The women who are shaking up banking
Debbie Crosbie is about to join the ranks of the UK’s financial elite. She won’t be alone: Meet...
THE boardrooms of Britain’ s banks have long been stubbornly dominated by men despite all the evidence that women can offer at l east as much as their male counterparts.
But now, at last, a host of women are poised to seize jobs at the very top of the UK’s biggest financial institutions, hailing a new dawn for the sector tarnished by a testosterone-fuelled crash a decade ago.
TSB will welcome a woman boss for the first time in 2019 when Debbie Crosbie, the chief operating officer at CYBG, becomes its new chief executive. She will lead the clean-up effort at the group, still recovering from an IT meltdown sparked by a mass migration of customer accounts to a new system under former chief executive Paul Pester.
But rival RBS could become the first of the ‘Big Four’ UK banks – beat i ng Barclays, HSBC a nd Lloyds – to appoint a female chief executive.
The state-owned lender, run by Ross McEwan since 2013, recently promoted Alison Rose to become deputy chief of NatWest Holdings, RBS’s main retail bank, making her candidacy for the top job the worst-kept secret in the City.
She remains head of RBS’s commercial and private banking busi- nesses, as well as deputising for McEwan. He has said he will not leave before 2020, meaning it is possible Rose could be anointed as soon as next year.
McEwan signalled the direction of the bank’s thinking in a recent interview with a City news channel, saying he ‘would be delighted if we had a woman running the bank’.
These women have been preceded by trailblazers such as Jayne AnneGadhia, the former CEO of Virgin Money who was made a dame this weekend, and Santander’s UK chairwoman Baroness Vadera, who was Gordon Brown’s most trusted adviser in the financial crisis and a key architect of the banks’ bailout in 2008.
But other banks lining up female leaders-in-waiting include Santander UK and Lloyds. Susan Allen, a former RBS banker, has enjoyed a meteoric career at Santander in the last three years and will be responsible for more than 80 per cent of the lender’s revenues when she takes over as head of its retail and business banking arm on Tuesday.
Replacing Javier San Felix, who also held the title of deputy chief executive, underlines her status as a leading internal candidate for the group CEO role. RBS relied on Allen’s cool head and leadership in 2012 when she was trusted with high- profile media appearances during a separate IT crisis. She joined Santander in March 2015 as a managing director and was promoted after just seven months to become chief transformation officer, charged with overhauling less effective parts of the business.
Mary Macleod, a partner at topflight headhunter Korn Ferry, said: ‘Susan Allen is brilliant at what she does. She’s really engaging and there are lots more women like her.
‘I think this is showing there has been a turning point in terms of people recognising more of the talent that is around,’ said Macleod, who worked with both Allen and Rose when the three were at RBS together. ‘The more we see women like Alison and Debbie getting into those roles, it shows the sector is doing more than it’s done before and is looking at the unconscious bias in how selection has been done previously.’
Lloyds, meanwhile, has two hotlytipped women on its executive com- mittee – playing key roles in the bank’s overall strategy. Former Credit Suisse analyst Carla Antunes da Silva, brought into Lloyds three years ago, has been central to the bank’s 2018-2020 strategic review. She has a hand in large swathes of Lloyds’ strategy, including mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures. The Portuguese economist, who studied at Oxford and the London School of Economics, also manages the group’s relationships with investors and analysts.
Her senior role, with its strategic focus, has made da Silva a leadership contender – and it doesn’t hurt that she has been described as the right-hand woman to Lloyds’ current chief executive, Antonio Horta-Osorio.
Lloyds’ bosses have also been backing Jennifer Tippin, who has headed up the bank’s response to the payment protection insurance scandal as its customer services director and now sits on the executive committee. Oxford-educated Tippin, who studied modern languages, joined Lloyds in 2009, having served as head of banking and savings at HBOS before the two banks merged.
She has been personally mentored by Horta- Osorio, a sign of the bank’s plans for her future. In January 2017, she was promoted to lead Lloyds’ cost cuts ahead of its strategic review. Just six months later, she was promoted to her current role of group people and productivity director, taking a lead in the bank’s strategic overhaul.
Macleod said the number of women rising up the industry was partly down to boards taking more proactive steps to make sure the executive tier of bosses is more diverse. She added: ‘What’s really encouraging now is the number of boards who are pushing search firms on this.
‘They’re asking how we can make sure they get a more diverse list of candidates. And we also have to push back at our clients to help them understand what is so brilliant and great about some of the women on the list.’
Barclays has introduced ‘unconscious bias’ training, to make sure its staff are not hiring in their own image, and the company supports its women through progressive maternity and paternity policies.
Leading the charge for women at Barclays is Karen Frank, a vocal advocate for women in the industry who sits on Barclays’ international executive committee. As Head of Private Bank and Overseas Services, Frank runs Barclays’ international wealth business and is in charge of 1,700 employees.
The role was created after CEO Jes Staley’s strategic review when he identified wealth as an important area for growth, and charged Frank with running the division.
Since her promotion, Frank has expanded the business, kicking off a hiring spree that will see 100 new staff recruited to help Barclays lure in wealthy clientele.
There has been a turning point in people seeing the talent that is around