Changing of the guard at Lloyds Banking

Details of the much-heralded senior management shake-up at Lloyds Banking have been revealed, with the group adopting a structure that reduces the number of bosses reporting directly to Group Chief Executive Antnio Horta-Osrio to five.

Alison Brittain has bagged the newly created role of Group Director of Retail, with responsibility for the part-nationalised lender's retail division, which includes Lloyds TSB, Bank of Scotland and Halifax.

Antonio Lorenzo, who came over to Lloyds from Banco Santander shortly after Horta-Osrio made the same switch, remains as Group Director of Strategy and Wealth and International but will also undertake responsibility for Asset Finance which had formerly been a part of the Wholesale business.

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Truett Tate, Group Executive Director for Wholesale and one of the old guard at Lloyds, has decided to hang up his pin-stripe suit this month and retire. The group has begin a search for a permanent director of the group's Wholesale division, and will consider both internal and external candidates.

Keeping their current roles are John Maltby, who remains as Director of Commercial, continuing with his responsibility for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), and Toby Strauss, whose role remains unchanged as Director of the Group's Insurance division.

The bank said there will now be five control and support functions: Risk, Finance, Operations, Corporate Affairs and Group Corporate Functions.

The bosses of the first four divisions listed above will be, respectively, Juan Colombas (Chief Risk Officer), Tim Tookey (Group Finance Director), Mark Fisher (Director of Group Operations), and Matt Young (Group Corporate Affairs Director).

The group is still recruiting for the position of Group Corporate Functions director; he or she will have responsibility for the Human Resources, Legal & Secretariat and Group Audit units, and will be a member of the group Executive Committee.

The restructuring was prompted by a realisation that Horta-Osrio, who was head-hunted from Spanish banking giant Santander, was being swamped with work as a result of too many people reporting to him and, so it rumoured, a reluctance on his part to delegate.

The Portuguese workaholic had to take a sabbatical lasting several weeks at the end of 2011 because he was suffering from exhaustion.

"The changes to the group's senior management team ensure we have the right organisational structure to deliver on our strategy and move to the next phase of the group's transformation," Horta-Osrio claimed.

"By bringing together our community banks with product and marketing functions we will deliver better, more targeted customer propositions. By creating the position of Group Corporate Functions Director, we will be able to bring better focus on areas such as Human Resources, Legal and Secretariat and Group Audit which are essential to transforming the group," he added.

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