City profile

António Horta-Osório

Lloyds Bank’s black stallion logo “suggests rebellious vitality”, said Lex in the FT. “It’s an ill fit for the dowdy UK institution”, and after a decade as chief executive, António Horta-Osório “has done little to alter that”. Now the bank’s Portuguese-born boss is off to pastures new – leaving earlier than expected in April to take the chair of Credit Suisse. In an ongoing game of musical chairs, Lloyds has poached HSBC’s head of wealth and personal banking, Charlie Nunn, to replace him. Nunn will probably have “some Covid nasties to deal with” before he can get into his stride at Lloyds, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. But that’s nothing to the mare’s nest that Horta-Osório, 56, is inheriting at Credit Suisse.

Thanks to the spectacular ineptness of its internal “Keystone Kops”, the bank is still enmeshed in its “CEOsinking spy scandal”, said Jon Shazar on Dealbreaker. com. The Swiss lender’s board, led by chairman Ulf Rohner, has also been tarnished by a racism row following the departure last February of its FrenchIvorian CEO Tidjane Thiam. “After one of the most turbulent years in its history”, Credit Suisse has reached outside the “Swiss establishment” for the first time ever in its choice of chair, said Bloomberg. The hope is that Horta-Osório, who deftly steered Lloyds through the aftermath of the financial crisis, can “help repair the bank’s reputation” as well as its balance sheet. Having been laid low by stress-induced insomnia in 2011, Horta-Osório has emerged as a champion of good mental health at work, said the FT. That should go down well in Zurich.