HSBC’s chief executive, Noel Quinn, is seen by many as ending his five-year tenure on a high note. The 62-year-old stunned the banking world this week by saying he planned to retire after an “intense” five years in the role to get a better work-life balance.
Quinn has slimmed down a sprawling global bank, paid out $19bn (£15bn) to shareholders last year and successfully staved off calls to break up the lender.
But Quinn’s fans were clearly not in attendance at HSBC’s annual meeting in London on Friday, where angry pensioners heckled bosses for clawing back their retirement payments and campaigners pushed bosses on climate commitments.
On the sidelines, shareholders such as Geoff Gaskin said that Quinn had “done well as far as the dividend is concerned”, while another conceded that HSBC “couldn’t make money by acting on principles alone”.
Their hopes for Quinn’s successor? Perhaps a more dynamic leader to take his place. “He’s no Jamie Dimon,” another shareholder of 20 years, John Threlfall, said of Birmingham-born Quinn.
But HSBC is no JP Morgan. And if there is one thing that bankers and investors can agree on, it is that helming a bank such as HSBC is not for the faint of heart.
Headquartered in London, but making the bulk of its profits in China, the 159-year-old bank has always had to tread a fine political line between east and west. That tightrope walk will get exponentially harder if Donald Trump returns to the White House and imposes new sanctions on China.
It will need to be someone who possesses “a really, deep emotional intelligence … someone who understands the reality of managing geopolitical risks, while still coming back to its core: someone who understands how a bank works,” one former adviser to HSBC bosses said.
They will also have to be a seasoned crisis manager such as Quinn, who launched his career at the UK’s Midland Bank, before its takeover by HSBC in 1992. “Starting off your career at a tough time means that when you get into a cycle of complexity in business … those formative experiences help you have discipline and an understanding of how things work,” they said.
It helped Quinn win over a tough chairman, his board, as well as the respect of staff. Having worked as a commercial banker, colleagues say he truly understood relationship banking and cross-border finance, key functions for a bank such as HSBC.
In August 2019, after more than three decades at the bank, the father of three was thrown into the chief executive role, initially on an interim basis, after the surprise departure of John Flint. His predecessor resigned just 18 months into the job amid tense disagreements with chairman Mark Tucker.
It put Quinn in a challenging position: parachuted in to lead one of the world’s largest lenders under a chairman whose tough and domineering reputation preceded him, while knowing he was not Tucker’s first choice for the permanent job. One banker, for example, recounts a story of colleagues entering a meeting room to find Tucker – a former trainee professional footballer – holding someone in what appeared to be a friendly headlock. Chief financial officer Ewan Stevenson also quit in 2022, when it was made clear that Tucker did not see him taking the top job anytime soon.
Tucker was at pains to state that Quinn’s exit is amicable, saying the “only point of difference” between them was their respective football club allegiances. But a source said Quinn’s departure was at odds with his recent message to staff that he would stay for a few more years, and pointed to boardroom tension around HSBC’s results in February, when profits and shares plunged on a $3bn write down in China.
Tucker was the first outsider to chair HSBC, having previously led Asia-focused insurer Prudential in the late 2000s. Some suggest the gruff approach was Tucker’s way of getting a handle on a bank that for years picked its leaders internally, with entrenched internal hierarchies and bureaucracies.
Tucker quickly got his way, persuading Quinn into an ambitious cost-cutting agenda involving about 35,000 job losses – something that Flint is rumoured to have opposed.
Meanwhile, Quinn was forced to navigate growing geopolitical tension, just as Beijing started to tighten its grip on Hong Kong.
Matters escalated when HSBC bosses controversially accepted China’s authoritarian crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong in 2020. Quinn was soon expertly dodging questions from US and British politicians over HSBC’s willingness to work with an increasingly authoritarian Beijing.
Critics say Quinn was “diplomatic to the point of being ineffectual, trying to please everyone while pleasing nobody,” said Andrew Harper, chief responsibility officer of HSBC investor Epworth Investment, which holds £7.7m in shares.
By then, the Covid pandemic was in full swing, stifling dealmaking and pushing interest rates to record lows. UK regulators forced HSBC to cancel dividends, infuriating Asian investors. It prompted calls from HSBC’s top investor Ping An to break up the business and spin off its more profitable Asian operations to boost returns to shareholders.
HSBC resisted, but Quinn got to work: accelerating a pivot towards Asia while selling off less profitable retail operations in western countries such as France and the US. Quinn and Tucker eventually won the war with Ping An, but split opinion along the way.
One senior banker, who has worked closely with HSBC bosses, said pulling bank capital out of western democracies and into China was one “obvious misstep”. “It’s not just the Hong Kong crackdown. It’s the way [Chinese president] Xi [JinPing] is becoming increasingly authoritarian in terms of the domestic economy in China, and continues to demonstrate that if you put capital in China, it’s not really yours.”
Meanwhile, Quinn’s sold the US and French retail bank before interest rates spiked. He “got the least possible value, and sold at the absolute bottom. This is why the share price is below where it was when Tucker took over as chair seven years ago,” they said.
HSBC shares were trading around 706p on Friday, down from 737p when Tucker joined in October 2017.
“It’ll be fascinating to see who they get next. It’s one of the most consequential jobs, and definitely not the easiest,” one former adviser said.
But with Tucker’s time running out as chair, he will want someone willing to take directions, but also step up when he departs. The finance chief, Georges Elhedery, and Nuno Matos, the head of the wealth management operation, are viewed as leading contenders. Former HSBC executives, including Lloyds Banking Group boss Charlie Nunn and BlackRock vice-chairman Mark McCombe, have also been named as potential runners.
“He’ll want someone who’s willing to be the ‘number two’ executive in the institution,” a senior banker said. “I suspect he’ll also be yearning for a star banker, but I’m not sure you’re going to get the combination of the two.”
