JUST WHO IS BILL WINTERS, THE NEW CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF STANDARD CHARTERED?

The American has had a relatively low profile over the past few years. But he is widely considered to be one of the best bankers of his generation.

Winters served as a member of the influential Independent Commission on Banking in the United Kingdom.

There are not many people that scare Jamie Dimon, the indomitable and outspoken boss of JPMorgan. But Bill Winters, who has just been appointed to replace Peter Sands as chief executive of Standard Chartered later this year, would appear to be one of them.

Until 2009 he was Dimon’s most trusted lieutenant, charged with running the financial behemoth’s rightly-renowned investment bank. Then, in September of that year, he promptly left. Why?

It certainly wasn’t poor performance. JPMorgan more than doubled its net investment banking profits in the previous quarter. Winters is also reputed to have one of the finest risk management brains in the industry and was widely credited with helping steer the US bank clear of the troubles that beset many rivals during the credit crunch.

Nor was it operational. Winters helped build JP Morgan’s investment bank into one of the best of the world and worked on the integration of Bear Stearns, which was bought at the height of the credit crunch, and Cazenove's corporate broking arm in the UK.

Nor had he engendered discontent among the troops. Winters received a standing ovation from the bank’s London trading floor on the day his departure was announced. The man who took his place described following Winters as “not hard: it’s impossible”.

Nor had Winters fallen foul of the regulators. Quite the opposite in fact. One of Winters’ last acts at JPMorgan was to bemoan the “greedy” and “inept” bankers and investors who helped cause the credit crunch.

This was not a person ripe for defenestration. The real reason he left, according to industry whispers, was that Dimon and Winters had a falling out and the younger man had to go.

Others have since mused on whether JPMorgan would have faced some of its subsequent problems – the “London Whale” trading losses, for example – had Winters still been around. Indeed, he is thought to have raised internal concerns that the bank’s Chief Investment Office, which incurred the losses, was running too much risk.

But what has Winters has been doing since 2009?

He's not been idle. First he served as a member of the influential Independent Commission on Banking which submitted its report to the Chancellor in September 2011.

That same year, the American, who has lived in London since 1992, set up Renshaw Bay, a commercial real estate and structured finance asset manager. It was launched in partnership with Lord Rothschild’s RIT Capital Partners among others.

He has also worked for a number of charities. He is on the board of the Young Vic theatre (for which he made this rather startling fund-raising video).

Winters has also been linked with almost every big banking job to become available since he left JPMorgan with one newspaper dubbing him “the perpetual bank CEO candidate”.

Now, one of those rumours has turned out to be true. So, how well will his experience have prepared Winters to run Standard Chartered?

On the minus side, he doesn’t have the deep relationships with potential clients in Asia and Africa that were Peter Sands’ main forte. His experience is also skewed to investment banking rather than commercial and retail banking, which are relatively more important at his new firm. In recent months Standard Chartered has been reversing its problematic foray into investment banking, announcing in January that it would close almost all of its equities business.

On the plus side, Winters' acute sense of risk will hopefully help Standard Chartered sort out some of the souring loans that have started to clog up the balance sheet. His management skill will be required to pep up a disparate global workforce that have been sapped by several years of demoralising bad news. His good relations with regulators and American nationality will hopefully help mend the bridges that Standard Chartered badly damaged by violating US sanctions on Iran and other countries.

One item most certainly off the agenda will be big M&A deals. Bankers have long mused that a potential tie-up between Standard Chartered and JPMorgan might be the last big game-changer in the financial industry. The strengths of the two banks – both in terms of the kinds of business they are good at and their geographical footprints – are almost perfectly complementary. But such a tie-up has long been unlikely; global regulators would not sanction the creation of the resulting financial gargantuan.

Now – with Dimon’s old adversary at the helm of Standard Chartered – the possibility looks even more distant.

The Telegraph