HSBC Holdings said the head of its wealth unit, chief operating officer and head of human resources are departing in the first major shakeup since Georges Elhedery was named as chief executive last month.
Nuno Matos, who was a contender for the CEO role, is exiting after nine years, the London-based group said Thursday. He quickly rose through the ranks of the lender to eventually run its wealth and personal banking divisions, which generate about 40% of the bank's revenues. Matos will be replaced by Barry O'Byrne, who now leads HSBC's global commercial banking business.
Also departing are Elaine Arden, group chief human resources officer, and John Hinshaw, group chief operating officer. Arden will be replaced by Aileen Taylor, group company secretary, while Hinshaw's role will be split between two executives, the bank said.
The makeover comes just days before Elhedery is set to take over the reins of Europe's largest bank from CEO Noel Quinn, who unexpectedly announced in April that he was retiring after almost five years on the job. Separately, Elhedery is considering plans to remove layers of middle management, mirroring similar changes undertaken by rivals Citigroup and Standard Chartered, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday.
As part of the deliberations, HSBC could cut the number of country heads operating across its worldwide network, people familiar with the discussions said. Elhedery is also likely to make changes to the executives and roles that will report to him after he takes the helm on Sept. 2, they said.
It's unclear how many roles might be affected by any restructuring that Elhedery undertakes, and the deliberations are at very early stages and his plans to streamline operations may still change, the people said.
Under Quinn and his predecessors, HSBC has already been dramatically reshaped, with 50,000 jobs cut in the last decade. Executives have said much of the remaining work to streamline the lender is about fine-tuning its organization rather than further reductions.
As central banks around the world start cutting interest rates, global banks including HSBC have been seeking to rein in costs, as lower borrowing costs threaten to narrow their profit margins. In recent months, HSBC has started to slow hiring and asked bankers to be more judicious about their travel and entertainment spending, Bloomberg News has reported previously.
The departure of Matos, 56, will see HSBC lose one of its most high-profile executives, who frequently posted on LinkedIn highlighting initiatives at the bank. He will support O'Byrne in an advisory capacity through 2024 and will leave the group next year after a period of gardening leave, HSBC said.
Matos was seen as a strong candidate for the CEO role, having received a series of promotions that propelled the former Banco Santander executive from CEO of HSBC's Mexican business to head of its largest division. The Portuguese native also relocated from London to Hong Kong as part of the bank's focus on Asia.
The search process to name the next CEO, helmed by Chairman Mark Tucker, involved the screening of internal and external candidates. Ultimately Matos lost out to Elhedery, who was widely seen as the favorite for the top job given his experience both as chief financial officer and co-head of global banking and markets.
"It seems like natural succession," said Rupak Ghose, an independent analyst. "It gives room for the new CEO to bring in a new team."
Matos joined HSBC in 2015, jumping from one senior post to another as he set his sights on the CEO role. For about four years, he ran HSBC's business across Mexico. His time at Banco Santander saw him serve in various roles in different countries starting 1994, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also had a stint as an analyst at Portugal's central bank.
In recent years, Matos was the driving force behind several initiatives from HSBC to take on a raft of fintechs that have attempted to displace mainstream financial institutions. Most recently, he launched Zing, an in-house foreign exchange payments service open to non-HSBC customers, aimed at challenging the likes of Wise and Revolut.
As CEO of HSBC's wealth and personal banking division, Matos has been directly involved in most of the bank's bolt-on acquisitions that have focused on bolstering wealth management in Asia. During his tenure, the bank bought wealth operations in India and Singapore, and recently, it completed the takeover of Citigroup's retail wealth portfolio in China.
