Lloyds executioner with a talent for mimicking Ferraris

November 13th, 2010

Mark Fisher, the low-profile “blustery Yorkshireman” and petrol-head, who was renowned for his ability to imitate the sound of a revving Ferrari when serving as henchman to Sir Fred Goodwin at the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2000-09, has fired more people than perhaps anyone else in history.

As Nils Pratley explained a couple of weeks ago in his Guardian column:-

He was Sir Fred Goodwin’s shredder-in-chief at Royal Bank of Scotland, where he produced the savings from NatWest that earned his boss his nickname. Now he is director of operations at Lloyds Banking Group, where another 4,500 jobs were lost. That makes 22,000 since the takeover of HBOS in January last year. True, only half the cuts have been secured via redundancies. But the cull may not yet be over. The three-year integration plan runs until the end of next year. Is anybody keeping count? Fisher must have passed 35,000 by now.

Given these numbers it is perhaps understandable that Fisher — who must be smarting that Lloyds Banking Group appointed Portuguese-born António Horta-Osório over his head as Eric Daniels’ successor — isn’t too popular inside Lloyds/HBOS right now.

Having crawled from the wreckage of RBS/ABN Amro in March 2009, with his swag bag intact, Fisher joined Lloyds Banking Group as head of IT and operations with a brief to axe circa 30,000-40,000 people, oversee the HBOS integration and merge IT systems in the hope of giving the Lloyds/HBOS deal some semblance of commercial sense.

Yet, even though Lloyds would probably not exist were it not for continued government support (it is 42% state-owned and is dependent on £132bn of state-subsidized funding from the Bank of England’s special liquidity scheme and related schemes), Fisher seems to harbour nothing but hatred for Britain!

A Lloyds Banking Group insider (who has just left an intriguing ‘comment’ on my earlier Sunday Herald article about Fisher) said:-

I work for Lloyds Banking Group and was present at a meeting when Fisher, who likes to be known for his brutal honestly, stood in front of an IT audience and told them how it is.

“Why are we offshoring so much of our work to India?” he was asked. His answer? “Because this country’s education system is run-down and unable to produce the calibre of people we need. India’s education system is far superior to ours and, since we started outsourcing, the quality of the code has been impeccable. We are a run-down nation with poorly educated students unable to deliver to the standards the bank needs.”

Now, if he had said that it is cheaper to outsource to India, then I might have understood him (though not agreed with him). His tirade against the people and the standards of this country was hard to stomach.

“What about splitting up the bank?” asked another colleague. Mark Fisher replied: “They’re unable to do that as we do not have sufficient people with the ability to run the banks.”

Wow! I wonder what made the big, blustery Yorkshireman so full of himself, and yet negative about the talent that is to be found in the country that bailed out his bank?

On another note, it seems that Fisher’s reputation as a bank integrator par excellence doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. While RBS executive John White is recognised as having done a superb job in shifting NatWest onto the RBS IT platform following RBS’s £21bn acquisition of National Westminster in 2000, there are many who now admit that, all-in-all, the RBS/NatWest was a bit of a botched job.

I spoke to a senior banker the other day who said:-

The reality of the NatWest takeover and integration [on which both Goodwin and Fisher made their names] was that they were not a success at all. Okay, they did were a few, very cheap things. But despite all the hyperbole in places like the Harvard Business Review, the fundamental integration was a failure. There are still basically two distinct banks, with two administrative systems.

One senior ex-RBS insider believes the reasons the acquisition and integration came to be perceived as a success included:-

• RBS spin: Before announcing its hostile bid for NatWest in Nov. 1999, RBS shares were trading at £21. Thanks to the “winner’s curse” they sank below £8 by Feb. 2000, when it won the takeover battle. The bank misleadingly took this as the starting point when measuring subsequent share price performance. RBS shares only fleetingly rose above £21 — their price before the NatWest bid was announced — between March 2000 and the bank’s October 2008 collapse.
• The willingness of the UK media and investment analytical community to peddle the myth: One of the worst culprits was Harvard Business Review, for example in its “Royal Bank of Scotland: Masters of Integration,” panegyric to Fred and Fisher, published in 2003.
• The lack of competition in the UK banking market, coupled with the patience and inertia of British consumers, also played a part.

Hmm, all most intriguing.

I am doubly interested in Mr. Fisher right now since, while the Yorkshireman was serving as Amsterdam-based chairman of ABN Amro in 2007-08, and even as the bank was collapsing about his ears, I’m told he prioritized feathering his own nest — ensuring his bonus, incentive plan, perks and pension were in order and the like — over ensuring that long-standing ABN Amro customers were looked after or treated fairly.

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Posted by Ian Fraser on Nov 13 2010. Filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry