Australian analysts have described the appointment at the end of January of Matt Comyn as Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s new chief executive as a surprise, given that he is an insider and the board had expected to embrace change.
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| Matt Comyn, CBA |
If Comyn is to be believed, nobody was more surprised than him. In a press conference in Sydney on January 29, Comyn told reporters: “I only found out this morning.”
A subsequent question sought to clarify this. He replied: “There were discussions over the weekend and it was finalized.”
The 42-year-old head of retail banking was always in the mix for the top job – Euromoney said so in August – but in the weeks before the announcement it had seemed increasingly likely that chair Catherine Livingstone would opt for someone from the outside so as to make a clean break from the scandals that have dogged the bank.
“We did a global and local search, so we considered a significant number of candidates,” says Livingstone. “Matt came out as compellingly the best candidate.”