
Bloomberg/Paul Yeung
HSBC Holdings has begun to reshape top management, laying the groundwork for a new direction under its next chief, reported Bloomberg.
The bank is expected to announce the retirement within days of Marc Moses, Chief Risk Officer and board member. The qualified accountant is likely to be replaced by Pam Kaur, Head of Wholesale Market and Credit Risk.
Meanwhile, the London-based firm has decided to split leadership of its investment bank. Gregory Guyett and Georges Elhedery will jointly run the unit once Samir Assaf steps down in the coming months. Guyett is currently head of Global Banking, while Elhedery runs HSBC’s Global Markets Business.
The departure of Moses would mark the most senior exit from the business since the ouster in August of former Chief Executive Officer John Flint. He was pushed out by Chairman Mark Tucker, who said the bank needed a change of leadership to cope with an increasingly complex business environment. Moses’s departure has been in the works since before Flint’s and Kaur has been preparing to replace him for several months, one of the people said.
Flint’s replacement, interim Chief Executive Officer Noel Quinn, is reviewing the entire business. Quinn has made a bid to get the top job on a permanent basis and is considered one of the front-runners for the post.
Quinn’s review is the third undertaken by HSBC in the last decade and the pressure is on the bank to deliver after its stock hit a 12-month low this week. The bank’s operations in the US and continental Europe are expected to bear the brunt of the cuts.
The lender has already signalled its intention to offload its French retail unit, which could take as many as 8,000 employees off its payroll. Equities sales and trading in France, Germany, the US and the UK are also likely to be scaled back.
HSBC is also under scrutiny by the Bank of England, which has warned for two years in a row that it has failed to tackle concerns about how it handles risks, including financial crime and staff conduct.
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