American for Lloyds TSB top job

BANKING group Lloyds TSB today named American Eric Daniels, the former Citigroup veteran who heads Lloyds' retail arm, as its new chief executive. Filling the plum job, which carries a salary package of £1m a year, ends damaging uncertainty over the successor to Peter Ellwood, 59, who retires next May.

Daniels, 51, was recruited 12 months ago from a failed Latin American dotcom to join the Lloyds senior executive team - wooed with the help of a highly controversial £1.3m golden hello. Known as the Invisible Man among banking analysts because of his ultra-low profile since joining Lloyds, Daniels spent 25 years in retail financial services at Citigroup.

The City reacted coolly. Jon Kirk of Fox-Pitt, Kelton said: 'This looks like a missed opportunity to bring in someone from outside to shake things up a bit.' However, the shares were marked 13p higher at 448 1/2p.

The promotion of Daniels is a blow for deputy chief executive Michael Fairey, who was seen as a contender for the top job. Another candidate was Lloyds' finance director Philip Hampton, who earned his City laurels masterminding demergers at British Gas and British Telecom.

Ellwood retires on a pension of at least £336,000 a year. Last year his pay was increased by 17% to £1m - a package likely to be matched or bettered for Daniels.

Chairman Maarten van den Bergh praised Daniels' 'exceptional financial-services experience', adding that he had already made a significant impact on the quality of Lloyds' retail business. He also paid tribute to Ellwood, describing his work in merging Lloyds with TSB as 'the most effective combination of two banks ever achieved'. Peter Ayliffe, managing director of personal banking, succeeds Daniels as head of retail and joins the main board.

Daniels' disaster

THE one curious episode in Daniels' otherwise smooth and conventional rise to the top of Lloyds TSB was a 17-month spell running a doomed dotcom.

Aged 49, Daniels quit his promising job as chief executive of Citigroup's Travelers Life & Annuity arm, where he was in charge of 4,000 employees and $4bn in revenues. He had worked for Citigroup for 25 years.

It was May 2000 and the dotcom bubble had already started to burst but Daniels was undeterred and joined ZonaFinanciera.com, which aimed to sell financial services online to the Spanish speakers of Latin America.

'This is a wonderful opportunity,' he enthused at the time, pointing to the 8m internet users of Latin America, which he forecast would grow to 24m by 2003. It was a disaster. Ten months later he closed offices in Colombia, Venezuela and Peru, and cut back to a skeleton staff in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. Seven months later it closed down.