New ANZ CEO Nuno Matos unleashes ‘Nunogeddon’ on bankers rocked by job cuts

In just four months, Nuno Matos has dismantled the decade-long legacy of ANZ’s former boss Shayne Elliott. Since taking over as chief executive of one of Australia’s biggest banks in May, the former HSBC banker has moved to slash 3500 jobs, shaken up its senior management and revamped the lender’s top risk and compliance positions. The blunt-talking Portuguese financier has even earned the moniker “Nunogeddon” for the drastic actions so far. The swift and far-reaching changes have surprised and unsettled ANZ staffers, sowing worry and forcing them to quickly adapt to a different and harsher management style than they were accustomed to. The stakes are high for Matos, who last year missed out on the top job at HSBC and is now trying to prove his mettle at ANZ. The 57-year-old is upending a longstanding internal culture that Australian regulators allege contributed to bad workplace behaviour, poor risk management and other shortcomings in the bank’s global markets business. Following the abrupt departure of markets boss Anshul Sidher earlier this week, more job cuts are expected within the scandal-ridden division, said people familiar with the matter. Matos, speaking at a conference on Tuesday, said his goal is “to put our house in order” and that pace was important in a rapidly changing world. The same day, ANZ announced cuts that would shrink its roughly 42,000-strong workforce by around 8 per cent over the next year. A spokesperson for ANZ declined to comment. Email slip-up In late August, some employees learned they would be terminated through automated emails that were sent to them prematurely. ANZ apologised for the gaffe in an internal memo, but had to accelerate some of its planned layoffs as a result. The slip up drew criticism that the bank was making changes chaotically and insensitively under Matos. Also that month, managers were told to identify members of their teams who weren’t meeting the bank’s expectation of spending at least half their scheduled working hours at ANZ workplaces. Team members who didn’t meet the 50 per cent requirement would face “performance and remuneration consequences” for the 2025 fiscal year that ends in September, according to an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg News. Those with low recorded attendance without a formal exception or valid reasons would have their variable pay docked, it said. On internet forum Reddit, there is a Weekly Nuno/ANZ thread about the CEO and the bank, with participants discussing the dour mood and palpable anxiety among ANZ employees. Bloomberg hasn’t been able to verify the identities of participants on the forum. Since becoming CEO, Matos has travelled to ANZ’s offices across Australia, and to Singapore and Hong Kong, to meet clients of the bank, investors and regulators, and held town halls with staffers. He has been staying in a hotel while looking for a property in Melbourne, where ANZ is based, and most of his possessions have yet to arrive from Hong Kong, where he lived previously. ANZ has also said it plans to axe around 1000 outside contractors as part of a wider cost-cutting drive. It recently hired McKinsey & Co. to conduct a wide-ranging review. At a recent meeting where McKinsey consultants made business suggestions to senior managers of the bank, one executive pulled out a decade-old presentation by the consulting firm that had recommended a similar approach, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identifying sharing private information. A spokesperson for McKinsey declined to comment. ANZ shares have lagged behind its biggest Australian peers over the past few years, but have outperformed the broader stock market benchmark in the year to date. The lender will provide a strategy update to investors on October 13. Some analysts have warned that restructuring Australia’s second-largest bank by assets may take longer than expected and turn out to be more costly than the bank’s initial guidance of $560 million in charges. But investors such as Jason Kururangi are betting Matos can turn things around. “He’s listening to some of the concerns that the market has on a number of different fronts,” said Kururangi, a portfolio manager at Milford Asset Management in Sydney, which owns ANZ shares. While staffers are probably unhappy, investors and shareholders have been “pleasantly surprised”, he added. Scandal ridden ANZ, which does retail and commercial banking in Australia and New Zealand and has a large institutional banking division that operates across global financial markets, was previously run by Elliott, a New Zealander, for nine and a half years. In his final few months, Elliott faced off with parliamentarians in Canberra over allegations of misbehaviour by ANZ traders in the firm’s Sydney dealing room. So far, the firm’s retail division has bore the brunt of job cuts, and its former head Maile Carnegie left in July. Inside that unit, roles that are duplicative are being stripped out, and some analysts expect a costly tech revamp called ANZ Plus to be scrapped. “Despite billions of dollars sunk into the project, it still lacks functionality, and if the strategy needs to pivot, it is likely in the best interest of shareholders,” said Morningstar analyst Nathan Zaia. Matos is still looking for someone to run the unit, which is also responsible for integrating around 3000 staff from ANZ’s acquisition of Suncorp Bank last year. The retail division is currently led by acting head Bruce Rush. A search is also underway for a new global markets head to replace Sidher. ANZ’s institutional division is run by Mark Whelan, who has been asked to remain at the bank for continuity reasons, said people familiar with the matter. ANZ is still grappling with an Australian Securities and Investments Commission investigation into the firm’s role in the execution of a 2023 government bond sale. Slashing jobs and sudden layoffs have the potential to hurt ANZ’s reputation and backfire, said Mark Williams, a master lecturer in the finance department at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. “Layoffs can initially send a strong message to the market that management is addressing its largest costs,” Williams said. But they also “reduce employee morale, productivity and service quality. Under such cost cutting measures, bank turnover, client dissatisfaction and attrition could rise,” he added. Bloomberg