Grant Hackett likes to remind people that although he was a professional swimmer for 13 years, he has worked in financial services for 17 years and been CEO of the retirement investment business Generation Life – centre of the ASX-listed Generation Development Group – for the past six.
But even while he was swimming, Hackett was also studying commerce and law at Bond University and always had a deep interest in financial services, including trading stocks. “I burnt myself during the dot com boom,” he laughs. Straight after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Hackett began work at Westpac and then BT Financial Group where he cycled through distribution, wealth management and marketing, under Coombe who was CEO of Westpac’s BT for six years.Hackett says he and Coombe were looking at the business in 2013, when it was the broking outfit Austock Group, “because we knew there would be changes to superannuation and we’re the most tax effective investment outside of super”.
Hackett says their investment products are also popular for philanthropy and estate planning. “We’ve got a thing called future event transfer where you can distribute money at multiple vesting periods, so you really control it in a cost-effective way.” He was also detained by police following a mid-air altercation on a flight in 2016 and made headlines after a violent altercation at his parents’ home on the Gold Coast, where he grew up, in 2017.
“I had to do some work on myself, I had to understand what was going on and why I was having these ups and downs and just this really difficult period of life. When I got to the other side of that I think I became a better father, partner and more compassionate leader.”