CountPlus has turned to a member of the former parent company of Count Financial, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, to replace Matthew Rowe as chief executive.
The firm announced to the ASX on Friday morning that Hugh Humphrey, who held the role as executive general manager of wealth management advice at CBA, will step into the role from 1 July 2022.
Matthew Rowe stepped down from CountPlus as CEO in February with chief financial officer Laurent Toussaint taking over in the interim. Toussaint has now been promoted as chief financial and operating officer responsible for the company’s financial and operational functions, in recognition of his “exemplary work” as interim CEO, the firm said.
At CBA, Humphrey oversaw 1,200 people and $0.5 billion in revenue, leading the company’s customer remediation program as well as improvements to the business’s ethics, education, and professionalism.
Family affair
Rowe’s tenure saw CountPlus acquire Count Financial from CBA for $2.5 million in June 2019 – a fraction of the $373 million CBA paid Barry Lambert for it in 2011.
At the time of the acquisition Rowe described their “shared history” as being one of the things that made CountPlus a “natural home” for Count Financial advisers.
“The Count Financial network already fits our ‘family photograph’,” he said in 2019.
Humphrey departed CBA in August 2019 where he spent the next three years at NAB as general manager across the bank’s metropolitan NSW and emerging markets business. He was responsible for one hundred branches which included 600 people and 300,000 customers.
CountPlus chair Ray Kellerman noted Humphrey’s experience with two of the big four banks, along with AMP where he was director of strategy and transformation for advice, superannuation and banking between 2013 to 2016.
“Hugh’s experience across strategic growth, digital and transformation capabilities, along with his vision for the future of advice as well as leading teams across accounting and related services are key attributes the board identified as critical for the company’s ongoing success,” he said in a media release on Friday morning.
