ULSTER BANK is to appoint New Zealand banker James Brown, who works for the lender’s parent Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), to replace Cormac McCarthy as chief executive of the bank.
Mr Brown is chief executive of retail and commercial markets at RBS Asia. He will join Ulster Bank next month. Mr McCarthy will leave the bank at the end of May after announcing his decision to step down last July.
The appointment of Mr Brown is expected to be announced to staff shortly, possibly as early as today. A spokeswoman for Ulster Bank declined to comment.
Mr Brown previously worked for US group Citibank and Dutch bank ABN Amro before joining RBS. His appointment at Ulster Bank, Ireland’s third largest full service bank, will be his first stint in banking in Europe.
His experience in banking is seen as a refocusing of Ulster Bank towards more traditional retail and commercial banking, and away from corporate lending, an area that was responsible for the bank’s heavy losses on property.
Mr Brown will report to Brian Hartzer, who runs the RBS division which covers the UK retail business and Ulster Bank.
The Irish bank has undergone significant restructuring and cost-cutting over the past two years, with staff cut by 1,000 to 6,200.
It has closed 45 branches and moved 15 former First Active branches into Ulster Bank.
Mr McCarthy took charge of First Active in 2000, and was appointed head of Ulster Bank after RBS acquired First Active for €887 million in 2004.
He oversaw the growth of the bank to become one of Ireland’s largest mortgage banks and a significant lender to the commercial property and development sector.
Among the candidates who were in the running to replace Mr McCarthy was Robert Gallagher, Ulster Bank’s chief executive of corporate markets, who is to continue in that role at the bank.
Ulster Bank appointed a new chief financial officer, Charles McManus, this month to replace Senan Murphy, who held the role of chief operating officer with responsibility for finance.
Mr Murphy left to pursue other business opportunities.
RBS, which is 83 per cent owned by the UK government, has split Ulster Bank into a core business with loans of £36 billion, comprising mortgages, commercial and personal loans, and a non-core business of £15 billion of loans to be run down over time. The non-core division includes £9 billion of property development loans.
Ulster Bank (which reports its figures in sterling) made a loss of £761 million in its core business in 2010, almost double the previous year’s figure. The lender took a bad debt charge of £3.8 billion on total loans of £51 billion in both the core and non-core divisions.
