New boss at Lloyds is in line for £5.6m
HSBC wealth wizard to succeed Horta-Osorio
A FATHER of four who grew up in a village outside Southampton is set to scoop one of the biggest jobs in British banking.
Charlie Nunn, a keen cyclist and runner, has been recruited by Lloyds Bank to replace its outgoing boss Antonio Horta-Osorio next year.
The 49-year-old banker, who was educated at Brookfield Comprehensive in Southampton before graduating from Cambridge University, is HSBC’s chief executive of wealth and personal banking.
He has previously worked in the US, France and Switzerland and is fond of India – he proposed to his wife on the roof of the luxurious Lake Palace hotel in Udaipur.
And while he watches over around £18bn of clients’ money in his current job, he faces a tough few years at the helm of Lloyds as the bank battles with a stuttering economy, record low interest rates and billions of l oans expected to turn sour.
Nunn’s maximum pay, at £5.6m, will also be 20pc lower than his predecessor’s – though the hefty sum has still raised eyebrows around the City at a time when the banking industry is facing so many headwinds.
He will be paid a basic salary of £1.13m, a fixed share award of £1.05m, and benefits and pension funding worth 4pc and 15pc of his salary respectively.
But the big money comes with his performance share award, which could hit 140pc of his salary, and his l ong- term share incentive award, which could reach 150pc. Nunn will also rake in share awards at Lloyds to replace those he will lose by moving from HSBC, and any bonuses he would have been handed in his old job. It is not yet clear what this will amount to.
He said: ‘I feel particularly lucky to be joining Lloyds Banking Group at this important time.’
But Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre, said: ‘Charlie Nunn would be earning more than 212 times the lowest-paid quarter of Lloyds employees on the basis of a £5.6m payout.
‘To some extent, bankers’ pay is still a legacy issue – it’s difficult to get people to accept less money t han t he t erms t hey were employed on. So changes in key staff are an absolutely critical test of whether banks are serious about changing the culture of vast internal pay gaps. This is a real failure of that test.’
Horta-Osorio was widely credited with returning Lloyds to private ownership nine years after its £20.3bn bailout in 2008 – a feat which rival Natwest is still trying to accomplish. Lloyds was in such a state when Horta-Osorio took over in 2011 that just nine months into the job, he was forced to take eight weeks off with stressinduced insomnia. After time at high-profile rehab facility The Priory, he became an advocate for mental health issues.
But his time at Lloyds has been mixed. He has failed to put the HBOS Reading scandal squarely in the bank’s past. Crooked bankers defrauded business customers out of millions of pounds. Lloyds has paid more than £100m in compensation so far, but it is estimated that the total bill could top £500m. And he was also forced to apologise to employees for an extra-marital affair, denying that he had used more than £3,000 of company expenses to woo his lover after the pair were pictured together during one of his business trips to Singapore.
Nunn will hope to put Lloyds’ chequered past behind it when he takes over – though he still has a six-month notice period at HSBC and up to six months of gardening leave, meaning it might be a year before he starts.