And I asked him how you're enjoying it and he said, oh, yeah, really good.
I'll probably stay a year and then I think I'm going to go work at another company, which
Wow, you've just told your boss's boss's boss's boss's boss that you're not really committed,
but it's the truth.
If you spend your 20s grabbing the rung above you and going up, up, up in a single line,
you'll get to a point in your career where you don't have the breadth to actually be
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review.
And welcome to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything
And along the way, we're hoping to get some really great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Philippa Watson, the chief executive of YouBank.
Lovely to see you.
Thanks for having me on.
Now, Philippa, as I said, you're the CEO of YouBank, an online bank that is a subsidiary
of National Australia Bank.
YouBank has more than 800,000 customers, many of whom are young.
Indeed, in the first half of the current financial year, more than 60% of your new customers
were under the age of 35.
And you have more than 600 employees.
That sounds like enough to keep you going in the morning.
It well and truly is.
Thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the BOSS.
Okay, we only have 15 minutes.
The clock starts now.
What time do you get up?
What does your morning routine look like?
Well, I'm up at 5am.
I do about 30 minutes of yoga, meditate.
I have a black coffee.
I put on a podcast and I call down the stairs to my children to get out of bed and start
And what response do you get when you tell the kids to get up and get ready?
Well, look, I'm trying really hard not to be that mother who goes and turns on the light
and starts nagging them about getting ready for school.
So usually my little one is out of bed and it's his responsibility to go and wake up
his big brother who's closer to teenage years.
And you say you listen to a podcast.
What podcast do you listen to?
By the time I get to work, I would have engaged with sort of three different podcasts probably.
One is sort of an overnight news snapshot, the Daily New York Times.
I probably will have caught a very short personal financial management sort of podcast.
And I'll also try to catch up on a little bit of, you know, celebrity news as well.
So why do you like celebrity news?
For me, there's two reasons.
You can get very much in an ivory tower reading the kind of high quality journalism that you
produce and think that that's the entire world when in fact that represents an absolute
minority of what people are reading and consuming.
So being really aware of the zeitgeist of what's happening in pop culture and, you
know, the less sort of academic answer is it's salacious, it's fantastic, it's just
pure entertainment.
Just the first coffee of the morning.
And do you do breakfast?
Haven't for years.
And probably it's more to do with just getting up, getting the kids out the door and not
Can you point to a pivotal moment in your career, say a point where something happened
and it really changed the trajectory of what you were doing or a project that took you
in a whole different direction?
The sort of 2008 era of the global financial crisis was an absolute pivot point in my career.
About three or four months before the financial crisis hit, I'd moved across from a role
that was in sales and marketing to go and work as chief of staff for the chief financial
officer of the bank that I was working with at the time.
Which was which bank?
And so my friends when they saw that I was taking up a job in finance were so perplexed
and said that I was in for the most sort of mundane, pedestrian number of years working
for the head accountant.
And then the global financial crisis hit and suddenly finance, treasury came right to the
fore of that company and I had for a couple of years exposure into the daily management
of what was a completely unprecedented time in banking where the issues of liquidity,
funding, balance sheet management, which in good times sound fairly dull, were absolutely
critical and had a wonderful opportunity to see leaders under enormous pressure managing
extremely high consequence decisions through and the combination of seeing the consequences
of challenges around the strength and security of the global financial industry in combination
with seeing leaders under extraordinary pressure was just a crucible moment in my career.
And what did you learn about leadership at that point?
What I saw in that time was that under acute pressure, the best leaders understood that
their job was to make very, very close, fine, good judgment calls and then to communicate
those decisions in a way that allowed everyone else to be crystal clear about what needed
And I saw leaders in that time not break their cadence around rest, exercise, sleep, et cetera,
all of the things that was needed to keep their mind incredibly sharp.
And I remember being really surprised at the time that through a period where the decisions
were so critical, my boss at the time and the people around him were continuing to keep
the routines that kept their minds clear.
So going home at a certain time, having dinner with their family, doing exercise in the morning,
making sure that they were getting plenty of sleep, having rest and recovery so that
they had clear minds for what needed to be done.
Did they have to narrow their focus on what they were deciding on?
Because I imagine that you can't, as a leader in the crisis, say that you're going to make
decisions about 10 or 12 things because they're so critical and you've got so much information
Did they narrow it down to the critical two or three things they had to decide on?
What I saw and what I have seen in my own career since then is that one of the most
critical skills of a leader in really tough times is prioritization of what are the most
critical issues that need decisioning and also role clarity and leaders needing to make
sure that they are available for and engaged in the decisions that only they can make.
Because ultimately, if a decision can be made somewhere else, it should be made somewhere
else to keep clarity at the top table.
So prioritizing is really, really critical.
Yeah, ruthless prioritization.
Excellent lesson.
Speaking of lessons, what is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
The best piece of career advice was don't worry about the next promotion.
Look laterally because the best opportunities are not necessarily the opportunities that
look like a slightly better title or a slightly better pay bracket.
When you're 25 and you're itching for a promotion, it's hard to believe that what
you should actually do is take a sideways move or move into a less prestigious part
But the truth is if you spend your 20s grabbing the rung above you and going up, up, up in
a single line, you'll get to a point in your career where you are so specialized and you
don't have the breadth to actually be able to grow a really rich and rounded career.
By the time you're leading an organization, ideally you have had at an earlier stage of
your career a level of involvement across almost every discipline so that you know enough
to be able to figure out if you've got the right leaders in place, interrogate what's
coming to you, and if you've just gone up in one line, you have skill gaps and weaknesses
and blind spots that you could have dealt with earlier.
It's a really good piece of advice.
Okay, Philippa, stay right where you are.
We're going to take a short break and when we come back, we're going to open the gorgeous
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Philippa Watson, the CEO of YouBank.
Now Philippa, this is our section called the chatterbox.
In front of you, you will see this lovely brown box inside which today I reckon there
are up to about 20 questions.
I am going to ask you to pick out some, pass them to me and I will then ask you to ask
I'm going to go ahead, have a bit of a fish in the chatterbox.
What's the advice you would give your younger self?
The first thing that sprung to mind from a career perspective is to take more risks.
But in fact, I think that's really double edged advice and I got some really good advice
10 years ago from someone I really respected who had taken a really big risk in his career
and it had gone really badly.
He said to me, really measure the risk you're taking in your career because when you step
into a role, it's fine day one, but when you're in a high consequence role and something
goes really badly wrong, you have to be the logical person to be in that role or else
things fall apart pretty quickly.
I think what I would say to my younger self is take measured risk, do as many different
things as you can.
What was the role that chap took and why was it so high risk?
He went from having a role that was substantially within the organization where his stakeholders
were all internal and he stepped into a role which was extremely public, extremely media
facing and what he found was that that stakeholder group was unforgiving.
When things went wrong in the role, internally you can manage the politics and the dynamics
and the stakeholders, but media, public, customer, if they see you as not being the right person
for a role when things are going wrong, it falls apart pretty quickly.
It wasn't so much that he didn't have the skills.
It was just high risk because it was public and media facing.
Probably there should have been two or three steps for him before he stepped into that
It goes to the point about always wanting to be moving up the ladder rung and I think
just be really careful about wanting your boss's job.
Be really careful about understanding the composition of that role, the risk profile
of the role and get there when you're ready.
Phillipa, next question.
Do you like public speaking and have you always liked it?
I don't have any fear of public speaking.
I don't have nerves in my stomach.
I feel comfortable, but I also think the sort of one way unilateral communication of information
can be really dull.
So for me to want to be talking one way for more than a handful of minutes, I've got
to be really passionate about it or I've got to think that I've got a really unique
The idea of a one way speech from a lectern is something that's incredibly old fashioned
and increasingly redundant.
And do you do very much in terms of radio or other media?
Our bank serves customers who want to interact with their phone more so than with their bank
leaders, executive leaders.
So in that case, do you talk to them quite a lot through Instagram or through Facebook
or through other platforms like TikTok?
We have the most fun and creative TikTok channel.
We're actually, Eubank is the most followed bank on TikTok in Australia, but it's the
22 year olds in our business generating that content because our customer base wants to
hear or wants to consume material that isn't produced by someone a couple of decades older.
We release TikTok content at least three times a week that we generate in-house, but it's
picking up the latest trends and content and generates material that's going to be engaging
for customers based on what's happened in the last two days, three days on social media.
So if you have your CEO deeply involved in generating social media content that's going
to be interesting to 23 year olds, you're off base.
Have a bit of a fish.
What do you think of AI and what does it mean for your business?
Look, we have been exploring, experimenting with and relying on machine learning for some
time and particularly in the fraud space, for example, we've had a lot of success
in deploying machine learning to understand fraud patterns and to disrupt those patterns.
So I see AI as an evolution of that, but my goodness, it's developing really fast and
in financial services, we're part of an industry which has extremely robust regulation and
so it should because the consequences of getting things wrong for consumers in financial
services is profound.
And so alongside experimenting with what gen AI can do for our business, we're looking
at how you put in place the right risk management controls, quality assurance, et cetera, so
that today's productivity improvement or today's innovation doesn't become tomorrow's
Do you think about or worry about the fact that you potentially need all 600 plus employees
in the bank to be across generative AI and to have an understanding of it in order for
you to move ahead?
And if so, how do you make sure that everyone is keeping abreast of the changes and knows
Part for me of grasping the excitement and the opportunity is actually talking to the
youngest people in the business about how they're already using it.
They're always a step ahead and there is so much talk about the challenges of Gen Z and
working with younger people and all of that sort of stuff.
But the truth is, for me, like I'm wildly excited about the 25 year olds in our business
because they're so far ahead in their personal life of the technology that's coming into
our corporate life.
So the knowledge or the thought leadership is really shifting younger and younger in
our organization and in many organizations and I think it's pretty exciting.
Can you point to two or three things that the 25 year olds in your business have taught
Well, they've taught me that skinny jeans are no longer in fashion and it's all wide
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's important.
The next thing, the channels where our younger customers find their content are not the same
channels that we find our content and it is not just the people in our social media team.
It's the people in the lunchroom and when you actually talk about what's on their phone,
your most used app, it takes you into a whole different realm of information channels.
And then the third thing has been the most refreshing thing for me to realize and remember,
which is when you approach a 25 year old and you ask them a question, they will generally
tell you the truth because they have not been socialized through corporate life into understanding
that there are things you say to the boss and there's things you don't say.
And so I had this wonderful experience with a guy recently.
He was new to our business.
He had only been here for three months or so and I asked him how you're enjoying it
and he said, oh, yeah, really good.
I'll probably stay a year and then I think I'm going to go work at another company, which
And I had this moment of, wow, you've just told your boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's
boss that you're not really committed, but it's the truth.
Then I was on alert to think about, well, how am I keeping him and his friends engaged?
Whereas if you'd asked the average person who is a bit further on in their career, they
never would have answered that way.
There's a good lesson in that.
Mind the 25 year olds.
I've now got one final question and that is, if you had 12 months off, unencumbered, you
could do anything you liked.
What would you do?
I would cycle from the top of New Zealand's North Island to the bottom of the South Island.
And I would do it with my partner and kids and, you know, our peloton that we cycle with
And I was in New Zealand on the holidays and I realised over Christmas that my little kids,
if you put them on an e-bike, they can keep up with adults on normal bikes.
And so it's not just a pipe dream.
It's actually something that I'm planning for.
Would you do it with big panniers or get big panniers to put on your bikes?
Stay in hotels overnight and have someone drive and transport my bags hotel to hotel.
So you could do cycling tours.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not camping these days.
And how long do you think that would take you?
I think we'd do it in some stages, but if we did it beginning to end with some, you
know, time at vineyards in between, probably could do it leisurely in a month.
What about the other 11 months?
For me, I would probably spend three months in Australia, three months in New Zealand,
three months in New York and three months in London and just wake up and do something
And that is our 15 minutes up.
I really love talking to you today about the way that you have observed leaders in a crisis
look after their health so that they can come to work being able to make the best decisions
and the way in which they have to really prioritise decision making.
I love that piece of advice that rather than looking for your boss's job, seek lateral
moves, actively go and seek lateral moves.
I really like that advice about taking risk, but taking measured risk.
And I think I too will start mining the 25 year olds at the financial review.
So thank you for that.
Thanks so much for having me.
Thank you for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
If you like the podcast and would like to hear more, please consider sharing the podcast
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At The Financial Review, we investigate the big stories about markets, business and power.
For more, go to AFR.com and you can subscribe to The Financial Review, the daily habit of
successful people at AFR.com slash subscribe.
This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton and produced and edited by Lapfan.
Video and audio assistance and our music theme is by Alex Gao and our executive producer
is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.