The Art of Competing Differently: What Strategy Leaders Can Learn from Macquarie

By Michael Hone In November, the executive who led Macquarie's rise in home loans becomes Group CEO. His retail bank record offers a clue to the strategic discipline that underpinned that success.

Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the British soldier and military theorist, is best known for developing the strategic concept of the “indirect approach.” It holds that the best strategists seek not to overpower strength, but to make it irrelevant. Hannibal embodied it by leading his men and war elephants across the Alps in 218 B.C., along a route so treacherous that the Romans never imagined he would attempt it. He bypassed Rome's preparations and brought the war to the Roman Republic on his terms.

Hart's theory finds an unlikely corporate parallel in the rise of Macquarie's retail bank under Greg Ward. Since taking charge in 2013, Ward has grown Macquarie's mortgage market share from 2 to more than 7 per cent. It is a remarkable achievement in a concentrated market long dominated by the big four.

In November, Ward takes charge of Macquarie Group, where the strategic choices will be broader and more complex. His retail-banking record does not tell us what those choices will be. But it does offer a clue to how he may approach them.

Two principles of Hart's indirect approach help explain Macquarie's retail banking success.

Avoid the “line of natural expectation”

In his book, Strategy, first released in 1929 as the Decisive Wars of History, Hart describes the “line of natural expectation.” It is the path your opponent expects you to follow and, therefore, prepares most heavily to defend. Hart urges strategists to ask “what course is least probable the enemy will foresee.”

The Allied invasion of France illustrates the point. The shortest route across the Channel led to the Pas-de-Calais, where the Nazis expected the attack and concentrated their defences. The Allies landed in Normandy instead, choosing ground where those defences counted for less.

For Macquarie, the expected path was to build a branch network and a proprietary sales force comparable to those of the big four. That meant confronting them on terrain they already dominated.

But Macquarie chose another route. After Ward and Ben Perham visited technology firms in Silicon Valley in 2013, Macquarie adopted a branchless model and relied on brokers to distribute more than 90 per cent of its mortgages. Digital lending itself was not undefended: CBA and others were also simplifying mortgage applications.

Macquarie's distinction lay in combining digital capability with broker distribution. This enabled it to gain national reach without recreating the incumbents' costly physical networks.

Attack where strength cannot be fully brought to bear

Hart argued the indirect strategist chooses ground where an opponent cannot fully deploy its advantages.

Macquarie chose carefully where to compete. In a 2019 parliamentary inquiry, Ward described Macquarie retail as a “narrow niche business”, focused on metropolitan mortgages, higher-value customers and selected business sectors where its capabilities mattered more than the majors' breadth.

In mortgages, Macquarie favoured metropolitan borrowers with larger loans and substantial equity. Most borrowers contributed equity of at least 30 per cent. The bank reinforced this by offering discounted pricing at a 70 per cent loan-to-value ratio, rather than the conventional 80 per cent.

Customer research identified approval speed and certainty as decisive. Macquarie invested $300 million in a new core banking system and mortgage platform. Approval times fell from an industry average of 25 days to three to five days, and sometimes less than a day. Ward told Parliament that when rates were within 10 basis points, customers would shop around for speed and certainty.

Seven years later, the model has scaled without changing much in character. Home loans grew 28 per cent in FY26 alone to $181.3 billion. More than 95 per cent are still originated through brokers, while the average loan-to-value ratio at origination remains about 65 per cent. And the investment in speed has continued: some broker applications can now be approved in under 30 minutes. The figures suggest that Macquarie has grown not by broadening towards the majors' model, but by pushing further into the choices Ward described in 2019.

Macquarie chose ground where the big four could not fully deploy their traditional strengths. Slightly lower rates, branch networks and product breadth counted for less than the speed and certainty that Macquarie had deliberately built for its target customer segment.

Beyond the Alps

The lesson of Macquarie's mortgage success lies less in its particular choices than in the discipline behind them. It avoided recreating the incumbents' model, identified terrain where it could compete on different terms and concentrated investment in the capabilities that mattered most.

Ward inherits an institution shaped by two connected strategic eras. After the financial crisis, Nicholas Moore made Macquarie more global and less dependent on market-facing earnings. He built its funds-management and other annuity-style businesses. Shemara Wikramanayake extended that model via selective growth in private markets and digital infrastructure. Ward takes charge not of a company requiring reinvention, but of a successful, diversified group seeking its next sources of advantage.

That is what makes his retail banking record relevant. It cannot tell us which markets Macquarie will pursue or where it will deploy capital. But it does suggest a way of approaching those choices. Resist the obvious path, be precise about where the organisation possesses a genuine advantage and concentrate investment where that advantage can be made to count.

That may prove harder at group scale. Macquarie's breadth creates more possible avenues for growth, but also more opportunities to disperse capital and attention. The challenge will be whether Ward can apply the same discipline across a much larger and more complex institution.

Hannibal gained his advantage by confronting Rome with a problem it had not prepared to solve. Macquarie's retail bank succeeded in much the same way. Not by matching the majors strength for strength, but by changing the basis of competition. Ward now takes that strategic discipline to a very different arena. The question is not whether he can repeat the retail bank playbook, but whether he can apply the same clarity of choice across the breadth of Macquarie Group. About the Author

This article was written by Michael Hone and contributed to The Strategy Brief.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Strategy Brief. The article is based on publicly available information.

© 2026 Michael Hone. Published with permission.