Advisory Chair — Operating Model and Recovery (Banking)

Decision rights built to outlast the people who agreed them

Decision rights are usually negotiated between particular individuals and quietly renegotiated whenever one of them leaves. The Advisory Chair's purpose, over 24 months with the Group Chief Executive Officer as reporting line, is to help this multinational banking subsidiary establish decision rights that survive changes in markets and in leadership. The seat is advisory: you counsel the people who decide, and your influence rests on the quality of that counsel rather than on any authority of your own.

Where the counsel is directed

You will help leadership agree how decisions are divided, including the thresholds that remain local, and advise on what information should steer investment, capacity and controls across markets. You will recommend which inherited commitments should go on, pause or end, and challenge proposals moving cost or risk where no one is accountable, as well as investment cases that omit take-up, dependencies or downside. Your counsel will also reach how leaders are organised, how issues escalate and how often they are reported, and you will help leadership and operating teams settle disagreements before resources are committed.

In a subsidiary, decision rights have a further layer: what the local entity decides, what the group decides, and what supervisors expect the local board to own regardless. Advice that ignores the third layer tends to be undone at the first supervisory review.

A two-year test of durability

Within the first ninety days you and the Group Chief Executive Officer should agree decision rights for leadership and markets, documented in a form that does not depend on who currently holds each role. Around month nine leadership should review how those rights have performed through whatever change has occurred, and close the gaps in how issues are escalated. By month 24 the operating model and its decision rights should have held through leadership change, and should stand without the Advisory Chair.

A senior banker who knows when local judgement should stay

You have run a banking or financial services business turning over $400 million or more, with 700 or more people in five countries, and you can distinguish local judgement that is necessary from variation that is merely inherited. Regulatory remediation is the experience most relevant, alongside professionalisation and cost transformation. Strategy formation is sought at level 4; at level 3, the role needs operating cadence, risk judgement and genuine ownership of a P&L. Your judgement should have been tested somewhere the business kept trading while authority moved between hands, and you should be in the habit of writing down the boundary between local and central decisions so that others can apply it after you have gone.

Group Chief Executive first, directors last

In week one the Group Chief Executive Officer holds the opening conversation privately, by video. The third week is a working session in which the Risk Committee Chair tests your thinking. Executive leaders from each function meet you as an in-person panel in the fifth week, after which the full board of directors closes things in the seventh week. Four working days after each, you receive a response in writing.