Due to succeed long standing current chairman Michael Chaney when he steps down in December, Dr Ken Henry's experience amongst the top rungs of government bureaucracy is seen by some to signal a "new era for Australian banks".

"By giving a former bureaucrat the top job, to oversee the board, replacing a mover and shaker of Michael Chaney's ilk, means the banks management is accepting its fate, and the fate of the industry," Jonathan Shapiro, journalist for the Australian Financial Review, wrote.

"Their job in this new era is to oversee a regulated utility that offers investors steady, dependable returns, not drive a profit-growth engine."

Economist Dr Henry has been a member of NAB's board since November 2011, following a decade as secretary of the federal Treasury when he was described as 'Australia's most revered public servant'.

He has also served on the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia, currently chairs the risk committee of NAB's board and is a director of ASX Ltd.

Outgoing chairman Mr Chaney said Dr Henry had "an unequalled understanding of the Australian financial system, the issues facing financial services companies and the Australian economy more generally."

Dr Henry was born in Taree in 1957 to parents John and Heather Henry. He credits a conversation about the distribution of profits from a huge log cut down in Lansdowne State Forest by his timber working father as a defining moment in his life, when he realised that governments "have responsibilities, including responsibilities over the assets of the people that they represent - timber stocks, fish stocks, quality of the air, water, generally the quality of the environment."

His father reportedly worked hard, but earned little. Dr Henry has said that more often than not, when there are inequitable outcomes, it is not so much the fault of the free market, but the fault of poor government policy.

A standout scholar, he graduated in economics with first-class honours from the University of NSW in 1974 before completing his PhD at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

In 1984, he joined Treasury's taxation policy division devoting his next few decades to how consecutive federal governments redistribute wealth and fund programs.

More recently, Dr Henry is credited as the principal architect of the strategy that protected Australia from the worst of the global financial crisis (a $42 billion stimulus package, $10 billion cash "handout'' and a bank guarantee).

"It did look like we were not going to be able to avoid a recession... As Secretary of the Treasury I was not going to stand on the sidelines," he told the ABC's 7.30 Report in 2012.

"There was no point in going in soft. If you were going to use fiscal policy to avoid a recession, you should throw a lot at it... I did say 'Go Hard, Go Early, and Go to Households."

Dr Henry was made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in 2007, in recognition both of his achievement as an economist and for community work in wildlife rescue.