One of the storied institutions of British banking is closing after 160 years. HSBC’s International Manager programme is a victim of cost-cutting by the bank’s newish chief executive, Georges Elhedery.
Created when Britain ruled the waves, the scheme took raw recruits and forged them into a close-knit group of managers who would go on to run the bank’s global operations from Riyadh to Shanghai.
They would typically spend their careers at the bank. Some would end up in the top leadership jobs, such as recent CEOs Stuart Gulliver and John Flint. International managers had to be willing to move halfway round the world at a day’s notice for a new posting.
A Euromoney profile from 1997 called it the “financial world’s most idiosyncratic and powerful network”. Until not so long ago, members of the programme had to ask the bank’s chairman for permission to get married.
The typical recruit was a solid public schoolboy with a fondness for rugby. Until the early 1980s, it was a source of pride at the bank that none of its leaders had been to university. Women were not allowed to join the programme until 1989, a modernising change that enabled the scheme to live on decades longer than it might have done.
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When Gulliver was CEO from 2010-18, it was said that you could predict appointments to the executive committee by who was with him in Hong Kong when he did the programme.
Elhedery, who joined the bank from Goldman Sachs in his 30s, presumably hopes that closing it sends a message that he will be ruthless in changing the bank’s culture to make it more competitive.
Had Gulliver been appointed to fill the recent vacancy as chairman, as many HSBC insiders hoped, perhaps the programme would have lived on.
Photograph by Paul Yeung/Bloomberg via Getty Images