SBS Bank chairman Acton Smith is frank about why he is retiring this afternoon as chairman of the society's board after 18 years and a total of 21 years on it.
"I didn't ever want to get the DCM [don't come Monday]. I never wanted that. There comes a time when you need to pull out to allow the next generation to come through. You need to keep refreshing the board - I don't want the board getting old."
Mr Smith joked he had just become eligible for the "Muldoon pension" as he had turned 65 and that he felt it was time to step aside.
"As you get older, there is less distance in front of you to plan for the future."
The board's average age was in the mid-50s, a balance Mr Smith believed was the right one for SBS.
However, it would be very unlikely that Mr Smith would have faced that sort of resistance from the board and membership of the institution he is widely credited with saving from a hostile takeover from Westpac if he had indeed wanted to stay on.
SBS chief executive Ross Smith said: "Acton was a key player in defeating the sale of SBS to Westpac in 1991. There is no doubt Acton Smith will be remembered fondly as one of the most important directors in SBS Bank history."
Asked to recall his highlights on the board, Acton Smith recollected the "fair old ruckus" with Westpac when 50% of the building society's members voted to sell and 50% voted to retain ownership of their society.
At a packed special general meeting in Invercargill's Civic Theatre in 1991, Mr Smith and a team of business people rallied together to see off the bid by Westpac by the slimmest of margins.
Westpac's top officials went to Invercargill and were allowed to sit on the stage of the Civic to address the audience, while Mr Smith and his team were relegated to the general seating area.
Mr Smith had to say his piece from the seats in the audience.
The final vote was 50.97% in favour of members' retaining ownership of the building society, defeating the Westpac bid.
Mr Smith recalled that the split vote left the society with a divided membership. The board had to work extremely hard to earn the trust of those members who had voted for the sale.
"Thankfully, most of those members now come up and say, 'Thank goodness we did not sell it'."
Mr Smith and his family have a long association with SBS, and building societies in general, starting with his grandfather who received the largest loan of its time from the society to extend the landmark Invercargill department store H & J Smith in the 1930s.
Mr Smith's father, Jock, was deputy chairman of the Southland-based Permanent Building Society in the 1970s when it received a takeover offer from the Northern Building Society.
Jock Smith fought against the takeover, urging members to consider talking to SBS and other Southern-based societies rather than selling to a North Island society.
"Dad couldn't make any progress and decided to resign rather than be part of it."
Acton Smith had his first mortgage with the Permanent Building Society. The loan was switched to the Northern society but when the time came to renew his mortgage to buy a bigger house as his family expanded, Mr Smith moved to SBS and never looked back.
The intergenerational nature of the SBS customer base was something to be proud of, he said.
SBS had to not only meet the needs of its current customers and owners but also had to plan for the needs of future customers, who were often introduced to the society through other family members.
Mr Smith's election to the board is also part of the SBS legend.
He laughed when he recalled that he and a friend - Invercargill accountant Mike Piper - became concerned at the average age of the then board, which he estimated to be in the 70s.
"We thought someone might pop off so we would put our names forward. And that's how we started."
SBS has shown exponential growth during the time Mr Smith has been part of the board. When he joined, there was one branch, compared with 19 now. There were 83 staff, compared with the more than 400 working for SBS now.
Shareholders' equity 21 years ago was around $20 million and was now more than $200 million, something Mr Smith regarded as "not bad" for a bunch of boys from the country who were told they could not succeed.
"You don't initially go out thinking of those numbers. Looking back, they are a reflection of the work everybody has put in."
Mr Smith was a key part of the successful push for the society to gain bank registration as a mutual in 2008, despite experts telling him that it could not be done.
The main motivation to become a bank was the collapse of the finance sector in New Zealand and the desire to get the society out of that "finance space".
SBS was told it could not become a bank unless it became a limited liability company and issued shares, something that was a complete anathema to the principles of the society.
Eventually, the board made a call and decided to push ahead, Mr Smith said.
"We had been told everything we couldn't do, so we asked the advisers what we could do."
Even then, one of the advisers remained opposed to SBS getting registration and had to be told that if he would not do the work, the society would find someone who would.
SBS received its registration about a week after Lehman Brothers failed and the world's financial system came to the brink of collapse.
Mr Smith remembered being phoned at 3am in Austria by Ross Smith to be given the good news.
"I was so excited, I could not go back to sleep. That was a moment in life when everything came together."
Forty years ago, building societies were an integral part of the New Zealand financial scene but many had disappeared through mergers and buyouts. Mr Smith believed that many just gave up the fight.
"We couldn't see why we should quit and why we couldn't find a place for ourselves."
