Washington H. Soul Pattinson’s Jaki Virtue swears by the power of ‘unknown sponsorships’, as she takes out the Financial Services - Non-banking category.
In 2023, as Washington H Soul Pattinson celebrated 120 years of being listed on a stock exchange in Australia, managing director Todd Barlow was turning over a key question in his mind: was it time to hire an inaugural chief operating officer, who could spearhead the now $12 billion conglomerate’s key non-investment functions?
That was months before Soul Patts mounted a surprise $3 billion bid for Perpetual Limited, which, had it been successful, would have required it to up the ante on its operations.
The executive who received Barlow’s call-up is Jaqueline Virtue, a 25-year veteran of financial services and winner of the Financial Services – Non-banking category. Or Jaki, as she is better recognised around the Sydney, Melbourne finance circles.
What sticks out on Virtue’s resume is the range of specialisations she’s led, from technology and HR to M&A and even remediation. She has served as UBS’s chief operating officer for corporate finance in Asia Pacific, but just three years later, in 2020, was drafted in to run point on Commonwealth Bank’s 600-strong team executing a $1 billion customer remediation program.
That’s two vastly different roles, and Virtue has some sage advice for senior executives looking to make a similar move.
“It is a lot about your mindset and your ability to keep going, and then you have to have adaptable skills,” she says. “I am never going to be ‘the’ specialist in remediation. But I can figure a problem out. And if I can’t, I know where to go and get the right expertise to pull in and solve it together.”
Her time running CBA’s $1 billion remediation program, which overlapped with COVID-19, saw the team swell from an initial staffing of 150 to more than 600 as the bank realised finding the correct accounts for the 270,000 affected customers was a tougher task than it had anticipated.
“We ended up having a mantra: we will have three to five really challenging decisions to make every day and one possible problem to solve every week,” she says. “It was pretty phenomenal, despite being challenging, stressful and complex.”
The remediation role is probably what Virtue gets quizzed about the most in dinner party conversations. It is also what piqued several of our judges’ interest. “Her dealing with a really major crisis that was customer facing was really impressive. She’s had some hard jobs, and I think she’s taken some risks, and I liked that about her,” said former Chief Executive Women boss Marie Festa.
Yet, the remediation gig is a small slice of her 25-year-long career. Starting in Schroders’ structured finance business in early 1990s, Virtue first broke into the top echelons of leadership at Deutsche Bank. It was here, while working in Deutsche’s Sydney offices, that she had to make what she lists among her toughest career decisions – relocating to London with two kids both under 18 months.
“The then COO was walking across the trading floor and going up to my colleagues to ask whether they were ‘mobile’,” Virtue recalls. “When he walked past me without asking, I stopped him and said ‘What are you doing? Why didn’t you ask me?’”
What followed was a stint in London that broadened her skill set. It also meant her nine years at Deutsche ended as a direct report to the firm’s two topmost bosses, the global co-head of investment banking and its global chief operating officer.
When homesickness kicked in, UBS’s Hong Kong offices offered a compromise on travel times, with a COO role in its Asia Pacific corporate finance business. Two years later, in 2017, NAB knocked on Virtue’s door with an offer to run a 45-person team tasked with supporting its corporate and institutional bank. The remit was quickly expanded to include other functions and 170 charges.
Virtue credits “unknown sponsorships” for her career moves across Sydney, Hong Kong and London. By that she means unsolicited and informal recommendations passed along by former colleagues or collaborators.
Whenever the silent cheer-leading crystallised an opportunity, Virtue wasn’t one to mope around. That’s a characteristic she shares with high-power executive Anne Sherry, with whom she crossed paths while advising NAB’s board on their remuneration structure.
“I like taking risks, and so the decisions have never been difficult,” Virtue says.
At Soul Patts, Virtue will be pulling together her collective experience from Deutsche, UBS, NAB and CBA to build its operations leadership from the ground up. When she checked into Soul Patts’ offices in August, she was a rare female C-suite hire for the firm, whose top positions have historically been passed down among male scions across five generations.
A fin services COO typically oversees all functions that sit outside finance or are directly tied to revenue generation. At Soul Patts, Virtue has been plugging along on governance, legal, risk and compliance, people and culture, corporate affairs, investor relations and administration.
As her top priorities, Virtue counts supporting Soul Patts’ growth ambitions and – in a breath of fresh air – developing its talent pool of about 55 people.
“We want to make sure that our people really feel a part of the [firm’s] rich history. But equally that they are empowered to be entrepreneurial, to be innovative, and to take Soul Patts to its next level of evolution and growth,” she says.
And while the Perpetual units have been carted away by US private equity giant KKR, Soul Patts is flush with cash and on the hunt for its next multi-generational investment to stand alongside coal miner TPG Telecom, coal miner New Hope and brick-maker Brickworks.
Expect Virtue to be heavily involved behind the scenes.
“I think that [the Perpetual bid] is an interesting indicator,” she says. “What it tells you is that Soul Patts understands its growth aspirations.”
Licensed by Copyright Agency. You must not copy this work without permission.