It’s been a critical week for Westpac and the banking industry as a whole.

The CEO stepped down instantly, in early 2020 the Chairman is going to step down as well, and there will be no re-election for the current Head of Risk.

Those are some drastic measures and rightly so, because a couple of days ago Westpac was hit with 23 million breaches of AML/CTF legislation.

In addition to that, AUSTRAC have claimed that they have been ignoring patterns of transactions that were related to child abuse.

Considering the severity of these infractions, these drastic are definitely the right path moving forward for Westpac.

Westpac definitely has a big challenge ahead. But within every challenge lies opportunities.

Westpac’s opportunity is to reevaluate their processes and models and course-correct towards a customer-centric approach.

If a firm of this size makes this change, the rest of the pack will follow.