ANZ bank appoints CIO

The Australian and New Zealand Banking Group has ended a year-long search for a new chief information officer, poaching Anne Weatherston from Bank of Ireland where she performed the same role for four years.

Weatherston, who from early next year will report to ANZ chief executive officer Mike Smith, will work alongside David Cartwright who, with infrastructure general manager Kieren Griffiths, have jointly performed the CIO's duties since Peter Dalton left last December to become the bank's first innovation general manager.

Cartwright will continue to lead the bank's operations and shared services such as property and facilities in Bangalore where it has 4000 developers and work to cut costs as chief operating officer, ANZ said. He will report to Smith and retained his place on the management board.

Weatherston's appointment expanded the bank's 11-person management board and gave greater weight of women in senior executive roles; she will join Joyce Phillips (appointed in July as marketing director), Susie Babani (HR) and Jenny Fagg (New Zealand CEO).

The delay in appointing a CIO has raised questions about the bank's information strategy.

Weatherston was IT director at Abbey/Santander and has held senior roles in Britain at Gaz de France, the Student Loans Company and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Her LinkedIn profile says she was educated at the universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow. On the social networking site, she listed her past achievements:

• stabilising IT services, renegotiating major IT contracts
• delivering major IT programes
• rationalising and transforming the bank's IT structure
• work on the retail arm of a joint venture with the British Post Office, and
• crafting a bank-wide enterprise architecture for IT spending.

"This appointment highlights the significant attention ANZ is placing on its systems and technology, including simplifying our approach to technology architecture and delivering global IT platforms and capabilities," Smith said.

"It's also a reflection of the scale and pace of change David is leading in operations and shared services in support of ANZ's super regional bank aspirations."

Next year ANZ's core support division, operations, technology and shared services group will be split, the bank said.