AMP's Alexis George on the challenge of restoring a fallen Australian icon
Its brand once dominated city skylines and the financial system. Now as a smaller version of AMP emerges from an era of scandals, Alexis George has a plan to restore it.
During the Sydney Olympics, the now 170-year-old AMP brand dominated the city skyline, welcoming travellers to Circular Quay and illuminating the Centrepoint tower. It was a testimony to the power and history of an institution Paul Keating designated one of the Australian financial system’s Six Pillars.
AMP’s brand still looms above Circular Quay, in a modern tower built on the same site as the landmark AMP Centre. But today AMP is just a tenant of that building, not the owner. It's a fitting illustration of its shrunken status in a financial sector it used to dominate.
Indeed, so tarnished had the historic brand become the company seriously considered getting rid of it all together.
Once one of Australia’s biggest property owners — including over a million hectares of pastoral land — and the most powerful investor on the ASX, AMP today runs a small bank, a struggling advice business and some promising wealth management platforms. As chief executive Alexis George tells Capital Brief in an interview, “we're ASX120, not ASX top 10 anymore”.
