Big shot of the week JOHN CRYAN, 56
AT THE risk of sounding unkind, there is a permanent air of gloom about John Cryan. Gruff and unsmiling, the plain-speaking Yorkshireman is not one of life’s sunbeams.
Threatening, too. His brow is grooved with furrows and there is a hint of menace behind that cruel-looking mouth.
When addressing reporters, he adopts a narrow-eyed piercing stare like a rugby prop forward whose sister’s chastity has been called into question by his opposite number.
This has always been his manner, apparently. Born in Harrogate to a jazz musician father who plied his trade at Ronnie Scott’s famous Soho club, Cryan is one of life’s toilers. A northern grafter.
At investment banks, where he has spent most of his career, he was forever known as ‘Mr Grumpy’ on account of his direct tone and abrupt demeanour.
Were this just a recent character development, however, it would be entirely understandable.
For the past two years Cryan, 56, been in charge at Deutsche Bank, a task which excitable financial commentators have dubbed ‘the toughest job in the world’.
While current White House spin doctors might beg to differ, there can be little doubt Cryan has picked up a chalice more rancid than a soggy, three-week-old Bratwurst.
ONCE Europe’s dominant powerhourse, years of corporate mismanagement and billions of pounds worth of regulatory fines have hammered the German lender’s balance sheet. Last week, the firm posted a £1.2bn loss.
Bonuses have been scrapped and demoralised staff are mutinous. Some 9,000 now face the chop.
Why dome-headed Cryan, a fluent German speaker, accepted stewardship of this toxic mess is anyone’s guess. It is not as if he has any pressing financial concerns.
True, his (undisclosed) salary is unlikely to be chicken’s feed – it seems doubtful he would have accepted anything less than the £6.2m his Prada-clad predecessor Anshu Jain was paid.
But after a successful 30-year career in the city, which began at SG Warburg before he become chief financial officer at UBS, Cryan is a considerably wealthy man.
Wife Mary, a lawyer he met at Warburg, is also part of America’s billionaire Dupont dynasty and there are no children to worry about.
Instead, Cryan appears to be that peculiar beast among the global financial elite – one that is unfussed by wealth and status.
He is certainly unencumbered by many of the poncey fripperies favoured by the mega-rich.
His unflashy suits are made by the same London tailor he’s been visiting for 30 years and at meetings he can be found clutching a battered old leather satchel.
Nor does he care much for corporate extravagance either.
He eschews costly private jets favoured by his aforementioned predecessor, preferring to travel on scheduled flights during his constant globe-trotting.
When in London, he usually hops on the tube from his Holland Park home to Deutsche’s Liverpool Street offices.
Most tellingly of all, was his marmalade-dropping pronouncement upon arriving at Deutsche in 2015, that bankers really didn’t need bonuses.
He said: ‘I have no idea why I was offered a contract with a bonus in it because I promise you I will not work any harder or any less hard in any year, in any day because someone is going to pay me more or less.’
So what’s his motivation? Intellectual curiosity, they say. A genuine fascination with making things work.
He once took out a pilot’s licence simply to better understand aviation. For someone blessed with such a quizzical brain, it may not surprise you to learn he studied physics at Cambridge University under the tutelage of Professor Stephen Hawking.
For now, Cryan is pressing on with his turnaround plan, dubbed ‘Strategy 2020’, which he says will make Deutsche a simpler, less risky, more efficient bank.
Whether he can succeed is still moot. But unlike his reckless forebears, Cryan has at least proven himself to be a long-term thinker.
If this all sounds fanciful, consider this: while working at Warburg, he advised Dutch bank ABN Amro during its infamous takeover by Royal Bank of Scotland.
Tossing aside expediency, he discreetly counselled RBS’s Fred Goodwin that the deal was a stinker and likely to backfire. The odious Goodwin pressed on regardless, with cataclysmic consequences.
So, we have a seemingly honest, intellectually-driven banker, unmotivated by bonus or rewards who is intent on playing the long game. Do such creatures really still exist? Apparently so. Just don’t expect this honourable trundler to crack a smile.