(Pictured: Matthew Brown)

Matthew Brown, who has about 20 years experience in securities servicing, will replace Christine Bartlett as general manager of NAB Asset Servicing when she retires next month.

Bartlett, who took on a non-executive directorship of property group Mirvac in December, has decided to pursue further such roles and depart NAB at the end of March. She is already a director of the Smith Family too.

Brown’s career spans about 10 years with State Street, starting in his native New Zealand and then, ironically, in Australia helping with the transition of its biggest client at the time, MLC. MLC remained a custody client of State Street for several years after the company was bought by NAB, but was eventually transitioned to NAB Asset Servicing. Brown then spent about 10 years overseas on various assignments with Citi.

Bartlett says she believes she addressed the two big issues which some clients had had when she took over the job in 2013. They were: cementing the relationship with BNY Mellon for international custody and some other services; and issues around delivery of performance risk and analytics.

A renewed deal with BNY was announced in June 2013 and the majority of NAB’s 70-odd clients are being migrated to the new analytics system.

Bartlett says that last year’s decision to review the ownership of NAB Asset Servicing was taken by the previous leadership of the bank and the decision to recommit by the current leadership, which had a greater appreciation of the division’s role within institutional banking.

She joined NAB in 2009, from the role of CEO of Jones Lang LaSalle Australia, to head up the “NextGen” program of transforming the core banking platform. Prior to that she was with IBM for several years.