Standard Chartered: $3.6m top job might not go to a banker
London-listed and Asia-focused Standard Chartered is parting ways with CFO Andy Halford, Sky News reported yesterday.
Sky believes that Halford’s replacement will be found by Russell Reynolds, the London-based headhunters.
Halford earned just shy of £3m ($3.6m) in 2021, a big boost on the £2.5m ($3m) he received in 2020, although below 2019’s £3.6m ($4.35m) amount.
He joined the bank in 2014 after nine years as CFO at Vodafone and spent three years before that as CFO of Verizon Wireless, which was part-owned by Vodafone at the time.
Before he joined the Vodafone group, Halford was CFO of the newly privatized East Midlands Electricity – suggesting the new chief finance officer of Standard Chartered could be another outsider without experience in banking.
He replaced Richard Meddings at Standard Chartered, who had been CFO for nearly 12 years. Meddings started his career at Price Waterhouse, the accountancy, and held roles at private bank Hill Samuel and Barclays before joining SC. He went on to take boardroom roles at Deutsche Bank, TSB, and Credit Suisse after leaving Standard Chartered.
Standard Chartered’s Corporate, Commercial & Institutional Banking (CCIB) segment had strong Q3 results, with their first nine months of 2022 up 21% on 9M2021, outperforming the big Singapore banks.
The bank’s general performance was also good, with a 32% rise in pre-tax profit far outpacing worldwide rivals such as JPMorgan (which recorded a 17% fall) and HSBC (which fell more than 40%).
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Zeno.Toulon@efinancialcareers.com in the first instance.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)
