Areas Of Expertise:

• Change Management
• Stakeholder Engagement
• Planning & Project Management
• Team Leadership & Mentoring
• Operating Model Design

Education:

• Master of Business Administration, UNSW Business School
• Bachelor’s Degree, Accounting & Finance, Edith Cowan University

About Catherine Ferrara

Catherine is a seasoned transformation and change leader with over 20 years’ experience delivering large-scale and complex business and technology programs with empathy and respect for those impacted. She is recognised by senior leaders for proactively driving initiatives and delivering business outcomes. She has a proven ability to identify problems and business requirements quickly and develop tailored solutions for her clients. Catherine works collaboratively with others, establishing strong relationships and building trust across teams to gain buy-in, align stakeholders and achieve results. She is often brought in when change initiatives are off-track.

At Westpac Group, Catherine successfully delivered 11 major change programs over 13 years. She brings a blend of strategic thinking, creativity, and pragmatism supported by an MBA. Her broad experience spans financial services, IT, engineering, and entertainment, with deep expertise in financial services and a particular interest in developing strategic frameworks.

What Catherine brings

• Experienced in leading complex organisational change and developing fit-for-purpose change strategies across diverse transformation initiatives.
• Adept at engaging and aligning diverse groups of stakeholders at all levels of organization.
• Proven commitment to coaching, mentoring, and upskilling of team members.
• Experienced in operating model design and establishing business functions, with expertise in setting up and managing processes, programs, and projects at both business unit and enterprise levels.

Key Clients:

• Westpac Group
• Sydney University
• WorleyParsons
• Macquarie Bank
• Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Key Achievements:

As a Portfolio Change Director at Westpac Banking Group, Catherine oversaw change delivery for the Enterprise Technology Transformation portfolio, with projects exceeding $250M. She directed the change management for a $100M+ Enterprise Records Management Program, designing and implementing an enterprise-wide target operating model across nine divisions, aligning systems, people, and processes. She also led the change management for the $200M+ UNITE Enterprise Testing Uplift Program, establishing a foundational change management function and team. Beyond Westpac, she developed the OCCAM (Organisational Change Capability Acceleration Model), a strategic framework to enable organisations to improve change management maturity derived from extensive experience in organisational change.

As Change Director for the Linc Program at Westpac, Catherine led change management for a major regulatory initiative separating Westpac New Zealand from its parent entity to comply with RBNZ BS-11 legislation. The program encompassed seven value streams and over 40 initiatives covering all business units across the bank. Appointed when the program was in RED status with no established change function and less than a year to meet compliance, she rapidly scoped and sized the change effort, secured additional senior change managers, and standardised the approach through customised templates and an overarching change strategy. She oversaw change delivery across 16 GMs and 30+ teams, strengthened cross-border collaboration between Australian and New Zealand project teams, and provided thought leadership on business readiness for both jurisdictions.

As Change Lead for HR Workforce Planning at Westpac, Catherine was part of a small team entrusted with delivering a significant enterprise wide and market sensitive restructure that impacted over 35,000 people. She led the Embedment workstream, partnering with KPMG to apply a human centered design approach and create fit for purpose materials for business leaders. This included a 90-day Leader Plan, a self-service hub for all employees, and leader information packs that were adopted enterprise wide to support divisional change management and embed new ways of working.

As Change Director for Finance Programs at Westpac, Catherine established a Finance Change Management Portfolio to drive consistency, optimise resources, and foster knowledge sharing across major finance initiatives. She led and supported four senior change managers, aligning their strengths to successfully deliver change on major finance projects. She oversaw three consecutive organisational restructures, BT Wealth, Consumer and Business Bank, and Specialist Businesses, ensuring smooth transitions and uninterrupted finance operations through structured stakeholder engagement, rapid impact assessments, and pragmatic change delivery. Catherine also led change management for the CtrlPrint project, enabling remote coordination and training of 80+ senior stakeholders during COVID to deliver Half-Year 2020 ASX reporting on time. Beyond delivery, she mentored emerging change professionals and served as a mentor for the Regional Opportunities Australia Program, supporting a Palestinian immigrant in securing employment. She also championed Westpac’s partnership with Good Return establishing a Giving Circle that raised over $40K for Indigenous female entrepreneurs.

As Process and Operating Model Lead at Westpac, Catherine led the Process and Operating Model stream on the $100M+ 4 year Economic & Financial Statistics (EFS) Program established to meet APRA requirements following the Banking Royal Commission. She developed the Target Operating Model for the new Axiom Regulatory Reporting system, incorporating best practices from other financial institutions and facilitating alignment among key business and technology stakeholders. Working closely with the business owner and Global Reporting team, she designed new processes for the submission of 44 domestic returns, managing return changes, and implementing a tiered business support model—delivering Phase 1 successfully and on time.

As Change Director for the Transfer Pricing Simplification (TPS) Program at Westpac, Catherine led end-to-end change management over three years to replace Westpac’s legacy Funds Transfer Pricing and Interest Rate Risk platforms with a single integrated Cost of Funds platform. The $60M+ program encompassed seven interdependent projects delivered successfully in July 2017 using both Agile and Waterfall methodologies. As part of the TPS leadership team, she facilitated weekly cross-functional working groups with Heads of Finance, Technology, and Risk. She established and managed a lean change team providing global coverage across Australia, New Zealand, London, New York, and Asia, and developed an integrated change strategy accommodating mixed delivery approaches. Catherine oversaw a detailed Change Impact Assessment endorsed by 35 senior leaders and designed a cascading Business Readiness sign-off process that secured approvals from five Business Unit CFOs and four senior Technology leaders, critical to the program’s successful go-live. She maintained strong stakeholder engagement across divisions and regions despite extended timelines and also mentored emerging change practitioners through Westpac’s Coaching4Change Program.

As Senior Change Manager for the Oracle R12 Upgrade Program, Catherine played a key role in delivering end-to-end change management for the replatforming and upgrade of Westpac’s General Ledger and Payroll systems. The three-year $50M program was completed on time and under budget, with change management recognised as a key success factor in the Post Implementation Review. She developed the overall change strategy, including budget and resourcing scenarios to support scope and timeline decisions, and led detailed impact assessments across Finance, HR, and Technology, securing sign-offs from over 40 senior leaders. Catherine streamlined engagement for more than 200 stakeholders through a structured engagement model, oversaw training development and delivery for over 1,000 users including three eLearning modules and coached change team members. She also represented Finance in the refresh of Westpac’s Enterprise Change Methodology.

As Change Consultant at the University of Sydney, Catherine supported a strategic change program to reengineer the end-to-end student lifecycle and enhance process efficiency. Assigned to the Marketing and Communications workstream, she partnered with the Marketing Director to plan and deliver all aspects of change within the framework of the University’s Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. She developed an integrated implementation framework encompassing change management, project management, business analysis, and future state design. Catherine also designed and facilitated workshops with the Marketing Leadership Team to define future state marketing processes and created process maps that enabled the Marketing Director to engage senior faculty stakeholders and secure their buy-in.

As Global Information Management (IM) Change and Communications Manager at WorleyParsons, Catherine reported directly to the Global CIO and played a key role in a multi-year transformation to restructure a 700+ person global IM team across three regions, repositioning the function as a strategic, service-oriented business partner. She worked closely with the IM Senior Leadership Team to drive alignment on strategy, planning, and operations, facilitating workshops with the CIO and senior leaders to strengthen collaboration and clarity. Catherine introduced IM operational team reviews to enhance visibility and communication across teams, organised regional virtual town halls linking IM strategy to corporate objectives, and developed a new communications plan to streamline engagement between IM and business stakeholders. She also coached project managers in applying change management principles to improve project outcomes.

As Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) Business Systems Manager at WorleyParsons, Catherine reported to the regional ANZ CFO in a newly created role to establish and lead a business aligned support function for the Australian instance of the Oracle 11i Global Business System (GBS). Initially focused on post-implementation change management, the role evolved to drive continuous improvement and deliver small-scale projects once stakeholder concerns were resolved. Catherine built and managed a support team serving over 5,000 Oracle users across Finance, HR, and Projects, implementing efficient processes later adopted by other regions. She chaired the ANZ GBS Governance Committee to align system priorities with business needs, supported a major organisational restructure impacting 3,000 staff, and oversaw the integration of several acquisitions onto the GBS platform. Additionally, she developed a tailored GBS training strategy and a sustainable support model leveraging a network of business trainers and super users across ANZ.

As Global Finance Services (GFS) Process Architect at Macquarie Bank, Catherine was one of two architects within the GFS Operational Excellence team responsible for driving business process improvements in the Record-to-Report function, incorporating best practices from the Shared Services Roundtable. During the 2009 Global Financial Crisis, her focus shifted to supporting the establishment and scale-up of a captive Shared Services Centre in India to accelerate cost reduction. She developed a process taxonomy and assessment model to identify finance processes suitable for offshoring, co-led a review with EY that achieved a 30% reduction in local finance team size, and supported leadership through retention planning, targeted communications, and structured knowledge transfer. Catherine also facilitated a “GE Workout” workshop with finance teams to streamline accounting processes, achieving annual savings of $85K.

As eCommerce Finance Lead at Sun Microsystems, Catherine managed financial compliance for a major global initiative integrating Sun’s web platform (Intershop) with Oracle 11i ERP, supporting approximately 20,000 eCommerce orders annually valued at US$1.1 billion. She established and chaired a global virtual team to drive automation and cost reduction in eCommerce order processing, developing a performance dashboard adopted by the eSun Director to manage stakeholder engagement across Marketing, Finance, and Operations. Catherine played a key role in enabling “touchless” online order processing by resolving complex compliance issues related to Revenue Recognition and Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, significantly reducing manual intervention and costs. She also designed an online tax exemption process to ensure accurate tax handling and compliance, mitigating financial risk.

As Global Program Manager at Sun Microsystems, Catherine relocated to the United States to establish and lead a global Credit Card Payment Program aimed at enhancing credit card processing capabilities for Sun’s business-to-consumer platform, supporting over US$100M in annual transactions. She chaired a cross-functional steering committee of Finance, IT, and Marketing leaders and managed a global virtual team to deliver key initiatives, including automation of US and Canadian credit card processing (reducing staffing by 50%), implementation of a hosted global payment gateway, and deployment of rule-based risk management tools that reduced fraudulent transactions. Catherine also led Sun’s worldwide adoption of Payment card Industry (PCI) compliance, identifying and remediating high-risk non-compliant areas, and successfully negotiated complex contracts with major credit card vendors American Express and Chase Paymentech through strategic relationship management.

As APAC Project Manager at Sun Microsystems, Catherine led the regional implementation of the Invoice-to-Collect (ITC) transformation, transitioning from decentralised, country-based operations to a centralised global function with standardised systems, processes, and governance. She successfully consolidated ITC operations across the Asia Pacific region into the APAC Shared Services Centre and completed a pilot outsourcing initiative with ABN AMRO Bank in Taiwan, laying the groundwork for global standardisation and efficiency improvements.