Headquarters:
ANZ Centre, 23-29 Albert Street, Auckland CBD
Year founded:
1840
Number of employees:
8,000
Phone:
0800 269 296
Email:
anztheinsider@anz.com
Website:
anz.co.nz
LinkedIn:
nz.linkedin.com/showcase/anznewzealand
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Award Winner
ANZ BANK NEW ZEALAND
Emily Mendes Ribeiro
General Manager, Homeowners
Hayley Burgess
Head of Mortgage Adviser Distribution
Bruce Bodley-Davies
Senior Business Development Manager
Leadership
Emily Mendes Ribeiro is general manager, homeowners at ANZ New Zealand, where she leads the strategic direction and customer value proposition for home loans. Her remit spans adviser distribution and insurance partnerships, with accountability for customer, financial and risk outcomes across the home loan value chain.
Known for her inclusive leadership, strategic foresight and ability to navigate complex regulatory and operational environments, Ribeiro champions customer-centred innovation and sustainable business growth. She brings more than 18 years of product management experience, including over a decade at ANZ. Throughout her career, she has delivered propositions that create meaningful value for customers and the business. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce and Administration degree from Victoria University.
General Manager, Homeowners
Emily Mendes Ribeiro
Hayley Burgess leads ANZ’s mortgage adviser business, with responsibility for strategy, performance, and adviser engagement across New Zealand. She leads a national team dedicated to supporting adviser relationships and delivering service excellence. With more than 20 years’ experience at ANZ, she brings deep expertise in product management, distribution, and relationship management.
Burgess is a passionate advocate for the adviser channel and the role it plays in helping more New Zealanders achieve home ownership. She is committed to supporting advisers, building strong industry partnerships and continuing to improve experiences for advisers and customers. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Auckland.
Head of Mortgage Adviser Distribution
Hayley Burgess
Bruce Bodley-Davies leads ANZ’s mortgage adviser relationships across key adviser networks and strategic partners. He is responsible for driving adviser engagement, business growth, distribution performance, market intelligence, and representing adviser insights within ANZ.
Bodley-Davies leads a team of business development managers supporting advisers throughout New Zealand. He has worked for ANZ for 20 years, holding a range of roles including business banking manager, regional manager and head of business performance for specialist distribution.
Senior Business Development Manager
Bruce Bodley-Davies
SPECIAL REPORT
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Bio
Rajmita Chand
Senior Manager Adviser
Rajmita Chand is senior manager at ANZ Adviser Assessment, where she leads adviser-related operations within customer lending assessment, overseeing adviser lending support, assessment operations, triage functions, and key lending decision processes. Her team supports mortgage advisers across assessment, escalations, construction lending, and application processing.
With 26 years of experience at ANZ, Chand has held a range of home lending assessment and leadership roles across contact centres, large seven-day flagship branches, and lending and assessment operations. Her career has evolved from representing the voice of the customer through contact centre leadership, to working at the face of the customer through branch leadership, and now leading ANZ’s largest single mortgage adviser distribution channel. Throughout, her focus has remained on working better together with advisers to deliver good-quality customer outcomes.
Senior Manager Adviser
Rajmita Chand
Jennifer Fifer
Senior VP, Programs
Jennifer Fifer is senior vice president of programs at RPS, where she leads initiatives focused on delegated authority, program business, and commercial underwriting. With more than 25 years of insurance industry experience, she has extensive expertise in developing high-performing insurance programs, strengthening underwriting governance, and building long-term partnerships among carriers, MGAs, and distribution partners.
Fifer holds the CPCU and AIC professional designations and earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Away from the office, she enjoys spending time with her husband and their three sons. Their free time is often spent at football games, on the lake, or traveling together.
Senior VP, Programs
Jennifer Fifer
ANZ Bank New Zealand built its reputation among advisers in 2026 not on a single standout product, but on the sum of smaller fixes that add up: faster turnarounds, clearer communication and a steady willingness to act on adviser feedback. That approach has earned the lender recognition at NZA Advisers on Lenders 2026.
ANZ positions itself around a deliberately dual promise: the resources of a major bank paired with the personal touch that advisers and customers say they value. The lender points to scale and stability as foundational, but credits its ongoing relationships with advisers, built on trust, responsiveness and consistency, as the real differentiator. The combination of a backing from a large institution without losing the adviser relationship, sits at the centre of how ANZ frames its performance.
The bank serves a broad customer base, from first home buyers to property investors, with a particular focus on helping everyday New Zealanders into homes. Adviser partnerships, it says, are crucial to reaching these customers effectively. Clients dealing with ANZ can expect professionalism, transparency and a genuine commitment to partnership throughout the lending process.
For ANZ, much of the past year’s effort has been about removing friction from the lending journey. It has reduced handoffs across its process, changed its approach to reassessments to bring down turnaround times, and simplified how it assesses business income.
The lender also says that simple applications are now turned around in two days. It attributes that result to added resourcing across its assessment and business development manager teams, deeper assessor training and a targeted look at where applications were slowing down.
Innovation has run alongside those operational changes. ANZ launched its Reno Loan during the year. It offers a 2.5% interest rate for three years on top-up loans of up to $50,000 for renovation projects. The lender describes the product as one example of a broader pattern of testing new ideas drawn from adviser and customer feedback, rather than developed in isolation.
ANZ also points to its people strategy as part of the bigger picture. It recruits for a combination of technical ability and soft skills and continues to build lender capability so assessors have the market knowledge needed to make credit decisions quickly. The lender says this has helped maintain the consistency and transparency it believes underpins adviser trust, particularly through more difficult market conditions.
ANZ says its leadership has kept customer outcomes central while pushing new initiatives to keep pace with a changing industry, helping the bank stay resilient and responsive throughout the period under review.
Looking ahead, ANZ frames this recognition as a shared outcome rather than an individual achievement, crediting its adviser partners, customers and staff collectively. With turnaround times and capability improvements now embedded rather than treated as one-off adjustments, the lender positions itself to keep building on the adviser relationships that have been at the core of their adviser-approved performance.
Laurie Schoch
Senior VP, Property
Kiera Cope
Lead Actuary
Diana Criscione
Head of Operations
Sarah M Stewart
Associate Vice President,
Leasing and Call Centre Operations
Laurie Schoch is senior vice president of RPS Property Facilities, bringing more than 30 years of E&S and commercial property underwriting experience. Since joining RPS in 2025, she has overseen seven property programs and helped shape underwriting strategy for scalable, delegated authority solutions.
Schoch’s background includes leadership roles at Aspen Insurance Group, XL Insurance and Great American, with deep expertise in facultative placements, catastrophe-exposed risks, and technical underwriting. Known for her industry insight and collaborative approach, she is also passionate about mentoring emerging underwriters and developing solutions that meet evolving marketplace needs.
Senior VP, Property
Laurie Schoch
Kiera Cope is an accomplished insurance actuary and Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society, with 30 years of experience in property and casualty risk analysis, underwriting strategy, and actuarial disciplines. She built RPS’s actuarial team and processes to deliver enhanced insights that support profitable program growth, strategic decision-making, and stronger risk management outcomes.
Cope’s team supports existing programs and new expansions through deliverables including M&A due diligence, rate filings, profitability reviews, segmentation analyses, and underwriting tool enhancements. She also volunteers with the CAS Ratemaking Working Group, contributing to technical white papers on emerging and standard ratemaking topics.
Lead Actuary
Kiera Cope
Diana Criscione leads operational systems design and execution for nearly 50 RPS specialty insurance programs. With more than 25 years of experience across insurance operations, technology, and process improvement, she helps streamline workflows, strengthen underwriting practices, and support business growth.
Before joining RPS Programs, Criscione spent 14 years with Gallagher in program operations and business systems leadership roles and previously founded a database company serving clients across industries. She is also a dedicated mother of three and has served as a Girl Scout troop leader for 17 years.
Head of Operations
Diana Criscione
Sarah M Stewart has more than 15 years of strategic leasing and customer care experience in residential property management. She is responsible for overseeing all aspects of Centurion’s national leasing platforms, residential lead generation, and overall customer experience excellence through operation of the company’s internal customer service department.
Associate Vice President, Leasing and Call Centre Operations
Sarah M Stewart