Further boardroom upheaval is underway at Barclays where the chairman of the insurer Standard Life, Sir Gerry Grimstone, is to become the most senior non-executive director at the bank.
Grimstone will take up the role of deputy chairman at Barclays on 1 January and will become the senior independent director, a key contact for investors.
He replaces Sir Michael Rake, who has been on the board for eight years and played a role in ousting the chief executive, Antony Jenkins, in July. Rake’s departure from the Barclays board was delayed by the hiatus over the chief executive and he will now leave at the end of December to focus on chairing Worldpay, the payments service floated on the stock market in October.
Grimstone will arrive a month after Jenkins’s replacement, Jes Staley, takes on the chief executive role, for which he is receiving up to £8m a year and shares worth about £2m to buy him out of bonuses at the US bank JP Morgan. Staley’s appointment means that John McFarlane can revert to his role as chairman after he temporarily took over the day-to-day running of the bank.
At the bank’s annual meeting in April 2014, the fund management arm of Standard Life had led protests about the size of bonuses being paid out.
Grimstone, who has spent much of his career at the financial firm Schroders, is also a non-executive director at the accountants Deloitte and the lead non-executive at the Ministry of Defence. He is also an adviser to the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, one of the largest commercial banks in Abu Dhabi. He intends to remain chairman of Standard Life.
Crawford Gillies, a Standard Life non-executive director, already sits on the Barclays board although he is leaving the insurer next year.
McFarlane said: “Sir Gerry commands great respect within the financial services industry and will bring immense experience, integrity and knowledge to the role.”
