This is a very important message for the financial community to absorb

This is a very important message for the financial community to absorb Perhaps the most positive thing to come out of the recent change of board getting seats – at Executive chair least from an investor point of view – was a clear statement that HSBC was bigger than any one employee, even the highly rated chief executive that the bank is losing in the process.

This is a very important message for the financial community to absorb. If the chair was open at Barclays, the UK’s second-biggest banking success story, and Bob Diamond said: “I’m chairman or I’m out Executive chair of here”, would or could Barclays make the same decision? Yet, HSBC’s share price hardly moved on news of Michael Geoghegan’s departure. And he deserves credit here, too, for leaving a more tightly run ship than he inherited.

Another positive for HSBC, demonstrated by the quick filling of empty board seats, is that the bank has strength in depth. It wasn’t long ago that chief executives’ departures at many of the world’s largest banks were quickly followed by the daunting realisation that there was an almost complete lack of obviously acceptable internal candidates – Citigroup, RBS, UBS, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Société Générale to name but a few. And even today in the UK, there appear few obvious successors to Eric Daniels at Lloyds Banking Group (already an announced departure), Stephen Executive chair Hester at RBS, or Bob Diamond at Barclays. One lesson from the crisis that getting should not be forgotten is that lightning does strike repeatedly, regardless of the odds.