess he might be achieving if he cuts these costs. What's going wrong at ANZ? Well, just on the salary, so that that will escalate to up to $10 million at its maximum potential if all the long-term benchmarks are achieved. That's the way it's structured. But it is a big number. $6 billion. Wow, look at that. Pure profit. Certainly a big number. It becomes less impressive when we start thinking, okay, ANZ's asset base is about $600 billion. It's kind of reasonable, but banks generally can do a bit better. So, Commonwealth Bank is a really well-run bank, and it generally returns about 13 and a half to 14%. So you can see, you can see the gap there.
Nuno Moss, he's coming from HSBC, a big global bank, and he's seen the immediate problem. ANZ's got to lift its shareholder returns, and this is one way that he wants to go about doing it.
There's a lot of talk about big changes to something called ANZ Plus. What is that and what, what would that mean? So, what it is, for the last six years, under the former management, ANZ has been building what it calls at the front end, a new app called ANZ Plus. It's been promised for ages, and we're talking five or six years in the planning. So far, they've spent $1.5 billion on building effectively an app that they've been promising is going to be rolled out. It's just starting to be rolled out to some customers. They're promising in the world, your whole 10-minute mortgages, it'll do your dishes, it'll do everything, but it's yet to be delivered. The upside for ANZ, though, it allows processes to be done much more quickly and efficiently. And they're betting on with less people as well. That's yet to eventuate.
Nuno Moss has come in and looked at this and he's thought of straight away, why is this app not being delivered? Why are we still building this thing? There's a lot of mission creep in this app. So, he's wants to take control of that. He just wants to pair it back and just get it in people's hands and get it delivered. And so, by this time next year, the expectation is it will start to be the main app the ANZ customers use.
We know the banks watch each other very closely. They all put rates up within hours of one another, or down depending on which way things are going. We've already seen NAB announce some job cuts. Would you expect people in banking to be now nervous that all the banks are going to look at whether they can bring their workforces down? I think what this does, it gives others cover to to also do that. Look, Westpac has in recent years cut about 1,700 roles, but it didn't come out with a big announcement. They just said, "Look, we want to target a lower cost base." Commonwealth Bank, again, you'll hear every now and then they might cut jobs, but not in a wholesale way, and they're certainly under no pressure to slash and burn because again, they run quite well. But it does give some of the others a little bit of cover. It also gives corporate Australia cover to think, you know, if I come out tomorrow and cut a thousand jobs, I'm not going to look like the bad guy. That guy down the road at ANZ, he's still looking pretty terrible. So that's what the message is. But really interestingly, what's happened is that um since the COVID pandemic, there hasn't really been wholesale job cuts. So, this was a real big wakeup call. And all large corporates have actually been hoarding labor because they're so scared of a tight labor market. And when the economy does go into an upswing, they'll have nobody to be able to fund that growth or or deliver into that growth. So, that's what we've heard of this term called jobs hoarding. So, this is a real change of that mindset.
Coming up, the long road down under for Nuno Moss and what other banking workers should expect. [Music]
At the top of this episode, we heard what Nuno Moss sounded like when he got this job. He'd gone for a couple of other big jobs. Reportedly, he wanted the top job at HSBC. Didn't get that. His name was muted to be the boss of Westpac. That didn't happen. Got this job at ANZ. And then in his introduction interview, he spoke very warmly about moving to Australia with his dogs and his kids. I feel like if he knew he was going to be coming in here and sacking a lot of people, he would have been less effusive about the big opportunity for himself and his family. He might have been a little bit more sensitive about that. So therefore, has he looked under the hood and found some things that have shocked him?
Look, I think he knew exactly what he was going to do when he signed up. And an interesting background. Portuguese banker, worked at a Spanish bank for many years called Santander, then moved across to HSBC, another big global bank. And he was an executive on the rise at HSBC. And they put him in what was probably their biggest problem child business, which was Mexico. So he ran Mexico for HSBC for many years, and that was after it had a number of regulatory skirmishes, particularly around money laundering. And you can imagine the complexity of that. Now, he really got onto the radar the of HSBC management there because first of all, cutting costs, winning back the trust of regulators, and while growing the business with customers. And look, that just ticked all the boxes for HSBC. He was in the running to get the top job and just narrowly missed out. At the time, Bloomberg described him as something along the lines as the most eligible CEO in the world. So, someone it was just had to, it was just a matter of someone reaching out, coming to he knew what needed to be done. He had a reputation for cutting costs, and this is his playbook. Exactly.
So, what's next? What we don't know is where the jobs are going to be cut exactly. We do suspect there's going to be in the retail bank, and we do suspect a bit about business banking. He's going to front up to investors in the middle of next month, October. And this is where he'll present his strategy. This is how we're going to go forward. He's expected to put a line in the ground saying, we want to achieve these kind of shareholder returns. We want to achieve this. And in the banking world, it's called a cost to income ratio. And it is what it sounds like. It's about your costs relative to the revenue you do. So, we expect him to put out a number to try and target a lower cost to income ratio.
Australian banks have a terrible track record of cutting costs. They have a terrible track record of really in these big change programs. Sure, change happens, but then they're very short-term, like banks get into their old ways. Regulation is a really big deal in the Australian banking market, and that's where a lot of the baked-in costs are from as well. So, he's going to confront some of these challenges as well.
...are running the bank and running it well. At the same time, his rival banks, CBA, National Australia Bank, and Westpac, they are just going gang busters on business banking. So, they're throwing everything at that while he's taking things out of it. So, that's going to be an interesting battle to watch.
Eric Johnston is an associate editor with The Australian. You can read his reporting from the lobby of ANZ's Docklands headquarters and all the best business news right now at TheAustralian.com.au. [Music]