Permanent TSB appoint Masding as new chief

STATE-CONTROLLED Irish Life and Permanent has appointed the former Barclays banker Jeremy Masding as chief executive of banking unit Permanent TSB, leading to the departure of Dave Guinane, a 25-year bank veteran.

The Department of Finance said Mr Masding (46) will be paid within Government guidelines for the bank’s executives, which caps his annual salary, bonuses and benefits at €500,000 for two years from June 2011 under the terms of Permanent TSB’s recapitalisation.

Mr Guinane, who was previously chief executive of Permanent TSB, applied for the job, a more enhanced role in charge of the bank, which will emerge as a standalone entity after Irish Life and Permanent TSB are separated in late March or early April.

Mr Masding will join the bank on February 20th, coinciding with the departure of Mr Guinane, who succeeded Denis Casey as Permanent TSB chief executive in 2007.

An employee of British bank Barclays for most of the period from 1984 to 2007, Mr Masding worked in various roles, including director of strategy development in the bank’s head office and on secondment to the British cabinet office for a year in the late 1990s.

This experience may prove beneficial given the Government’s 99 per cent ownership of Irish Life and Permanent after €2.7 billion in public funds was injected last July. The company requires a further €1.3 billion to meet the Central Bank’s capital requirement set following stress tests last March.

Mr Masding was chief executive of British lender Central Trust from 2007 to 2009. In 2010 he became chairman of the Richmond Group, loan brokers and lenders.

“I believe Permanent TSB has a very important role to play as a force for competition in what is a much reduced Irish banking sector,” said Mr Masding. “But I am also conscious of the wider responsibility of the bank to the Government and the taxpayers, who have supported it through incredibly difficult times. We owe it to them to return the bank to strength and profitability as quickly as possible.”

Irish Life and Permanent Group Holdings, the overall holding company, will be split with the separation of the life and pensions business, which will eventually be sold.

Alan Cook, chairman of Irish Life and Permanent, said the coming years would be “critical” to establishing Permanent TSB as “a successful, profitable and competitive force in the Irish banking sector” and that Mr Masding was “very well suited to this challenge”.

Minister for Finance Michael Noonan said Mr Masding was appointed following “a rigorous recruitment process and his appointment has been approved by the Central Bank of Ireland”.

He wished him every success “in his new role at this critical juncture of the bank and looks forward to engaging with him on the challenging work ahead”, he said.

The loss-making lender has the worst funding position of the Irish guaranteed banks, with the highest loans to deposits ratio, reflecting its heavy borrowing during the bubble years to become Ireland’s biggest mortgage lender.

The Central Bank directed the lender to offload €15.7 billion of loans, 43 per cent of its loan book, to wean itself off cheap funding from the European Central Bank.