FSA is unlikely to favour ex-banker for Sants role
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Former Prudential Group chief executive Mark Tucker and former Prudential UK chief executive Nick Prettejohn have both been tipped as possible candidates to replace Hector Sants as FSA chief executive.
Possible internal candidates include FSA managing director of supervision Jon Pain and managing director of the risk business unit Sally Dewar.
Lansons public affairs director Ralph Jackson says the FSA may be looking for a chief executive that has experience away from the banking sector.
He says: “Given what has happened, an investment banking background is not exactly advantageous in respect of the FSA and therefore another sector may provide a more likely candidate, like insurance, for example.”
Jackson believes that Tucker may be considered for the role. Tucker left Prudential in September 2009 and is a non-executive director at the Bank of England, alongside FSA chairman Lord Adair Turner.
Jackson adds: “Anyone appointing a new, hard-hitting head of the FSA does not want to know they have come from a sector that has not been perceived to have been regulated effectively.”
Lansons director of regulatory consulting Richard Hobbs tips Tucker’s former Pru colleague Nick Prettejohn as a “stand-out” candidate. Prettejohn also left Pru in 2009 and sat on the Financial Services Practitioner Panel.
He is a member of Chancellor George Osborne’s advisory implementation team, which will consider a new regulatory structure for UK financial services.
Hobbs says: “Prettejohn’s credentials for the role are exceptionally good but he has got to want the challenge of a job that keeps you awake at night and does not pay very well.”
Like Jackson, Hobbs believes the Treasury may be wary of appointing an ex-banker to the role because of the “simplistic political argument that they got us into this mess in the first place”.
Possible successors to Hector Sants
Nick Prettejohn
Prettejohn is a member of Chancellor George Osborne’s advisory implementation team, which is tasked with restructuring financial regulation in the UK. He was Prudential UK chief executive from January 2006 to September 2009. He was formerly chief executive of Lloyd’s of London, a director of private equity fund Apax Partners and is an honorary fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute.
Mark Tucker
Tucker is a non-executive director at the Bank of England. He was Prudential Group chief executive from May 2005 to September 2009. Following a stint as group finance director at HBOS, he held the role of executive director of Pru from 1999 to 2003 and chief executive of Prudential Corporation Asia from 1993 to 2003. Tucker is a chartered accountant.
Jon Pain
Pain joined the FSA in September 2008 as managing director of the retail markets business unit and became managing director of supervision in October 2009. Pain was previously Lloyds TSB managing director of Cheltenham and Gloucester, and managing director of the group’s general insurance business and private banking and stockbroking business. He was chairman of the Council of Mortgage Lenders in 2006 and 2007.
Sally Dewar
Dewar has been a managing director at the FSA since January 2008, initially of the wholesale business unit and most recently of the risk business unit. She was formerly the head of primary markets in the markets division at the regulator after working at the London Stock Exchange’s Listing Authority.
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Readers' comments (2)
Evan Owen - IFA Defence Union (for now) | 20 May 2010 10:57 am
Does the FSA have any say in who is appointed to the Board?
HM Treasury appoints ALL board members and I hope the new government thinks carefully about appointing bankers, McKinsey people or followers of Opus Dei for that matter.
Having met Hector I can with confidence claim that his grasp of what goes on at ground zero is, er.. ZERO.
Wholesale reform of the FSA is required and adding another banker to the thousands of bankers who already have their feet under those fancy desks is not my idea of reform.
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Mike H | 21 May 2010 2:45 pm
Shouldn't the appointment be on the basis of ability? If there's an experienced banker who kept a steady ship and avoided the mistakes of the lunatic brigade (and who therefore knows what to look out for) then why preclude him/her on the basis of not wanting to upset the baying mob that says all things banking should be pilloried.
Like it or not banking is an essential part of our economy, and will remain so, and can best be regulated effectively by those who understand it ( who aren't necessarily those who can distance themselves furrthest from it) If as is said above Hector Sants didn't understand it why propose to get another amatuer on board?
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