Razia Khan champions diversity at CBA

Razia Khan knows the power of a good mentor when it comes to inspiring women and people of diverse backgrounds to carve out a successful career in financial services.

Khan (pictured above) started her career at CommBank 15 years ago, working as a collections officer and then taking on a variety of roles throughout the retail bank. More recently, she was leading CommBank’s acquisition, retention and customer experience team for the homebuying business and worked closely with teams across technology, marketing, frontline and broker relationships.

Khan has now stepped into the role of acting general manager third party banking.

“I’m enjoying diving deeper into the broker industry and meeting many of our broker and aggregator partners,” she says.

As Australia’s largest bank, CommBank offers plenty of opportunities for career advancement, and Khan mentors a number of staff.

“Hard work, curiosity and humility are traits I will hold on to, and I believe allowing different perspectives into problem-solving always leads to better outcomes”

“I always think about how I can identify the types of opportunities that were given to me and pay that forward to my mentees,” Khan says.

“This is especially the case for some of the women I work with, who are more than capable of taking the next step but who don’t always have the confidence to try something new.

"As a leader I hope to be able to provide a support network where people can be encouraged out of their comfort zone and flourish, not fail. I think this all comes back to CBA’s core values of care, courage and commitment.”

Khan says there have been many leaders and peers who inspired her career, and she’s “particularly inspired by people that have had quite different experiences and possess different skills to me”.

“Hard work, curiosity and humility are traits that I will hold on to, and I believe allowing different perspectives into problem solving always leads to better outcomes.”

Khan wants to advocate for more industry diversity within the broker channel.

“I have a genuine passion for bringing more women into the industry and advocating for their success.

“I feel so fortunate to have started and grown my career at CBA,” Khan says. “I have been granted many opportunities to learn new things and have been fortunate enough to have been encouraged and supported to take opportunities that were outside of my comfort zone. I think we all have a role in helping to bring more diversity into leadership roles.”

The bank sets goals to support its commitment to advancing gender and cultural representation across leadership roles. Women represent more than half of CommBank’s overall workforce.

“We’re working towards a goal of about 50% gender equality in our middle management and leadership roles by 2025 – a goal that is gender inclusive to consider people who don’t identify with a binary gender – male or female.”

Khan has been a member of CommBank’s Inclusion and Diversity Council for over four years, working on mentoring and growing diverse talent through focused programs.

“One of our key focuses is wanting to help ensure that our leaders and teams reflect the communities that they serve,” she says.

The bank’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion strategy aims to enable an inclusive workplace anchored in CommBank’s values of care, courage and commitment. The bank also supports the MFAA’s Opportunities for Women report and the important role of diversity more broadly.

CommBank’s diversity strategy is based on three key pillars. The first is fostering care, equality and respect for staff and customers. The second is strengthening courageous, inclusive decision-making by listening to customer and staff experiences and reviewing metrics and decisions to ensure they are fair and equitable. The third pillar is amplifying the bank’s impact and delivering on its commitments through partnering with community organisations and experts to ensure an evidenced-based approach that accelerates positive outcomes.

Looking at her own career, Khan says her focus has always been on collecting different skills, which has offered her great opportunities and resulted in her leadership of frontline, data and analytics, workforce planning, strategy roles and sales teams.

“I’ve  always been drawn to roles that I know will keep me close to the customer while still allowing me to gain further skills. This approach helps me combine my under- standing of how the organisation works with what the customer needs to ensure the work we do supports our customer and broker-facing teams.

“We’re working towards a goal of about 50% gender equality in our middle management and leadership roles by 2025 – a goal that is gender inclusive to consider people who don’t identify with a binary gender”

Khan says the third party banking team is motivated by building strong relationships with brokers.

“Broker partnerships are incredibly important to CommBank. Over 70% of market activity at the moment is through brokers, and we want to ensure we work with our brokers to continue to grow their businesses … we want to offer best-in-class experiences that align with what our brokers and customers need.”

Technology is key to the bank’s ongoing investment and transformation agenda, Khan says, and its focus is on “making it easier to work with us through consistent and transparent experiences”.

CommBank is working on “ongoing digitisation of the application process to make things faster, and [putting] further investment into our newly launched portal”, she says.

“We have also invested heavily in learning and development for our brokers through our training hub and hope to be able to provide genuine value to our brokers through that portal.”

Over the last 18 months, CommBank has increased its team of relationship managers and has dedicated technology teams to service capabilities.

“A key part of building and maintaining relationships over the long term revolves around taking on board feedback from our brokers and making changes, or working towards those changes, to ensure our approach is simpler, better and easier,” Khan says.