Stock In Trade

The Age

Saturday June 28, 2008

Christopher Webb

CommSec's Craig James is a master of markets marketing, writes Christopher Webb.

IF FATE had taken a different turn, Craig James might have been best known to the customers of a suburban bank branch where he worked many moons ago as a teller.

But he has ended up as the most quoted man in the business pages, not to mention his frequent appearances on television and radio.

His game is economics; not the stuff of a university boffin or a closeted bank staffer, but man-in-the-street economics.

James, 46, works - for the rare person who has never heard of him - for Commonwealth Bank, or more particularly its stockbroking arm, Commonwealth Securities, better known as CommSec.

He gets into the office at 5.30am and is still there 12 hours later, churning out reports and commentaries; all the time keeping the CommSec brand in regular public view.

Over the years he has generated millions of dollars of free publicity and has done his bit for the extraordinary success of the stockbroking firm that was set up little more than a decade ago.

CommSec snuck under the guard of the stockbroking establishment and, while many traditional stockbrokers were asleep at the wheel, the Commonwealth, of all companies, went after their private clients, with startling results.

The firm has more than 1.6 million client accounts and it's a money machine; spewing out $220 million in pre-tax profits last year, up from $153 million previously.

CommSec is very much a man-in-the-street stockbroking firm, and that's where the publicity-savvy James comes in.

He is always available to the media who want help in interpreting the latest economic data, or who want his views on the latest sharemarket crunch. He has no qualms about handing out numbers for his office phone, his home phone, his mobile as well as his email address.

But the Australian media would have been a James-free zone if things had gone a bit differently when he left Narwee Boys High School in Sydney nearly three decades ago.

He got a job with the local branch of the Rural Bank of NSW, where he did a stint as a teller and other jobs that young people do in bank branches.

"I joined the bank in 1980, and the key reason was I wanted to do a university degree part-time and the bank offered the best ability to do that," he says.

He got a bachelor of commerce from the University of NSW and when he arrived back at his local bank branch he was told, "look, you're not staying here, you're going in to head office".

At the head office of the Rural Bank, which later became the State Bank of NSW and later still Colonial State Bank, he did economic research, producing internal reports, doing industry studies, and studies on various countries and financial markets.

"In the last recession, I think I was saved from being booted out of the place by moving into the planning area of the bank," he says.

Commonwealth Bank took over Colonial in 2000 and it was then that the cards started to fall into place.

The Commonwealth already had its own economics team and the three-person team they inherited from Colonial, including James, was out of place. They were a free-wheeling group, not used to the big-company atmosphere of the Commonwealth.

"We had a lot of autonomy about what we could write, say and do," he remembers.

"At the time of the takeover, they were a little bit unsure about what to do with us. I said to them, 'why don't you put us in CommSec and we can do the economic commentary from that point of view'," he says.

When James left school he was interested in three things: economics, journalism and marketing.

After the bank put him into CommSec he was able to merge those three interests and establish himself as the go-to man whenever newspapers, radio or television wanted a quick summation of what an economic report or a sharemarket development meant.

The one-time bank teller's skill was to reduce often complex material into a few sentences that just about anyone could understand.

It was quite deliberate how he went about it, and what helped was that few other people were available all day and night to comment on the economy.

"We took an approach that what we wanted to do was not the traditional role of using jargon and eco-speak," he says. "We wanted to explain what was going on, so we changed the way we wrote so that it was much more user-friendly."

He has become the most often-quoted economic commentator due to an ability to relate figures to the way people live day-to-day.

"We take the view that while it might be nice to know the latest inflation figure or the unemployment figure, the most important thing is what you actually do with that information," he says. "Does that mean you should be fixing your mortgage rate, should you be buying an investment property, should you be buying or selling shares? These are the sort of decisions that people want to do with the information."

It's not only the media that calls on him. He's in demand at conferences as well as in-house sessions with the bank's clients.

"In the last couple of weeks I've spoken to mining and energy conferences, fixed-income conferences. I've got a Rotary obligation in a couple of weeks. Yesterday I did something for the Risk Management Association down in Melbourne."

James is by nature more of a bull than a bear and he says his forecasts are as good, or as bad, as everyone else's.

He has been in the game a long time and he reckons that helps. "I've gone through two recessions and a sharemarket crash and plenty of corrections, and it helps. The more you go through these periods the more comfortable you feel," he says.

When it comes to shares, James reports that he's not an active trader. "I'll hold the traditional things like Qantas or Telstra or whatever it happens to be. You've got to have money to trade shares and with kids going through school, there's not a lot of that spare around."

And what about the economy?

"I think people tend to take a dim view of our economy. They forget we've had 17 years of uninterrupted growth, we've got super-low unemployment, we've got a budget in surplus and we've paid all our government debt off.

"There's not too many countries around the world that can claim that. Now, sure, we've got a bit of an inflation problem. Why? Because our economy has been boosted by what's happening in China.

"We've been doing a little bit too well. Well, if that's the worst that can happen to Australia, that we're doing a little bit too well, and we need to slow down, then I wouldn't have thought that was such a bad thing."

© 2008 The Age

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