RBS scandals could be a thorn in the side for bank’s shoo-in candidate Rose
BEST of luck to Alison Rose who, we read, may soon be given the chance to show that women are every bit as able as men to screw up big banks. She has been anointed — not cursed I hope — as successor to Ross McEwan at Royal Bank of Scotland. Rose last week became deputy chief executive of NatWest Holdings, the part of the giant bank that owns nearly all of the important bits.
McEwan has said he will go in 2020, which suggests that — as long as Rose doesn’t make a hash of it — she’s a shoo-in. The City certainly seems to think so.
A few things: two years is a long time in banking. If you try to find a two-year period in RBS’s recent history when something hasn’t gone spectacularly wrong, you won’t.
So it’s sincerely to be hoped that she hasn’t been set up to fail — handed a hospital pass so she can be sent to A&E before they hire some other boring putting herself forward. Men who fail are just failures. They are often allowed another crack. Women who fail seem to be representative of an entire gender and don’t generally get another top job.
The profiles noting that she’s a “highflier”, the “front-runner” and one of the most influential women in the City might not look so helpful when RBS entirely flunks its 2020 targets and the battered shares take another kick.
Also, front-runners so seldom seem to finish first.
A press release from Ladbrokes in June 2013 had this: Nathan Bostock odds-on favourite to replace Stephen Hester as boss of RBS.
“Bostock has immediately been installed as the 1/2 market leader in response to the news that Hester is to step down” cooed the bookie.
Sir Mervyn King, at 500/1, had about as much chance.
Fairly or not, Bostock was seen as partly responsible for RBS’s notorious Global Restructuring Group, which hounded small firms out of business. He works for Santander now.
The opportunities for Rose to become tainted by similar scandal seem endless, perhaps forcing the bank to hire a clean pair of hands rather than a safe pair.
When asking colleagues for examples of when the favourite candidate — the absolute shoo-in — ever actually got the job, I was met with blank faces.
Eventually, someone came up with this: Elizabeth II.