Lloyds Banking Group finance director Tim Tookey is to quit the partly state-owned British bank to join insurer Friends Life, continuing a series of high-profile management departures since the arrival of new Lloyds chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio at the beginning of the year.
Lloyds said yesterday that Tookey would remain with the company until the end of February and added that it had already begun looking for his successor.
Friends Life, which is a division of British insurance vehicle Resolution, said hiring Tookey would help it in its plans to return cash to investors.
Tookey’s departure follows that of former Lloyds retail banking head Helen Weir and insurance head Archie Kane, following Horta-Osorio’s arrival at the helm.
Canaccord Genuity analyst Cormac Leech said Horta-Osorio could promote his former colleague at Santander UK, Nathan Bostock, to replace Tookey as finance director.
Lloyds had poached Bostock from rival Royal Bank of Scotland in July to head up its wholesale banking, while Horta-Osorio joined from Santander UK to replace Eric Daniels as the new chief executive.
“Tookey’s departure may have been merely ahead of Osorio lining up a new candidate for the role,” Leech wrote in a research note.
Tookey already has experience of working in the insurance industry, having been a finance director at British insurer Prudential before joining Lloyds in 2006.
The British government has a stake of roughly 41 percent in Lloyds and holds 83 percent of rival Royal Bank of Scotland after it had to bail out both banks with taxpayers’ money during the credit crisis.
European competition regulators have ordered both banks to sell off assets to compensate for their state bail-outs, and Lloyds is currently in the process of looking to sell about 630 retail bank branches.
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