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Macquarie has long been dubbed the “millionaires factory” in Australia for the bank and investment group’s ability to transform the fortunes of its best performers.

Nick O’Kane, Macquarie’s departing head of commodities, proved to be a prime example of that reputation last year as his pay surpassed A$1mn a week.

O’Kane’s A$58mn annual pay, which comfortably outstripped those of his own chief executive and most of Wall Street’s biggest names, reflected the huge profit growth of Macquarie’s commodities and markets division — but prompted an abortive protest over pay at its annual meeting last July.

Shemara Wikramanayake, chief executive, told investors then that O’Kane had spent 20 years building the commodities business into Macquarie’s biggest profit contributor. “The market for talent like Nick is very strong and there are many alternatives where he could potentially earn multiples of what he earns here. He’s very committed and chooses to work with us,” she said. 

Yet his near 30-year career with Macquarie has abruptly ended after it was revealed that O’Kane — who had been widely tipped as a potential successor to Wikramanayake — will leave later this month. His resignation, a bolt out of the blue internally, and the short notice period set tongues wagging about his next move.

Macquarie is mostly associated with investment banking, financing infrastructure projects and its asset management arm, but the commodities and global markets business built and run by O’Kane has grown in stature. Last year it accounted for almost 60 per cent of the company’s profits.

O’Kane earned A$171mn between 2018 and 2023 as his division’s profit soared from A$1.6bn to a record A$6bn. He leaves behind a healthy business that has performed well in oil and agricultural trading this year as gas has proved less volatile, though profit for the year to March is expected to drop back to around the A$4bn level achieved in 2022.

O’Kane declined to comment on his plans but many inside the bank and outside are pondering which company has pockets deep enough to lure him away from such returns, or whether he could follow other former Macquarie veterans in setting up his own fund. Others guess he wants to take time out to spend with his young family and his fortune in the wealthy Point Piper suburb where he owns one of Sydney’s most expensive homes. 

The 50-year-old is described by people who have worked alongside him as an unassuming character who has not sought the limelight. His career is held up as an exemplar of how Macquarie nurtures, and handsomely rewards, those with the talent to use its balance sheet to create a business. 

O’Kane hails from the leafy Melbourne suburb of Ivanhoe and supports the Richmond Tigers, one of the biggest teams in the Australian Football League. After studying at the University of Melbourne, he worked for a year at National Australia Bank before joining Macquarie in 1995. 

He started working the night shift on the Sydney bank’s currency trading desk before an ill-timed move to Malaysia during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, when currency controls were imposed that forced him to wind down the bank’s trading book. That was followed by stints in South Korea and London before he turned to the US energy market, then considered too toxic for most after the collapse of trading group Enron. 

Alongside Andrew Downe, former head of the commodities and finance division, O’Kane led the acquisition of a niche Californian business called Cook Inlet. Four years later, Downe and O’Kane made their case to swallow the much larger Houston-based gas trading operations of Constellation Energy.

That opportunity landed in 2009 during the global financial crisis, which hit Macquarie hard. Chris Wright, co-author of The Millionaires’ Factory, a book about the bank’s rise, said the acquisition was a bold move. “Constellation was a big deal but the world was falling apart. They had the gumption to go and buy it,” he said.

In an interview posted on Macquarie’s website, O’Kane said the acquisition had been transformative. “[It] really helped us grow into the business that you see today,” he said, telling younger colleagues the bank had a “bias to saying ‘yes’” to good ideas. “You will get the opportunity to chase that idea down and build a business,” he said.

The US energy bet paid off and Macquarie thrived. When a “polar vortex” hit Texas in 2021, the commodities unit — which piped fuel into the state as wholesale prices surged — generated an enormous profit. The volatility in energy markets that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine proved an even bigger boon for Macquarie and O’Kane’s pay.

O’Kane left Houston for London in 2019 after replacing Downe and returned to Sydney in 2021, but Wright said his influence was still evident in the Texan offices where he made his biggest mark. “It feels like a Macquarie place,” he said. 

A physical legacy also remains in the form of a black surfboard, featuring Macquarie’s “holey dollar” logo, that has been left where O’Kane used to sit.

The surfboard dates to the Cook Inlet deal almost two decades ago, when O’Kane tried to forge a link between the Sydney bank’s executives and the Californian energy traders they built an empire around. “He was looking to find true common ground,” Wright said.