Which European banker will jump next?

The market is wondering who will be next after HSBC chief Michael Geoghegan becomes the fourth European banking boss to quit within a fortnight.

FT.com

Is it a coincidence that four of Europe's leading bank bosses have quit within a fortnight, or is there a pattern? And who will be next?

Those are the questions being whispered around the world's financial centres, after announcements that John Varley, Barclays chief executive, Stephen Green, HSBC chairman, Eric Daniels, Lloyds chief and Alessandro Profumo, UniCredit chief were all stepping down. Late on Thursday Michael Geoghegan, HSBC chief executive, looked poised to become the latest to leave.

Although the bosses have retired, resigned or been ousted in very different circumstances, there is a good deal of common ground with the departures. Most significantly, all of them have managed their banks through the financial crisis.

"Some bank bosses are feeling very tired and battered,” says Nick Woolf, a headhunter with Sainty Hird in London. "It isn't much fun being blamed for everything. It's been two years of absolute hell.”

While leaving as the ships were sinking, or while the battle to keep them afloat was ongoing, bailing out might have seemed like desertion. "The past three years have been such a time of crisis that it would have been very poor for someone to walk way,” says Daniel Davies, banks analyst at Credit Suisse. But now that the worst seems to be over, quitting seems acceptable.

Tiredness, everybody agrees, has been a factor in all of the recent departures – with the effect of managing groups through the crisis compounded by the populist "banker bashing” that has gone with it, especially in the UK over the City bonus culture.

Compounding that environment is the looming threat of another period of turmoil, this one brought on by the vast wave of new lawmaking and international regulations that is only now, two years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, being finalised.

Earlier in September, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision announced the details of the new capital and liquidity rules that will have to be adopted by the world's bank over the coming years.

Several countries around the world, including the US, UK, France and Germany have also imposed new bank taxes, while the US has passed the Dodd-Frank legislation restricting banks' activities.

In the UK, there is the added uncertainty over how the structure of the British banking sector could be overhauled. "It is no coincidence that most of these top banker departures are in Britain,” said one analyst.

The government appointed Commission on Banking will outline today its initial thinking on how to split lower-risk retail banking from higher-risk investment banking, and on limiting dominant market shares in retail banking. Both Daniels at Lloyds and Varley at Barclays have timed their departures so that it will be their successors who need to deal with this.

Given the relative stability of banks' top management, since the immediate post-crisis bloodletting two years ago, there is a widespread belief that the clutch of departures this month could herald a broader round of retirements and resignations.

Across Europe, Oswald Grbel, the chief executive brought in to fix UBS, may see his job as done within the next year or so. Long-standing Deutsche Bank chief Josef Ackermann, who was set to leave a few years ago but had his contract extended due to a boardroom disagreement over succession, is also expected to step aside in a similar time frame.

In the US, some people still question whether Brian Moynihan is the right man to unite Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Then there is Lloyd Blankfein, whose professional obituary has been written several times in years, most recently when the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with fraud.