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Barclays has turned to John McFarlane to rebuild its relationship with shareholders, appointing the Scottish-born banker as its chairman.
McFarlane replaces Sir David Walker, who was parachuted into the bank during the Libor rigging crisis in 2012. The appointment triggered boardroom changes at the other companies McFarlane chaired, including the insurer Aviva.
A high-profile figure in Australian banking circles in the runup to the banking crisis, McFarlane was picked by Aviva to shore up its reputation during the 2012 shareholder spring. The insurer has now replaced the 67-year-old with City veteran Sir Adrian Montague.
McFarlane will join the board of Barclays as a non-executive director on a £250,000 annual fee – becoming the bank's highest paid non-executive – and step up as chairman after the annual meeting in 2015, when his annual fee will rise to £800,000, including a £100,000 allotment of shares in the bank.
He joins Barclays following the row about pay earlier in year, when the bank's chief executive, Antony Jenkins, tried to justify a 32% rise in the bonus pool despite a 10% fall in profits by warning of a "death spiral" of staff leaving unless they were paid more.
Walker, who is now 74, had made clear when he took the chairman role during the height of the Libor rigging crisis that he would stay for no more than three years.
"Under Sir David's leadership Barclays has made significant progress in putting in place the foundations for sustainable, long-term success. I am very excited to be asked to chair Barclays as it enters the next, important stage of its long history," said McFarlane.
McFarlane, who used to be in a skiffle band and now grow his own olives in Provence, told Reuters last year that there were "probably less than a dozen individuals globally" that had the experience to chair banks. "I do think that a chairman of a bank should ideally have relevant banking experience because of the complexity involved," he said.
About the same time he told the Evening Standard he was not ready to go. "I've only been here two years; I've got to see this through … There is no way on earth I could conceive of chairing a bank. It is just not possible," he said.
Until he stepped in to stablise Aviva following the ousting of chief executive Andrew Moss during a shareholder revolt in 2012, McFarlane was best known in the City for his tenure on the board of Royal Bank of Scotland.
He joined RBS two weeks before its bailout by the taxpayer and the departure of the chief executive Fred Goodwin. When asked about this at an Aviva shareholder meeting, McFarlane said: "Hopefully I was helpful in the recovery of RBS and I'm certainly not guilty for its demise … I was slightly instrumental in the change of the chief executive."
He was at the helm of ANZ – Australia and New Zealand Banking Group– for a decade until September 2007. He has also been an executive director of Standard Chartered and was head of Citibank in the UK and Ireland.
At Aviva, he was took day-to-day charge of the insurer when he was the incoming chairman to stabilise the business after Moss's removal.
The insurer said on Friday that it had been "made aware some time ago" that McFarlane could leave and immediately named his replacement as Montague, a serial boardroom director.
Montague, who is chairman of 3i Group, non-executive chairman of Anglian Water, non-executive director of two Swedish companies, chairman of charitable trust the Point of Care Foundation and non-executive chairman of Manchester Airports Group, will step up from Aviva's April annual meeting.
McFarlane also chaired Scottish-based bus and train operator FirstGroup, which said senior independent director Drummond Hall had begun the process to find his replacement.
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