Published: March 30, 2015
RBS announces Cullinan’s departure only a month after he was asked to restructure its investment bank.
Rory Cullinan is preparing to leave Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), just a month after being tasked with restructuring the group’s investment bank.
Cullinan will leave his role as chairman of RBS’s corporate and institutional bank (CIB) at the end of April. Chris Marks, the division’s chief executive, and Mark Bailie, CEO of capital resolution, will become co-CEOs of CIB.
Cullinan’s most prominent achievements at RBS came as head of its internal bad bank, formed in 2009 following a government bailout to hold assets that would be sold off or wound down. Cullinan oversaw the removal of more than £220bn (US$335bn) of funded assets from the bank’s balance sheet during the following five years.
In February he was appointed chairman of CIB at the same time as the board announced an annual operating loss of £892mn for the division. His task was to restructure CIB to focus on the UK and Western Europe, and to exit Central & Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as much of Asia and the US.
On a call to announce the 2014 results, chief executive Ross McEwan said: “CIB carries the cost of past ambition to be a global investment bank, with much of that cost fixed and embedded in the systems and structures that were created years ago”, adding: “This marks the end of a standalone global investment bank model for RBS.”