Winters gets top job at StanChart in reshuffle

Standard Chartered Plc named Bill Winters to replace Peter Sands as chief executive officer in one of the bank’s biggest-ever management reshuffles to help reverse faltering earnings growth and a slump in shares.

Winters, 53, a former co-CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co’s investment bank, will join the group in May, before taking over as CEO a month later, Standard Chartered said in a statement on Thursday. Chairman John Peace will leave in 2016, while Jaspal Bindra, head of Asia, plans to step down later this year.

Sands, 53, is leaving the bank after he failed to reverse a slump in shares over the past two years, eroded by a a drop in earnings that ended a decade of growth. While the CEO last month announced the most aggressive cost cuts since taking over the job in 2006, he failed to convince investors, sparking months of speculation about the future of senior managers.

“Sands was an absolute disaster and the chairman was asleep when it was his job to replace the CEO,” said David Fergusson, chief investment officer of Singapore-based Woodside Holdings Investment Management Pte, who owns the bank’s shares. “Bill Winters is a good choice, a proper banker. It’s extremely good they didn’t pick someone internal.”

The shares initially jumped as much as 5.2 percent and have since retreated, trading 2.1 percent higher at 11:47 am in London. They plummeted about 29 percent in 2014.

Winters, who currently runs Renshaw Bay, an asset management firm in London, will receive a base salary of 1.15 million pounds ($1.8 million), according to the statement. His total potential compensation is as much as 4.6 million pounds.

He was ousted by CEO Jamie Dimon in September 2009 after 26 years at the bank and later served on the British government-sponsored Independent Commission on Banking. The native of New York founded Renshaw in 2011 with funding from Jacob Rothschild’s RIT Capital Partners Plc.