BREAKING THE MOULD

Paul Heath began his career as a trainee accountant at CSR's Mosman Park sugar refinery, but his future wasn't in debits and credits.

- Andrew McKean writes.

It was hiding in a filing cabinet.

"I had to clean out a filing cabinet one day, and in it was a foreign exchange trading manual for CSR. I had no idea what it was doing there, but I looked at it, started reading it, and it was like light bulbs going off in my head. I thought, how much fun would this be?" he says.

A conversation with CSR opened the door to Sydney, where Heath supported the team running its sugar hedging programhis first brush with financial markets.

In the mid-1990s, Heath took a job as a derivatives trader for Bankers Trust, stationed on an options trading floor in the basement of the building that Koda calls home today. But it wasn't long before he turned his attention toward financial advice.

"Every time I'd go back to see my family for Christmas, I'd make an appointment to see the then partner in charge of [JBWere's] Perth office. I wanted to become a stockbroker, and for seven years they said no, until eventually they said yes," he says.

After establishing a successful business as an adviser, Heath transitioned into management at the turn of the millennium, assuming leadership of JBWere's Sydney private client department - though he admits it "was a tiny little part of the business."

In 2009, what was then Goldman Sachs JBWere sold its private wealth business to NAB.

It was a full circle moment Heath and Tucker - Heath now running the business that Tucker, in his role as chief executive of MLC and group executive of NAB Wealth, had acquired.

As their careers intersected, Heath and Tucker reflected on the challenges of running an advice business inside a vertically integrated organisation set up around product sales.

"... I was trying to drive a change from a stockbroking culture to a wealth management culture. Steve was trying to drive a product sales culture into an advice culture," he says.