Westpac New Zealand’s Post

Meet Betty Shayle-George, one of our longest-serving employees. Betty was just 19 when she started with Westpac, then called Wellington Savings Bank, in 1978. Betty started as a teller in the Otaki branch where it was just her and the manager, Max. All the shops and townspeople operated in cash so it was a very manual, intensive job. Betty would manually count out withdrawals and deposits, issue bank cheques, write in savings account books, and open term deposits. Max was responsible for the lending in the branch. It was a small branch in a small town where people all knew each other. Betty said she was sometimes the only one in the branch – opening up or closing by herself if the manager went home early. If the branch ran out of a certain denomination of cash , Betty would walk down to the BNZ and exchange a cheque for cash. “There was just a lot of trust,” she said. Betty said one of the big changes between then and now was flexibility. She had a 10-month-old daughter when she first started but because there were no daycare facilities, Betty was lucky to have help from her mum. “I think the hardest thing when my daughter was young was that you didn't have many sick days. You had five sick days and you had to share those between yourself and your child.” Adding to this was the fact that fathers didn’t have flexibility either and society wasn’t set up to share the parenting load. Betty said the flexibility now was “awesome - it's definitely gone the right way”. Betty later moved to bigger branches in Levin and Wellington Central, sometimes with 8 or 9 tellers operating at once. She later moved into relationship management and lending and is now in Credit as a Business Credit Manager. The one thing that hasn’t changed – putting the customers at the forefront. “It's interesting when I look back, I was thinking how I used to make sure my customers were always at the forefront of everything I did - and they still are.” #WomenofWestpac #TogetherGreater Image: Betty Shayle-George now and (inset) Betty, then called Hikuraia, in 1980