Another major obstacle the pair faced: culture. GE Money's inexorable growth in Australia was part of the company's overall philosophy, as laid down by legendary GE CEO Jack Welch in the 1990s. Welch's dictum was that companies under the banner of GE had to be either number one or two in a market or get out. The plan calls for GE to identify market opportunities not fully appreciated, like Coles Myer's retail credit business, and build a commanding presence. Sound business, yes, but it is also an approach guaranteed to rattle the existing players in the Australian finance sector. In fact, GE's policy of rapid expansion in Australia saw the company dubbed a "silent assassin" by the local business press.

"If you think about the natural culture at GE, Westpac or IBM and Telstra, there's quite a lot of variety in those cultures," McNamara says.

"There is a difference in cultures," agrees Felstead. "Westpac is obviously steeped in tradition in this country, and there was some suggestion that the Westpac approach was more conservative. We may be owned by GE, which is a 100-year-old company, but we're a young company in Australia that's been built on acquisitions. We're seen as aggressive and volatile, but Westpac was open to what we brought to the table. That was important."

"I think one of the keys to our success was the environment that was created for these teams to operate together as one," McNamara adds.

"Each team had to reach out and connect with the other team. And at the end of the day, I don't think there was one dominant culture. Instead, I think we created a team that worked to the respective strengths of each organization."

"It was a powerful combination," agrees Felstead, who nominates Westpac's project disciplines and GE's experience in applying Six Sigma analysis to projects as the chief contribution of each organization. Felstead and McNamara used GE's own Six Sigma toolkits to keep the integration's many parallel projects on track, as well as to perform periodic health checks. In particular, the team relied upon a Six Sigma toolset called FMEA (short for Failure Mode Effects Analysis) for "traditional project management".

"We also set up workshops where there were problems, situations and risks to evaluate," Felstead says. "When we were concerned about where a project was going, instead of people worrying, we would articulate the risk and mitigate it."

One of the first projects - and according to Felstead, one of the most difficult - was to give people in AGC's numerous offices around Australia access to GE's systems, and vice versa. It was a huge challenge that required a great deal of trust and goodwill on the part of both companies, not to mention skill from the team members involved. McNamara, for one, describes the transfer as "a security breach waiting to happen".

"The fact that we went through that period without any breach is another major success," he says. "You can imagine the stress faced by the security teams on both sides. Everyone was very nervous about data privacy. Obviously both organizations are paranoid about the privacy of their customer bases. So we came up with a privacy protocol that made things clear while we were nutting through the security issues."

"We developed a protocol for communicating with each other without breaking commercial confidences," Felstead agrees, "particularly where someone had an incident that might impact on another part of the business.

"Network connections is a good example," he says. "We developed a protocol about how to escalate problems because we found that some people initially were a little edgy about how much they could say to the other company. But we found that a formal protocol was a really useful tool."