In a business career of 40-plus years, Rick Haythornthwaite has never been a banker. The closest he’s come was a long stint as chairman of Mastercard – but that’s a payment processor, which is a different type of financial beast. His chief executive life was as an industrialist: Blue Circle cement and Invensys, as the old BTR engineering conglomerate was rebranded. And his long chairing tour has also taken in British Gas owner Centrica, Network Rail and, now, the AA and Ocado. He is therefore a surprise pick to be chairman of NatWest.
There are a couple of flops on that CV (Centrica was a place of lowered dividends and low expectations while he was in the chair), but Haythornthwaite still ticks the “experienced” and “safe” boxes, which was probably the priority for NatWest after the great Coutts/Nigel Farage fiasco. His Mastercard years, at least, were a period of runaway share price success.
And, having chaired a couple of reviews and commissions for government – one so long ago that Labour was in office – he should know the Westminster game, which helps when the state still owns 39% of the bank’s shares and the relationship is now rotten.
The most important point is that he is a big enough City and business figure to carry out the necessary overhaul of NatWest’s crew of non-executive directors. Change will surely have to be of the sweeping variety. The initial backing for chief executive Dame Alison Rose, after she admitted a “serious misjudgment” in briefing the BBC business editor (misleadingly) about Coutts’ reasons for dumping Farage, was one of the most baffling unanimous decisions taken by the board of a high-profile bank in years. Given the strictness of banking rules on client confidentiality, Rose’s position was plainly untenable, as most of the outside world recognised instantly.
Haythornthwaite has so many other non-executive gigs (at an Argentinian software company and a couple of fintechs) that he needs a few months to clear the decks. That means he won’t arrive at NatWest until January for a three-month warm-up, so Sir Howard Davies will stay as chairman until mid-April, which was roughly his plan A all along. Such a long goodbye looked unlikely in the aftermath of the board’s enforced middle-of-the-night U-turn (proceeding without backing from Downing Street was almost the weirdest part of the tale).
Still, there’s an upside in Davies hanging around. He will have to oversee the decision on what, if anything, Rose gets by way of financial compensation. The report on the whole Coutts affair by law firm Travers Smith is still being worked on and then the board will ponder.
So set your watch for the end of next month to hear the summary findings, plus the decision on Rose’s payout, which ain’t straightforward given the complexities with long-term incentives, staggered vesting periods and ambiguous malus and clawback clauses. Thus £2.4m is a rumoured figure. But the correct answer to the payout conundrum should be straightforward: as little as NatWest can legally get away with. Haythornthwaite will be glad to be spared that mess. Davies, one hopes, knows what’s expected this time.
