TRANS-Tasman financial services group Tower has announced its managing director, Keith Taylor, will relinquish his role of steering the group later this month to Tower Australia head, Jim Minto. Taylor steps down as the firm completes a two-year recovery phase and moves to separately list its wealth management business.
As Tower group managing director, Minto will be expected to drive the company’s Australian and New Zealand risk business as the group now aims to focus on redevelopment.
Minto, who has been a senior executive at Tower for 16 years, will have nothing to do with the separately listed wealth management business, Australian Wealth Management, which is expected to list on the Australian Stock Exchange at the end of the month.
As well as taking up the group managing director role, Minto will hold onto his existing role as head of Tower Australia. In that role, Minto has earned the respect of the company board for getting its Australian risk business back on track after — in Minto’s words — it had “lost the plot in Australia”.
For that reason, Tower chairman Olaf O’Duill said the appointment of Minto represented a very “logical transition”.
“Jim has been spectacularly successful in the resurrection of Tower’s fortunes. He’s certainly picked up the Australian risk business and we think that he can apply some developmental skills to the whole group with Keith Taylor pushing on,” O’Duill said.
Minto’s appointment will mark the end of a three-year stint for Taylor at the helm of Tower, where he has worked for 25 years.
“I have enjoyed my 25 years at Tower, particularly the challenge of leading the turnaround of Tower Australia over the last two-and-a-half years,” he said.
O’Duill said Taylor’s departure was expected.
“Keith had a view that he wanted to apply himself to the recovery stage and he and I talked about this many times, that there’s a time for recovery and a time for redevelopment, we think the recovery stage is pretty well over and he does too.
“He’s had 25 years with us, he’s done very well. He’s done a terrific job and it was time to move on. And also he’s the guy who was the catalyst to get Jim Minto appointed to the job to resurrect Tower Australia’s fortunes.”
O’Duill said that from talking to Taylor he expected him to take up some directorship roles in New Zealand.
