Biography|Donald Neil Sanders — He Left the Reserve Bank to Run the Commonwealth

In March 1987 Donald Neil Sanders crossed Martin Place.

He resigned as Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank, a post he had held since 23 July 1975, and became managing director of the Commonwealth Bank.

He was sixty. The commercial bank he now ran was the same institution he had joined as a Wollongong teller in 1943.

The appointment sat awkwardly in some rooms. He was an outsider to the retail fiefdoms inside the Bank and an insider to the official family that had just passed him over for the Reserve Bank governorship in 1982.

The Commonwealth Bank's head office in 1987 was still the Moneybox building at 120 Pitt Street, on the west side of Martin Place.

A five-year restoration of 48 Martin Place, the former Government Savings Bank of New South Wales, finished in 1990 and became the new headquarters.

From January 1991 the title on his door changed from managing director to chief executive officer, the first person to hold that style at the Bank.

He held it until June 1992, when David Murray succeeded him.

The Beaux-Arts pile at 48 Martin Place still carries the words Commonwealth Bank of Australia on the stone.

Photo: J. Bar, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons