The hiring of M&A lawyer turned investment banker Michelle Jablko as CFO highlights the advanced thinking going on at ANZ as to how to quietly unravel Mike Smith's carefully constructed super-regional Asian strategy.  After early success, the drain on the balance sheet is increasing as risk weighted thinking pervades the banking sector - and along with that comes declining ROE. Early this month, at ANZ's half year profit presentations, chief executive officer Shayne Elliott, said of the delay in selecting a new chief financial officer: "We need someone who's going to augment my leadership team with new skills, so I'm taking a careful approach." And then hinted the decision was "not very far away." In its search for new skills, ANZ would have looked at how their Melbourne rival NAB moved to replace exiting CFO Mark Joiner not with another supremely qualified chartered accountant, but with banking analyst turned investment bank CEO Craig Drummond, who brought a new approach to an old problem - how to jettison NAB's deadweight UK business, which he did with aplomb.  As is the case with all of Australia's major banks, ANZ has a plethora of well-performing and experienced balance sheet managers and number crunchers, such as deputy CFO Shane Buggle (who now has all the other divisional and regional CFOs reporting to him, as the AFR has pointed out), group treasurer Rick Moscati, and Luke Davidson, head of group funding at ANZ, not to mention Elliott himself. So, a different set of skills is what Elliott wanted and what he has hired in the person of Jablko is 16 years of investment banking M&A expertise. Elliott will be calling on all of it to exit ANZ's Asian holdings. As a bonus, the gender diversity box-tickers in ANZ's HR department will be beside themselves as they welcome Jablko to the upper level of the bank's management.