He Watched Global Markets Freeze, Then Went Through It Again - Akbar Shah

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He was a few years into his career at NAB when the world's capital markets froze overnight.

Akbar Shah was in treasury, the part of the bank that manages funding, liquidity and access to capital, when the GFC hit.

One day, that access was a given. The next, it was gone.

Institutions that had been around for centuries were collapsing or being absorbed.

Governments were stepping in with sovereign guarantees just to keep the system moving.

And Akbar was front and centre, working through stress tests and contingency plans while the financial architecture of the modern world was being rewritten around him.

He stayed at NAB for 16 years.

Treasury, capital markets, and a secondment to New York, where he discovered what it means to represent an Australian bank that nobody in the world's biggest financial market had ever heard of.

When he came home, he found that international experience carries an unexpected penalty.

Out of sight, out of mind, even inside the same organisation.

Then COVID arrived at the same bank and demanded the same grit for a completely different kind of crisis.

He went from 30,000 colleagues at NAB, to a team of 200 with Hume Bank, from committees and governance layers to immediate cut-through and total accountability.

Only the scale changed, the things that actually mattered didn't.

Highlights:

-Living through the GFC from inside a major bank's treasury function

- Competing in New York's capital markets as an Australian bank nobody had heard of

- The "out of sight, out of mind" cost of building a career overseas

- Going from a 30,000-person institution to a mutual bank with under 200 staff

- Why the fundamentals of the CFO role are the same regardless of scale

- How AI is compressing the operational side of finance and shifting the value to storytelling

- The consolidation pressure reshaping Australia's mutual banking sector

- Why grit and ambition matter more than qualifications early in a career

If you have spent years inside a large institution and wondered whether that depth limits you or prepares you, Akbar gives the answers.