Risk tackler
A banker who'd save banking from itself, StanChart's Bill Winters says the bank is at an inflexion point.
IT'S not often that you meet a chief executive so open in chastising his own industry, one in which he rose through the ranks. And yet, listening to Bill Winters, chief executive of Standard Chartered (StanChart), it is plain that beneath his criticism of bad practices are some solid insights on risk in banking. It also explains why he was picked, two years ago, to run a bank that had lost its way with its high-risk businesses, and is being steered back on course.
"In some ways, it's easy to tell when you've got a bad risk culture," Mr Winters tells The Business Times during a recent visit to Singapore. "An unhealthy risk culture is one where the frontline sees it as its job just to push for yes, push for yes, push for yes, until somebody says no, and then you back off. That happens. And I imagine there was some of that at Standard Chartered before, where the frontline just pushed and pushed and pushed."
The 56-year-old banker harks back to his time at JP Morgan, where he spent more than two decades, beginning at what was then known as Morgan Guaranty Trust, a "100 per cent client-centric bank".
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