SYDNEY, July 2 -- Paul Fowler spent a decade helping Commonwealth Bank take market share in Australian business lending. Now, five months into running the same division at Westpac, he is turning that playbook on the bank that used to employ him, and on the one that currently leads the field.

Westpac will hire 350 additional business bankers over the next two years, adding to the 135 it has already brought on this year, Fowler told Reuters. The hiring is not incidental expansion. Fowler described a division that had "lost focus and conceded considerable ground" over roughly a decade, and said the bank had made "a strategic decision, to tilt towards business banking" to win it back. That is an unusually blunt admission from a division head...