Executive Management

Chris Whitehead B.Sc (Hons), FAICD

Chief Executive Officer

Chris joined CUA in August 2009, bringing the benefit of over 25 years of experience in a broad range of organisations and roles. He commenced his career in the IT industry in the UK and quickly progressed from technical and project management roles into sales, marketing and product management, mainly working with banks and building societies.

After migrating to Australia in 1989, Chris moved into General Management roles, including establishing a new Australian subsidiary for an international IT services provider. In 1994 Chris joined Advance Bank in Sydney as Chief Information Officer, moving to BankWest in Perth in the same role in 1998. His role in BankWest broadened to include payments business responsibility and responsibility for innovation strategies and the establishment of a number of new businesses.

In 2001 Chris was appointed as Chief Executive of Retail Banking and led a significant and highly successful business transformation program. Through a highly innovative national expansion, coupled with a strong focus on customer service, BankWest's retail assets doubled over five years to over $20 billion with significantly increased market share and strong growth in profitability.

In 2007 Chris was seconded to the Bank of Scotland based in Glasgow to gain international retail banking experience with responsibility for a network of over 150 branches and over 2,000 staff. Chris has served on a range of Boards as a director in the banking, financial planning, funds management and general insurance industries; as well as community and charitable organisations. Chris is currently a director of CUA Limited, a number of CUA subsidiaries and also of Cuscal Limited.

Tony Taylor CPA, F.Fin, B.Com

Chief Financial Officer

Tony joined CUA in October 2011 drawing on more than 30 years regional experience in financial and management accounting, with the last 13 in CFO roles within the financial services industry.

Tony was previously CFO Retail Bankwest where he spent six years improving the financial management of the Retail Division, supporting the east coast expansion program and playing a leading role through the challenges of the GFC and post-Commonwealth Bank acquisition.

Prior to that, as CFO of the Papua New Guinea Banking Corporation, Tony lead the vendor due diligence team in its privatisation and post-sale took over the role of CFO Bank South Pacific. A leading role in the post-sale transformation project saw Tony take responsibility for shared services, IT and marketing in addition to his CFO responsibilities.

David Gee B.Ec, MBA

Chief Information Officer

David joined CUA in September 2011. He is a highly experienced CIO with more than 28 years’ IT experience across the USA, Japan, Asia and the Oceania region serving as CIO, director and consultant. David held a series of CIO roles at Eli Lilly across its US, Japanese, Chinese and broader Asian
operations over a 15 year period. In his last CIO role at Eli Lilly USA, he was responsible for a US$12B organisation. David’s experience also includes providing strategic IT consulting at KPMG and at Ernst & Young across a number of industries.

He has also successfully completed a number of large scale transformation programs at organisations such as IAG Insurance, John Fairfax and Pioneer International. Mr Gee is a past Global Advisory Board member for HP, Nokia and Oracle Siebel.

Jason Murray B.Bus, PGDip Mgt

General Manager, Products and Marketing

Jason has developed his financial services industry experience through a career working in Product, Marketing and Innovation roles in Retail and Corporate Banks in both Australia and the UK. After spending 7 years in the UK, where he built a legacy of launching innovative, award winning and customer focused products, he returned to Australia in 2010 to join CUA.

His current areas of responsibility include Products, Brand, Corporate Affairs, Customer Insights and Communications. Jason is passionate about positioning CUA as a genuine alternative to the major banks and believes leveraging and extending our customer centric approach is critical to achieving this objective.

Darrin Northey

Group General Manager, Distribution

Darrin joined CUA as an Executive in April 2010. With more than 20 years experience across an extensive range of roles in the banking and finance industry, Darrin has spent the past decade as a senior leader and executive in business and retail banking. Darrin’s most recent experience, prior to CUA, was with Westpac as General Manager South Australia/Northern Territory and Head of Local Business Banking for Queensland.

Darrin has extensive experience leading distribution businesses, with a strong passion for customer service excellence and specialises in the transformation of sales and service delivery channels. Darrin’s areas of responsibility at CUA include, a national branch and mobile lending network, CUA Financial Planning, CUA Direct customer contact centre. Along with responsibility for CUA’s various digital services and digital innovation, including www.cua.com.au, mobile banking, Web Banker and our various online services.

Darrin is a Director of CUA Financial Planning Pty Ltd.

John George

Group General Manager, Service Operations

John draws on more than 30 years experience in the banking, finance and property industries. His deep, practical understanding of operational management, customer service, systems integration, change management and process re-engineering has led him to develop a passion for creating and implementing quality-management systems.

His major areas of responsibility include lending operations, credit risk management, continuous improvement and special projects.

Dawn Tsoubos B.TrngDev, GradCertHR, CAHRI, MAITD

General Manager, Human Resources

Dawn has more than 20 years experience in financial service change leadership and human resources (HR) management. Dawn joined CUA in October 2010 after leading the HR function at a leading superannuation company, where she supported the organisation through a significant business transformation.

Dawn’s extensive experience includes consulting and developing HR and learning strategy, design and development, organisation design and change management. Her current focus is shaping CUA’s HR function into one that supports and encourages high performance through elements such as training, recruitment and remuneration.

Royden Juriansz B.Bus, FCPA, CISA

General Manager, Risk & Compliance

Royden has more than 30 years of international experience in the financial services industry, including retail banking operations. Recently he has focused on governance and risk issues and has been instrumental in rolling out fraud mitigation strategies and governance frameworks including risk management and compliance across the group.

His responsibilities include internal audit, compliance, operational risk, credit risk, fraud management, business continuity and crisis management.

Sue Coulter

General Manager, Business Transformation

Sue commenced with CUA in May 2010 and brought with her over 25 years experience in financial services across a broad range of senior management and executive roles, in Australia and the UK. During this time Sue has been responsible for delivering major strategic transformational change programs for HBOS and BankWest and also as a management consultant across other industry sectors. Sue has also been responsible for strategy development and enablement across areas such as back office processing, distribution, product and channel management. Many of these projects have also required the delivery of complex technology solutions as part of the organisations overall transformational change agenda.

Consistent with the strategic objectives of CUA, Sue's major focus is to deliver the core banking system replacement project and other related initiatives such as Online and Mobile Banking, whilst also overseeing the remainder of the CUA project and change portfolio.