LONDON: Thousands of jobs cuts, business closures and billions of euros of capital raising are all on the cards as the new bosses of three of Europe’s biggest banks respond to pressure to devise new strategies to revive them.
Credit Suisse Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam, Deutsche Bank’s John Cryan and Standard Chartered’s Bill Winters are putting the final touches to their plans, which Thiam and Cryan will unveil next month and Winters is expected to deliver in early December.
All have been in charge roughly 100 days — a period when new chief executives typically formulate strategy after meeting investors, regulators, politicians, customers and staff. Big job cuts loom in a bid to cut costs and improve profitability — their main target.
Cryan is to cut 23,000 staff, or about a quarter of headcount, mostly from disposals, financial sources told Reuters earlier this month.
Winters could axe several thousand, sources said, although they said no final decisions had been made and much will depend on disposals. Meanwhile Thiam has said he plans to use his engineering background to take a hard-nosed look at efficiency.
Senior management ranks are also being shaken up — Winters has named a new management team and is cutting layers of bureaucracy to simplify and speed up decision-making while Thiam immediately brought in a long-time confidant as his chief of staff and moved a couple more staff.
Santander’s chairwoman Ana Botin said changes she had made in her first 12 months had “laid the foundations for the bank we want for the next 10 years”, and said 21 of her top 31 management team are new or have new roles.
Thiam, Cryan and Winters, all in their early 50s, each needs to undo mistakes made by predecessors and shrink their banks to reduce complexity and get out of business areas that no longer make money. Other banks, including CEO-less Barclays and Italy’s UniCredit, are also going through the process, but new CEOs are under pressure to come in with a fresh view to take bold action.
“All are high caliber, but they need to hurry up and make decisions about their business and markets while they are still learning a lot about them,” one senior banker said.
All three CEOs declined requests for interviews. But here is their thinking on key issues, according to public comments and interviews with sources at banks, investors and analysts:
The three CEOs have all gathered with their boards and senior bankers this month - opting for hotel retreats in Bavaria, Switzerland and Singapore - to discuss plans.
They have made some big changes in their first two to three months and given broad signals on where their priorities lie in messages to staff and at second-quarter results.
Winters halved his bank’s dividend after a slump in second-quarter profits laid bare the scale of the challenge he faces.
Reuters
