Westpac

Overview

Westpac Banking Corporation is Australia’s oldest bank and one of its big four banks, tracing its origins to the Bank of New South Wales, which opened in Sydney on 8 April 1817, and taking its current name from the 1982 merger of that bank with the Commercial Bank of Australia (National Museum of Australia) (Parliament of Australia). Headquartered in Sydney, it now ranks second among Australian banks by residents’ assets, behind only the Commonwealth Bank (Market Index) (Savings). Its modern shape was set by a run of acquisitions crowned by the St George merger of 2008, and its recent history by a record proposed AUSTRAC penalty and the leadership change that followed (Parliament of Australia) (AUSTRAC).

Born from a colony without currency

Westpac did not begin as a corporate strategy but as an answer to a practical failure: the penal colony of New South Wales, established in 1788, had been given no internal currency, so trade ran on barter, on coins from many countries, and on personal promissory notes (National Museum of Australia). Coin was scarce partly because merchant ships carried hard currency away, and settlers paid in commodities such as cattle and rum (National Museum of Australia). Governor Lachlan Macquarie, who governed from 1810 to 1821, tried to plug the gap with the holey dollar, a Spanish dollar with its centre removed and reminted as two coins (Reserve Bank of Australia Museum). The push for a bank itself came after the arrival of Judge-Advocate John Wylde in October 1816, whose discussions with Macquarie revived the idea (National Museum of Australia). On 20 November 1816 Macquarie invited Sydney’s magistrates, principal merchants and gentlemen to a meeting, seven directors were elected on 7 February 1817 with the Governor’s secretary John Thomas Campbell as president, and Edward Hall Smith was appointed the bank’s first cashier and secretary on 15 February (National Museum of Australia). The bank opened at 10am on Tuesday 8 April 1817 in rented rooms in the house of ex-convict Mary Reiby in Macquarie Place, the same premises the Reserve Bank’s museum describes as leased from the emancipist businesswoman now portrayed on the $20 banknote (National Museum of Australia) (Reserve Bank of Australia Museum). Notably, Macquarie had no specific power under his commission to grant a charter of incorporation; Wylde considered the governor possessed an implied power, and Macquarie went ahead anyway (National Museum of Australia).

Built by merger

The institution that opened in 1817 became Westpac only in 1982, when the Bank of New South Wales merged with the Commercial Bank of Australia (Parliament of Australia). Growth then came by acquisition: Challenge Bank in 1995, the Bank of Melbourne in 1997, and BT Financial Group in 2002 (Parliament of Australia). The largest step followed in December 2008, when St George Bank, itself a former building society that had amalgamated smaller banks including Advance Bank and BankSA, joined the group (Parliament of Australia). St George and Westpac signed an amended merger implementation agreement on 8 September 2008, and St George merged with Westpac on 1 December 2008, with St George shareholders receiving 1.31 Westpac shares for each share held (Australian Taxation Office). Across the Tasman, Westpac has operated in New Zealand since 1861, and since 1 November 2006 it has maintained two registered banks there to meet Reserve Bank of New Zealand policy: Westpac New Zealand Limited, a locally incorporated subsidiary, and a New Zealand branch of the parent (Westpac). Today the group provides lending, deposit taking, payments services, investment platforms, leasing finance, general finance, interest rate risk management and foreign exchange services (Market Index).

Scale among the big four

Westpac’s size is best read against its three big-four peers, the Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank and ANZ (Savings). On APRA data for August 2026, Westpac held $1.16 trillion in total residents’ assets, second to the Commonwealth Bank’s $1.26 trillion and ahead of National Australia Bank at $992.49 billion and ANZ at $765.77 billion, with the four banks together holding about $4.20 trillion, or about 70% of the market (Savings). The same pattern holds in home lending and deposits: Westpac was second for owner-occupier home loans at $332.862 billion, behind the Commonwealth Bank at $417.108 billion, and second for household deposits at $364.240 billion, behind the Commonwealth Bank at $469.529 billion (Savings). The implication is a bank that is consistently the challenger rather than the leader in its home market: second on assets, mortgages and deposits alike, even as its market capitalisation of $115.95 billion in October 2026 ranked third, behind the Commonwealth Bank and National Australia Bank (Savings).

Bank	Residents’ assets, August 2026	Owner-occupier home loans	Household deposits
Commonwealth Bank	$1.26 trillion	$417.108 billion	$469.529 billion
Westpac	$1.16 trillion	$332.862 billion	$364.240 billion
National Australia Bank	$992.49 billion	$236.321 billion	$244.071 billion
ANZ	$765.77 billion	$219.240 billion	$198.956 billion

The AUSTRAC penalty and a new chief executive

In 2020 Westpac and AUSTRAC, Australia’s financial intelligence regulator, agreed a proposed civil penalty of $1.3 billion over breaches of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 (AUSTRAC). Westpac admitted contravening the Act on over 23 million occasions, including failing to properly report over 19.5 million International Funds Transfer Instructions amounting to over $11 billion, failing to pass on information about the origin and source of funds, and failing to carry out appropriate customer due diligence on suspicious transactions associated with possible child exploitation (AUSTRAC). The Federal Court was to consider whether the proposed penalty was appropriate; if approved, it would have been the largest ever civil penalty in Australian history (AUSTRAC). The leadership reset followed: Peter King, who had stepped in as chief executive in 2019 in the aftermath of the banking royal commission, retired after a 30-year Westpac career including five years as chief executive (AAP). His successor, Anthony Miller, took over on 16 December 2024, having joined Westpac in 2020 after serving as Deutsche Bank’s chief executive of Australia and New Zealand and spending 16 years at Goldman Sachs, including as partner (AAP). Chairman Steven Gregg presented Miller as the right person to take Australia’s oldest corporation into a new era (AAP).

What this profile does not claim

The exact month of the 1982 renaming was not settled by the sources read in full, so this profile gives the year only. The AUSTRAC figure is a proposed penalty agreed with the regulator, subject at that date to Federal Court approval; a final court order was not verified in this pass and is not asserted here. Company-reported customer and staff totals were not independently verified and are not used. Branch counts, and the details of Westpac’s 1996 Trust Bank acquisition in New Zealand, were likewise not verified in this pass. This profile also does not claim that Westpac’s New Zealand structure described here reflects any later regulatory change after the sources’ dates.