By Byron Kaye
SYDNEY, July 23 (Reuters) - While Greg Ward was building Macquarie Group's mortgage book to the fifth-biggest in Australia, he was also cutting a figure as a respectable Porsche racer, with few wins but — more importantly, say motoring experts — few serious mishaps.
Ward was named the investment bank's seventh CEO in nearly 60 years on Thursday, with racing industry veterans joining investors hailing a person of ambition and caution. Shares of Macquarie were little changed after the news,
reflecting a sense of stability at a time of geopolitical and economic disruption.
As at the bank, there's no room for recklessness in racing.
"It needs exceptional attention to detail and preparation," said Dave Shylan, president of New South Wales Production Touring Cars, who was familiar with Ward's record racing Porsche GTS cup cars.
"There's no mucking around. It's far too expensive a category," he added.
Ward, who went to coincidentally-named Macquarie University in Sydney, joined Macquarie Bank soon after its 1996 listing. The following year, at the age of 29 he was made its chief financial officer, a role that involved navigating writedowns and substantial profit declines in the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis.
The bank's shares took nearly a decade to recover, but Ward carved out a racing side-career, and in 2008 he took first place in the GT Challenge Round in his Porsche GT3 Cup Car, media reported.
Arthur Magaitis, president of NSW Production Sports Racing Cars Association, which has hosted races in which Ward has competed, viewed him as "fierce, competitive" and, like most Porsche racers, "data driven".
He kept competing until at least 2020, according to a motorsports database. On a call with journalists on Thursday, Ward said he hadn't raced in years.
He also bought and sold a winery in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney in the 2000s then spent A$8.4 million ($5.9 million) on a 40-hectare country estate to the south, complete with vineyard and cellar door, in 2020.
Through all this, Macquarie made headlines building an empire of infrastructure funds, renewable energy investments and commodities trading operations spanning Europe, North America and Asia.
But Ward took a different path, and in 2013 became head of one of the company's only Australia-only divisions, retail banking, a business with less than 1% of a mortgage market that had been dominated for decades by four lenders.
He took the relatively low-cost online-only, branchless model, and used a combination of competitive lending rates and rapid, technology-powered approvals to take customers from legacy rivals which sometimes offered cash bonuses to compete in return.
He leaves the unit with nearly A$200 billion of mortgages and more than 7% of the market, regulator data shows, within striking distance of No. 4 lender ANZ's 13%, according to analysts.
"Greg knows the business well and his track record's been good," said Andy Forster, a portfolio manager at Argo Investments which holds Macquarie shares.
"I don't think anything is radically going to change."
($1 = 1.4255 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Additional reporting by Christine Chen; Editing by Sonali Paul)
