FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 20, 2001

SYDNEY, Australia, Sept. 19— Edward Asbury O'Neal, an American banking executive who helped build one of Australia's best-known building societies into the fifth-largest bank in the country, died at home in Sydney on Sunday. He was 57.

The cause was suspected to be a heart attack, according to a spokeswoman for the Australian bank, St. George Bank, where Mr. O'Neal was chief executive.

Mr. O'Neal was recruited in 1998 to lead St. George, then a building society, the Australian equivalent of a savings and loan. He was one of a number of American executives who had come to Australia in recent years to turn around some of the country's biggest companies. Mr. O'Neal took over the task of merging St. George with Advance Bank.

While recent attempts to expand elsewhere in Australia -- by acquiring the Bank of Western Australia, which is based in Perth and is a unit of the Bank of Scotland -- failed, Mr. O'Neal had successfully engineered several acquisitions, particularly in funds management. St. George's earnings and stock price have risen sharply in the last year.

Born in Detroit on June 6, 1944, Mr. O'Neal graduated from Amherst College in 1966, and two years later from Harvard, with an M.B.A.

Mr. O'Neal spent the first 23 years of his banking career at the Chemical Bank in New York, where he became vice chairman and a member of the board. In 1993, he joined Bank of Boston. There, he ran consumer banking and later oversaw the integration of several franchises, including BayBanks.

He is survived by his wife, Dianne, and a son, Edward.