(Bloomberg) -- The clock strikes 5 a.m. in New York and the calls and emails start dribbling in to managers across HSBC Holdings Plc’s sprawling businesses.
A junior corporate finance employee receives a missive thanking him for his digest of the advisory mandates the bank was pitching on. A high level executive is asked to produce a detailed breakdown on staff attrition data within a division of the institution.
It sounds like business as usual at a large global bank — but what makes the messages unusual is their sender: It’s not the chief executive officer, but Mark Tucker, the 66-year-old chairman of HSBC who’s spent years establishing himself as the unquestioned power at the heart of Europe’s largest financial group.
Tucker has even managed this feat while living in New York — not the obvious location for the hands-on chairman of a London-based institution with a heavy Asia focus — but it’s where he often starts his days tapping out emails and phoning staff across the business while on his daily morning walks.
Executives have had to get used to this hands-on approach over the past seven years, even if some have found it uncomfortable, and unusual for a chairman.
Tucker has been the one consistent presence at the top of HSBC during a turbulent period. He’s outlasted both of the chief executives he hired — one left after just 18 months – and is now hunting for someone to succeed Noel Quinn, who unexpectedly announced in April that he would step down.
That appointee will be the fourth CEO of Tucker’s chairmanship.
With just weeks to go before Tucker and the rest of the board are expected to announce who will lead one of the most systemically important banks on the planet, this search gives the chairman another chance to leave his mark on the lender before 2026. That’s when he’ll hit nine years heading the board, the maximum length of service recommended by the UK’s Corporate Governance Code.
The bank is looking at internal and external candidates, with Chief Financial Officer Georges Elhedery and global wealth and personal banking head Nuno Matos seen among the frontrunners.
The following article is based on interviews with several current and former HSBC executives and directors, as well as people who’ve worked with Tucker over the years. Tucker declined to provide a comment for this story through a spokeswoman for the bank. HSBC also declined to comment.
Tucker joined HSBC in September 2017 as chairman designate and formally took up the post a month later.
At the time, the bank was in the midst of a major restructuring and an effort to put behind it a legacy of compliance and misconduct issues.
On his watch, the bank has trimmed thousands of jobs, sold off businesses and pivoted hard toward Asia’s swelling middle classes. It’s also had to navigate an increasingly fractious China-US relationship, deal with controversy in Hong Kong as well as a fend off pressure from a major Chinese shareholder.
The share-price performance has been underwhelming in that time, with the stock down more than 8% since he took over.
But profit hit a record in 2023 – helped by higher interest rates – and return on equity is double what it was when he took over.
And HSBC is on a charm offensive with shareholders, who are getting a special dividend funded by the sale of the bank’s Canadian business, as well as a $3 billion buyback. The shares, which have been on a broadly upward trend after the Covid mauling of 2020, have gained about 6% this year.
Knighted
Tucker, once an aspiring professional footballer, has spent four decades in the financial industry, much of it based in Hong Kong. He previously led insurers Prudential Plc and AIA Group Ltd. and was awarded a knighthood last month for services to the economy.
Much praise for Tucker is very much focused on his skills as an operations manager rather than a big-picture visionary. Some of those who’ve worked with him say his strategic thinking has at times been lacking.
But both critics and friends cite his phenomenal appetite for work, and stories are legion of his attention to detail. Emails are forensic in their dissection of performance and strategy. One former manager remembers sending Tucker the agenda for an informal meeting only to have it returned minutes later reordered.
Peers like Jayne-Anne Gadhia, former CEO of Virgin Money, laud his dedication to the job and say he's a “great connection” between Asia and the UK.
As is often the case with figures that have risen to the top of their industries, his toughness comes with a large side of charm and an ability to cultivate important relationships with the right people. One former executive remembers that whenever he would meet with billionaires and politicians across the world, one of the first questions he would be asked was, “How is Mark?”
Almost everyone the executive met appeared to know HSBC’s chairman well and would cite a recent conversation they’d had, discussing anything from the global economy to Chelsea football club, Tucker’s favorite team.
Asia Strategy
At HSBC, Tucker has personally overseen a series of reviews to better manage relations between a complicated network of subsidiaries that all operate with their own separate boards and executive teams, and played a central role in the bank’s Asian plans since it stepped up its push again in early 2021.
Tucker’s presence has been particularly important when it comes to dealing with Hong Kong and the mainland Chinese government. The value of his connections helped defuse events that at times became serious threats to the company.
In late 2019, during pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and controversy over HSBC’s role in the U.S. prosecution of Huawei Technologies Co., Tucker went on China Central Television, saying he looked forward to being part of a “peaceful and prosperous Hong Kong and clearly supporting China’s growth and development.”
Covid was the trigger for other troubles, when financial authorities called on major British lenders in 2020 to cancel dividends. For HSBC’s large and loyal Hong Kong investor base, this was seen as an unthinkable betrayal.
So reliable were HSBC dividends, they were seen as a fact of life, a regular multi-billion dollar thank you.
Behind the scenes, the chairman worked to calm things, explaining to clients and the authorities that the situation was not one of the bank’s making.
One person familiar with the matter said Tucker’s status as a long-time Hong Kong resident who had run two of the city’s largest insurance businesses was vital to these talks.
His local insights once again came into play in the next crisis.
Ping An Insurance Group Co. of China had become one of HSBC’s largest shareholders around the time of his appointment as chairman. It was both a clear endorsement of Tucker’s reputation and also spoke to the professional respect shared between Tucker and Ping An’s chairman and founder, Peter Ma, who had known each other for decades.
But Ping An turned activist in 2022 with a campaign to break up the bank and list its Asia operations separately. HSBC was blindsided, but quickly established an internal defense team with Tucker as a central figure.
During the battle, Tucker helped put to bed fears that the campaign had been orchestrated by the Chinese government, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
Speaking with his Hong Kong and Chinese contacts, it was Tucker who established that there was no wider political motivation. Crucially, that allowed the bank to treat Ping An as a conventional activist investor rather than having to worry about offending China with too aggressive a defense.
That was vital for HSBC, which had just unveiled a reset with a focus on Asia.
“A key element in his leadership is a certain uprightness when making decisions, doing what is right rather than what is expedient,” said George Yeo, a former Singapore minister who served on AIA’s board when Tucker was CEO. “He never took the conventional western view of China which is mostly negative. His view is much more balanced.”
Previous HSBC CEOs had pushed variations of the Asia strategy, but it took on a new lease of life with Tucker. While Quinn and his executive team drove the plan, it was developed under Tucker’s guidance, and has echoes of his strategies when he ran AIA and Prudential.
HSBC’s total invested assets stand at about $1.2 trillion, of which a little under half are held through its Asian arm. More than 50% of worldwide wealth management revenues come from the region. In the first quarter, 70% of its $27 billion net new invested assets were in Asia.
Like other banks, HSBC has slowed and in some areas frozen hiring in recent months amid expectations that falling interest rates will dampen profitability. That said, publicly it remains bullish. It’s opened a new US headquarters, highlighting renewed ambition to compete more aggressively in the world’s largest economy.
Joseph Dickerson, head of banks research at Jefferies in London, says HSBC’s share-price performance is an issue, but reckons Tucker has been reasonably successful, given the reorganization that was needed and the impact of the pandemic.
“There was a job to get the business in a much better place, and there’s also been streamlining,” he said. “I wouldn’t pin it all on him, but clearly the activist investor had a point. They’re probably on the right track now.”
CEO Decision
The pressing management question now is whether Tucker and the board choose a CEO to keep executing the current direction, or whether there’s an opportunity to refresh things.
Speaking in April, Quinn said his decision to leave had come at a “natural inflection for the bank as it comes to the end of its transformation phase.”
Once Quinn's successor is named, the focus will turn to Tucker, and who replaces him in 2026.
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