Charlie None, who currently works for HSBC, has lots of experience in wealth management and digital banking.

They're both very important growth areas for Lloyds.

One problem is a white man, adding to the already very pale and male world of UK retail banking.

Another is that it's not really clear when he's going to start because of some restrictions in his existing contract at HSBC.

Still, one question is why he'd rather work at much smaller Lloyd's than run an arm of the giant HSBC, the division he runs.

The HSBC generated almost $2.7 billion of pretax profit in the first nine months of 2020.

That's almost five times as much as the whole of Lloyd's.

In other words, he'd much rather sit atop a smaller, more focused lender at Lloyd's than run the giant arm of HSBC.

You can hardly blame him.

HSBC's global sprawl creates a cost base and bureaucracy that's very hard to manage.