Who’s on the move? November

6 min read
6 min read

First State Super welcomes new CEO

Deanne StewartFirst State Super has welcomed incoming CEO Deanne Stewart ahead of a six-week handover with Michael Dwyer AM, prior to his retirement.

Stewart brings to the role more than 20 years’ experience in superannuation and insurance both in Australia and overseas.

Before joining First State Super, she was chief executive officer of MetLife Australia and previously held senior roles with BT Financial Group, Merrill Lynch Investment Management in New York and McKinsey & Company in London.

Chairman Neil Cochrane said: “Deanne’s extensive experience and achievements in financial services ensure she is well equipped to be our next CEO.”

Stewart will assume the role and responsibilities of CEO following Michael Dwyer’s retirement on 30 November, 2018.

QSuper CIO announces retirement

Brad HolzbergerQSuper chief investment officer Brad Holzberger has announced his intention to retire at the end of September 2019. 

Holzberger has been at the helm of QSuper’s investment team since 2009 and directly oversees the investment of over $80 billion in funds on behalf of QSuper’s 570,000 members.

CEO Michael Pennisi said Holzberger’s contribution to QSuper, and to superannuation policy more broadly, had been immense.

“Brad’s knowledge and wisdom is often called on in industry and policy forums, and he has become a trusted advisor to not only our investment committee and board, but to regulators and policy makers across the country who want to improve the system for the benefit of all Australians.

“Brad served as a director of the Association of Superannuation Funds Australia (ASFA) from 2011 to 2017. He was also the chair of ASFA’s Economics and Investment Policy Council. Last year, he became one of only 30 Australians to hold an ASFA life membership for outstanding contribution to the Australian superannuation industry,” Pennisi said.

The AMP Superannuation boards announce new appointments

Cathy DoyleTony BrainThe AMP Superannuation boards have announced that Cathy Doyle (pictured, left) and Tony Brain (pictured, right) have joined them as independent non-executive directors of AMP Superannuation Limited and N.M. Superannuation Proprietary Limited, both of which govern AMP’s superannuation funds.

Doyle has more than 25 years’ experience in the finance, superannuation and consumer services sectors, holding senior roles at McDonalds Australia, BNP Paribas, CBA, Qantas, NRMA and Perpetual.

Brain is a chartered accountant, with more than 30 years’ experience in Australia and the UK. This included 28 years with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, 12 as partner responsible for the provision of assurance and advisory services to clients in the superannuation industry. He was also head of risk management at AustralianSuper for nearly three years.

AMP Superannuation Limited Chairman Rick Allert AO said: “We’re delighted to welcome Cathy and Tony to the boards. Both have considerable experience in the superannuation industry and will help ensure AMP’s superannuation funds are governed in the best interests of our members.”

Equity Trustees announces new leadership appointments

Equity Trustees has announced new leadership of its in-house asset management function following a review earlier this year.

Darren Thompson will take up the position of head of asset management, and Chris Haynes the position of head of Australian equities, on 1 October 2018. They will be based in Melbourne.

“Darren co-founded Northward Capital in 2007 after moving from IAG Asset Management. He brings to Equity Trustees 30 years’ experience and proven success in the evaluation, structuring and execution of investments, leveraging analytics and commercial insight to deliver excellent investment returns to clients.

“Chris brings over 25 years’ experience in investment and portfolio management. His proven track record of consistently over benchmark results as well as his people management and team building skills ensures a positive injection of talent to our business,” said Mick O’Brien, managing director, Equity Trustees.

NGS Super appoints CEO

Laura WrightNGS Super has announced the appointment of Laura Wright as its chief executive officer.

Wright has served as acting CEO of the fund over the past seven months, following the resignation of former CEO, Anthony Rodwell-Ball.

NGS Super chairman, Dick Shearman praised Wright for her exceptional leadership and her diligence during a year of change. “The board was delighted to appoint Laura as the fund’s CEO. She graciously took the leadership baton as acting CEO and successfully navigated the fund through some industry challenges and milestones which has seen the fund go from strength to strength”.

Wright is NGS Super’s second female CEO and has a long-standing history serving the fund for nearly two decades, initially as an inaugural director, then chair. For the past ten years she has worked for the Trustee Office firstly as general manager, operations before being appointed senior manager, governance.

Wright was a member of the Superfunds editorial committee for many years.

Challenger announces CEO retirement and succession

Challenger Chairman Peter Polson has announced Brian Benari’s decision to retire as managing director and CEO in January 2019 and the appointment of Richard Howes to succeed Benari.

Benari will work with Howes over a six month period to ensure a seamless transition. Howes has held a number of senior executive roles at Challenger since joining the company in 2003 including chief executive of Challenger’s Life business and chief investment officer. He currently leads Challenger’s distribution, product and marketing team. Prior to joining Challenger, Howes held senior positions with leading financial services groups in Australia and the USA, including Macquarie Bank and Bankers Trust.

Polson said: “Since his appointment as CEO in 2012, Brian has overseen the transformation of the business with the company more than tripling its market capitalisation to nearly $7 billion today. Similarly, assets under management has also almost tripled. This has delivered a total shareholder return over this time of 209 per cent, compared to the ASX200 result of 95 per cent.”

Benari said he was extremely pleased to see Howes appointed as Challenger’s next CEO. “Having worked with Richard for many years, I know that he has an exceptional intellect, customer-focus and passion for our business. I am confident he will lead Challenger to continued success,” he said.

ESSSuper announces new GM Member Engagement

David DaleyESSSuper has announced that David Daley is new GM Member Engagement.

Daley has a background as a senior executive in member-based organisations. He has a strong focus on how a high performance culture drives success in member services. In his most recent role, Daley oversaw contact centre operations supporting superannuation industry funds; such as AustralianSuper, HESTA and Cbus.

Daley replaces the previous GM Member Engagement, Brad Weldon.

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Cath Bowtell

Chair, IFM Investors

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Cath is the Chair of IFM Investors; Industry Super Holdings (ISH); and the Federal Government’s Jobs & Skills Ministerial Advisory Board.   

She is a Director of Industry Fund Services (IFS) and of the Melbourne Arts Precinct Corporation. 

Cath has worked for many years in senior roles in both the superannuation industry and union movement. She was the Chief Executive of IFS and Chief Executive of the Australian Government Employees Superannuation Trust (AGEST) from 2010 until its merger with AustralianSuper in 2013.

Prior to this, Cath was a Senior Industrial Officer at the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). She has held a number of directorships and committee positions throughout her career, including Director of AustralianSuper, Director of AGEST Super and Director of Ausgrid.

Natalie Previtera

Chief Executive Officer, NGS Super

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Natalie is the Chief Executive Officer of NGS Super.  

With a career grounded in governance, legal, and strategic leadership, Natalie brings a forward-thinking and purpose driven approach to superannuation. She is responsible for steering the fund through a dynamic regulatory landscape, ensuring operational excellence, and delivering long-term value to members.

Natalie also served as Chief Risk and Governance officer having deep institutional knowledge and a strong track record in executive oversight and regulatory engagement.

She is known for her collaborative leadership style and her ability to drive transformation while maintaining a strong member-first ethos.

Prior to joining NGS in 2019 Natalie held senior governance roles at AMP, Suncorp and Perpetual.  

Laura Catterick

Director, Resilience & Cyber, UK Finance

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Laura Catterick is the Director of Resilience & Cyber at UK Finance, which is the collective voice for the UK banking and finance industry, representing over 300 firms and supporting members in their efforts to build more resilient firms and a more resilient financial sector.

Within UK Finance, Laura works closely with industry leaders, government, and regulators, influencing policy on operational resilience and cybersecurity at a national level. UK Finance also co-chairs CMORG (Cross Market Operational Resilience Group) to deliver collaborative resilience initiatives that address systemic risks.

Laura is a Chartered Professional Accountant from Canada with extensive experience in risk, regulatory compliance, cyber security, operational resilience, and large-scale transformation. She has held senior executive roles within highly regulated sectors, including roles across all three lines of defence within Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Lloyds Banking Group, and Mastercard.

Josh Cross

Chief Operating Officer, SS&C Technologies

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Josh Cross brings over 30 years of experience in Technology, Operations, Delivery and Transformation within the Australian Financial Services industry. His expertise spans Trade Finance, Institutional and Corporate Lending, Consumer Lending, Share Trading, Insurance and Superannuation.

Josh joined SS&C in July 2025 through a lift-out from Insignia Financial – one of Australia’s largest Superannuation and Investment providers, known for its growth through large-scale acquisitions and technology separations from major Australian banks.

In his current role, Josh leads the SS&C  Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) function, which delivers technology, operations, and service delivery for more than one million Australian across multiple technology eco-systems, supported by a team of approximately 1300 staff. Over the next three years, Josh will also lead the major transformation of the underlying superannuation platforms and processes, migrating to SS&C’s Bluedoor ecosystem.

Lt Gen Michelle McGuinness, CSC

National Cyber Security Coordinator, National Office of Cyber Security

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, CSC was appointed as Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator (the Coordinator) on 26 February 2024.

As the Coordinator, LTGEN McGuinness leads national cyber security policy, the coordination of responses to major cyber incidents, whole of government cyber incident preparedness efforts, and the strengthening of Commonwealth cyber security capability. 

LTGEN McGuinness has served in the Australian Defence Force for 30 years in a range of tactical, operational, and strategic roles in Australia and internationally.

Prior to this appointment, LTGEN McGuinness most recently served as Deputy Director Commonwealth Integration in the United States Defense Intelligence Agency. In this role, she led policy and cultural reform, and technological integration, including interoperability across information technology, systems and data.

Jamie Bonic

Global Head of FX and Commodity Sales, NAB

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Jamie Bonic is NAB’s Global Head of FX and Commodity Sales, responsible for several FX-related sales businesses including NAB’s Institutional, Corporate, and Government teams.  Prior to joining NAB, Jamie spent 17 years in London working for JPMorgan as a Managing Director in their Global Markets division, leading sales and trading across Interest Rate and FX products. Jamie holds a Bachelor of Economics from The University of Sydney and is currently based in Sydney.

Katie Miller

Deputy CEO, Regulation, AUSTRAC

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Katie Miller is the Deputy CEO, Regulation, AUSTRAC and has strategic responsibility for AUSTRAC’s regulatory, policy and legal functions. 
Katie has extensive experience exercising regulatory functions and advising regulators at state and federal levels. Katie is a published author on issues involving regulation, law and technology and supports connections between government, practitioners, communities of practice and academia. 

Derek Thompson

Via live link

Best Selling Author, Podcast Host of 'Plain English'

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Few speakers can match Derek Thompson‘s ability to synthesize mega-trends in society, labor, economics, technology, and politics. Put another way: Derek trawls the data sets and does the forecasting and deep reporting necessary to help us better understand how we live, how we vote, how we spend, and how we work.

In his paradigm-shifting #1 New York Times bestseller, Abundance (co-written with Ezra Klein), this award-winning journalist reveals how our policies and culture have pushed us into a world of scarcity (not enough housing, workers, or progress)—and offers a radical new path towards a world where housing is affordable, energy is plentiful, and innovation flourishes across industries.

He shares a compelling vision of a future where we have more than enough for everybody, and a practical, actionable roadmap for how to get there. It starts with taking more risks, building more expansively, and recognizing that we all have the power to create a world of abundance. “Everything’s utopian until it’s reality,” he says.

Carmen Beverley-Smith

Executive Director - Superannuation, Life & Private Health Insurance, APRA

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Carmen joined APRA in March 2023 and holds the role of Executive Director, Life and Private Health Insurance and Superannuation.  

She has had an esteemed career in financial services, spanning over 25 years. She has held diverse leadership roles at Westpac and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, including across risk, transformation and change, product and portfolio development, and sales and service. 

Prior to joining APRA, she held the role of General Manager, Risk Transformation Delivery Integration at Westpac. This involved leading the group-wide implementation of a suite of solutions to uplift risk management capability and develop data, analytics and reporting. 

Carmen leads with a values-driven approach and a particular interest in developing and mentoring talent. 

She holds a Bachelor of Commerce and Accounting, is a certified Chartered Accountant and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. 

Amy C. Edmondson

Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked #1 in 2021 and 2023; she also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017.  She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organisational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. Her 2019 book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley), has been translated into 15 languages. Her prior books – Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2013) and Extreme Teaming (Emerald, 2017) – explore teamwork in dynamic organisational environments. In Building the future: Big teaming for audacious innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), she examines the challenges and opportunities of teaming across industries to build smart cities. 

Edmondson’s latest book, Right Kind of Wrong (Atria), builds on her prior work on psychological safety and teaming to provide a framework for thinking about, discussing, and practicing the science of failing well. First published in the US and the UK in September, 2023, the book is due to be translated into 24 additional languages, and was selected for the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year award.

Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller’s mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organisational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University.

 

Daniel Mulino MP

Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Born in Brindisi, Italy, Daniel was a young child when he moved with his family to Australia. He grew up in Canberra and completed his first degrees – arts and law – at the ANU. He then completed a Master of Economics (University of Sydney) and a PhD in economics from Yale.

He lectured at Monash University, was an economic adviser in the Gillard government and was a Victorian MP from 2014 to 2018. As Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer of Victoria, Daniel helped deliver major infrastructure projects and developed innovative financing structures for community projects.

In 2018 he was preselected for the new federal seat of Fraser and became its first MP at the 2019 election, re-elected in 2022 and 2025. From 2022 to 2025, Daniel was chair of the House of Representatives’ Standing Economics Committee in which he chaired inquiries; economic dynamism, competition and business formation and insurers’ responses to 2022 major floods claims.

In 2025, he became the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services.

In August 2022, Daniel published ‘Safety Net: The Future of Welfare in Australia’, which aims to explore the ways in which an insurance approach can improve the effectiveness of government service delivery.