“She was an extremely effective executive who Ian [Narev] and I were happy to develop on the fast track,” says Saines, who ran the institutional bank at the time and now sits on the Macquarie board.
While at CBA, the sports-mad Bayer Rosmarin began building out her other interests, including joining boards for the Football Federation Australia, working with the Stanford Foundation, and becoming a special advisor for the University of NSW’s engineering faculty advisory board.
“My feeling is she is a very clever, incredibly hardworking person, and also very collegiate,” says David Gonski, the UNSW chancellor and a former Singtel director who has known Bayer Rosmarin for many years.
As she climbed the ranks at the bank, Bayer Rosmarin also gained a reputation for wanting to know every detail. Wanting to understand things before she spoke. And, perhaps, underestimate that some colleagues – or customers – may not immediately grasp those details the way she did.
Gail Kelly when she was the chief executive of Westpac. She now sits on the SingTel board. Peter Braig
“She is unsympathetic to people who don’t get it as quickly as she would like … that’s led to her success. She won’t trust anyone else to deliver the perfection,” says one person who had worked with Bayer Rosmarin but spoke only on condition of anonymity.
A blunter take: “She knows better than anyone else.”
Others say her confidence and focus meant she was able to successfully manage the egos in CBA’s institutional bank, as well as recognise that she needed to move to Optus if she wanted a top corporate job.
Bayer Rosmarin is married to another former CBA executive, Rodney Rosmarin. With their two daughters, the family live in the wealthy Sydney suburb of Vaucluse in a home purchased for $15 million. (The high-powered career has also come with similarly high-powered salaries. The couple sold another eastern suburbs house for $7.75 million in 2021, and offloaded a country home in the Southern Highlands for $4 million last year.)
Appointed chief executive after just a year at Optus, Bayer Rosmarin worked the first day in the top job from Vaucluse as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down all travel. Her daughters decorated the home office.
A few months later, she also joined the board of Airtel Africa, a role that she resigned from earlier this month after three years on the board. She started a giving circle with nine other families. In January 2022, she was appointed to the board of REA Group.
“Kelly brings good experience to the board, especially with the development of our important financial services strategy,” REA’s chairman Hamish McLennan said this week, ahead of the company’s annual meeting next week. “Ironically, the Optus data breach incident has also provided our company with learnings on what to look out for.”
But all the public plaudits have made Bayer Rosmarin’s approach – playing down the blackout, as Optus did the cyberattack – more puzzling to many.
It also raises questions about why Singtel’s board, which includes former Westpac chief executive Gail Kelly and has long-term Optus advisor Paul O’Sullivan, didn’t push for a change of crisis strategy after the hack.
Others ask whether it’s simply not a priority for Singapore’s SingTel – until customer numbers start falling.
On Thursday, Optus reported a 14 per cent slide in earnings before interest and taxation in the six months to September to $141 million. Higher expenses offset a rise in revenues and Optus’s total mobile average revenue per user, which measures the amount of money it makes from mobile subscriptions, fell slightly.
Customers were left in the dark after Optus experienced an outage across the entire country on Wednesday. Louie Douvis
At Optus’ headquarters in the Sydney suburb of Ryde, some things had already begun to visibly change on Friday.
The most noticeable – apart from the exhaustion of many staff members after working around the clock to handle the fall-out from the outage – took place at the team’s TGIF all-staff briefing. (Another acronym Bayer Rosmarin has introduced is TOFU, or “take ownership, follow up”. It was also used at CBA.)
Each Friday, Bayer Rosmarin hosts a meeting for all staff, a Q&A session that typically begins with a scripted introduction from the chief executive. This week, she went decidedly off script and spoke about the outage. One employee said they wished she’d shown this side to the public.
It may have been a subtle change, but it sums up the Optus dilemma.
Internally, Bayer Rosmarin is well-regarded by her staff for her work ethic and focus, even if her board hasn’t backed her publicly. Externally, the perception is she’s someone whose company is overly accident-prone and fails to take responsibility for the customer fall-out.
And, fair or not, there’s a view among directors that politicians won’t risk looking too friendly with a national infrastructure provider after being criticised for being too cosy with Qantas under Alan Joyce.
The question is what Bayer Rosmarin has learned for the next round. And maybe the solution is as simple as TOFU.