StanChart Singapore on the hunt for new CEO

Singapore

STANDARD Chartered is on the search for a new Singapore CEO, with the current head Judy Hsu promoted to a regional role. The bank said on Tuesday that Ms Hsu will take over responsibility for the Asean and South Asia region fully by the fourth quarter of 2018.

The current regional CEO for Asean and South Asia Anna Marrs will relinquish the role, but retain her position as CEO of commercial banking and private banking and wealth management.

Ms Marrs will transfer her regional CEO responsibilities in two stages between now and the fourth quarter of 2018 to Ms Hsu. To manage the transition, Ms Hsu will take on additional responsibility for Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as join the group management team, both with immediate effect.

Ms Marrs had taken on the role in late 2016, after its then-regional CEO regional for Asean and South Asia Ajay Kanwal resigned over standards of disclosures to do with "personal investments" that he no longer owned.

Mr Kanwal, who was appointed to the newly created role in October 2015, resigned with immediate effect. The bank told The Business Times then that the apparent lapse in disclosure was not a legal or regulatory breach.

Ms Hsu was appointed as head of the Singapore franchise in late 2015, after running the bank's global wealth management unit for about six years.

In an interview with The Business Times this year, she said that StanChart Singapore had secured a big chunk of the investment deployed by global CEO Bill Winters.

A five-year plan designed together with Boston Consulting Group demonstrated to the global management that the Singapore operations still had room to grow through a retail franchise that had to be digitised, and via investments in the commercial banking business.

She was also open about how the bank had been hit by a risk averse culture in the midst of the bank's restructuring. "We instruct, instruct, instruct. And then, when we instruct, how come things go wrong? And then we realised, people didn't understand the spirit behind it," she said earlier this year.

"The billions of dollars of fines have made banks quite scared of violations of any of these rules. Conduct is a big agenda, but because of that, we've written so many rules and processes. And nobody needs to think, they just do. But that's quite scary, because not every situation can be written down as how to behave, or how to act, how to solve the problem."

StanChart is a UK bank, but derives a significant amount of its income from the emerging markets, and has global operations based out of Singapore. Business out of Asean and South Asia made up close to 30 per cent of the group's income in 2015.