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Very few chief executives of big banks know how to brand a cow, what to do when calving season starts, or how to tell Angus from Shorthorn cattle. Except, that is, Ross McEwan.
很少有大银行的首席执行官知道如何给牛打烙印，在产犊季节来临时该怎么做，或者如何分辨安格斯牛和短角肉牛。只有一个人例外，那就是苏格兰皇家银行(Royal Bank of Scotland)的首席执行官罗斯•麦克尤恩(Ross McEwan)。
The Royal Bank of Scotland boss owns a cattle farm with his wife in their native New Zealand. He holidays there twice a year to get away from the strains of his London-based day job and says they bought it as an alternative to spending a similar amount on a “tiny” city flat.
麦克尤恩和他的妻子在他们的新西兰老家有一个养牛场。他一年会有两次从伦敦繁重的日常工作中抽身去新西兰度假。麦克尤恩表示，他们买下了这个养牛场，就不用花差不多的钱去买一套“狭小的”城市公寓。
An added advantage of his agricultural escape near Auckland, he says, is that it gives him a glimpse of the choices that small business owners face, such as whether to hire a second farmhand.
他说，抽空去奥克兰郊区经营农场的另一个好处是，这可以让他体会小企业主会面临什么选择，比如是否雇佣临时的农场工人。
That sort of recruitment dilemma is a far cry from the management challenge he himself took on at the part-nationalised UK bank, which has been shedding staff in industrial quantities.
这种招募困境远非他本人在这个半国有化的英国银行面临的管理挑战可比——苏格兰皇家银行一直在大规模地裁员。
Mr McEwan took over as CEO from Stephen Hester in 2013 only a year after the latter lured him from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to run RBS’s retail arm. Since then he has taken a hatchet to what was once the world’s biggest bank by assets.
2013年，麦克尤恩接替史蒂芬•赫斯特(Stephen Hester)出任苏格兰皇家银行的首席执行官，而就在一年前，赫斯特才刚刚将麦克尤恩从澳洲联邦银行(Commonwealth Bank of Australia)挖来负责本行的零售部门。自上任以来，麦克尤恩就一直在精简这个曾经是全球资产规模最大的银行。
“We’re retreating across many parts that just don’t give us a good return and are not connected into our core business, which is the UK,” the 57-year-old says. “This is now a core UK bank.”
现年57岁的麦克尤恩表示：“我们正退出许多没有给我们带来丰厚回报而且与核心业务无关的业务——我们的核心业务在英国。现在这是一家地地道道的英国银行。”
RBS is pulling out of many activities in Asia, the Middle East, continental Europe and the US. It has drastically cut back its once mighty investment bank and is selling the international part of its Coutts private bank.
苏格兰皇家银行正退出亚洲、中东、欧洲大陆和美国的许多业务。它大幅削减一度兴盛的投行业务，并出售其私人银行Coutts的国际部门。
The bank is shrinking as fast as it once expanded under Fred Goodwin before the financial crisis struck and it was bailed out at the cost of £45bn to the taxpayer in 2008. Since the crisis its balance sheet has more than halved from £2.4tn and its staff numbers are set to drop almost two-thirds from their peak of 225,000. Its non-UK operations are set to fall from 40 per cent of the group to 20-25 per cent.
该行收缩的速度与其在金融危机爆发前的扩张速度一样快——当时是弗雷德•古德温(Fred Goodwin)担任首席执行官。2008年，纳税人花了450亿英镑的代价对该行进行了纾困。自金融危机以来，该行资产负债表规模从2.4万亿英镑减少了一半多，其员工数量与22.5万人的峰值相比将下降近三分之二。非英国业务占该集团的比例将从40%下降到20%至25%。
A tall man — he met his wife playing basketball at university and recalls being picked for school rugby because he could win the ball in the line-out — Mr McEwan exudes a bonhomie that seems to help people warm to him.
麦克尤恩个子很高，面貌和蔼可亲，这似乎很容易获得人们的好感。麦克尤恩在大学打篮球时认识了现在的妻子，他回忆起自己曾被学校的橄榄球队选中，因为他能够在争边球(line-out)时抢到球。
But those who know him say he can be tough when needed. “He’s got this ability to not let people off the hook, but not to be brutal about it,” says a top 20 shareholder in RBS. “He is quick and decisive and his judgment is very good at putting the right people in charge.”
但那些了解麦克尤恩的人表示，他在必要的时候可能非常严厉。苏格兰皇家银行前20大股东中的一位表示：“他有这种不让人们逃脱责任的能力，但他不会铁面无情。他做事迅速果断，而且知人善任。”
Mr McEwan feels his retrenchment strategy is in tune with the times. “The regulators quite rightly want safe banking in their territories,” he says. “I think what you are seeing is that as companies become more global, banks actually are becoming more regional.”
麦克尤恩觉得自己的收缩战略与时代合拍。他说：“监管机构非常希望自己的辖区内有安全的银行业。我认为你看到的是，在企业日益走向全球之际，银行实际上在日益区域化。”
He says fragmented regulation and stiffer national capital requirements are making life tougher for banks that still have truly global ambitions, such as JPMorgan Chase and HSBC. “I think there will be very few what I would call international banks.” He adds: “You’ve got to have the people on the ground and to work with all those regulatory frameworks and have the capital trapped in territories and not be able to move it around like you used to.”
他表示，监管各自为政以及各国出台了更为严厉的资本要求，这让摩根大通(JPMorgan Chase)和汇丰(HSBC)等依然拥有全球抱负的银行的日子更加难过。他补充称：“我认为将来很少有能让我称为国际银行的银行。你不得不让那些人脚踏实地，在所有那些监管框架下运作，让资本留在当地，无法像过去那样自由流动。”
Mr McEwan admits to being more comfortable with people than with numbers and only passed his university accountancy exam at the third attempt. Yet he is sure his strategy will show signs of bearing fruit on February 26, when RBS is expected to report its first annual pre-tax profit since the crisis.
麦克尤恩承认，与数字相比，他更喜欢与人打交道，在大学时考了3次才通过了会计科目的考试。然而他确信，自己的战略将很快初见成效。
He remembers the scepticism among investors about his plans to cut £1bn of its £18bn costs in the first year of a restructuring plan he unveiled almost 12 months ago. “Most of the market said that is far too aggressive, you’ll never get it out. Wait until the results and you’ll see we’ve got £1bn out,” he says.
麦克尤恩还记得，他在近12个月前披露的重组计划中透露，打算在计划首年将180亿英镑的成本削减10亿英镑，投资者对此表示怀疑。他说：“市场里的大多数人说，这过于激进，你永远不可能成功。等到业绩报告出来之后，你就会看到我们成功地削减了10亿英镑的成本。”
Perhaps the biggest challenge for Mr McEwan is to rebuild the bank’s reputation, which has been tarnished by a string of scandals. These include fines for Libor interest rate rigging and foreign exchange manipulation, as well as accusations that its restructuring team — dubbed the Global Restructuring Group — was trying to profit from the struggling small business clients it was supposed to help.
或许麦克尤恩面临的最大挑战是如何恢复苏格兰皇家银行因一系列丑闻而遭到破坏的名誉。这些丑闻包括因为操纵伦敦银行间同业拆借利率(Libor)和外汇操纵案而被罚款，以及有指控称，其名为“全球重组集团”(GRG)的重组团队试图从陷入困境的小企业客户身上牟利——它本应为这些小企业客户提供帮助。
“They all add up,” he says, listing several of the setbacks. “Each of those is taking a little bit more out of the reservoir of trust for RBS. It is about how we start rebuilding that reservoir of trust and getting it right.”
他在列举了数个挫折后表示：“他们全都累积起来。每个都一点点地侵蚀掉公众对苏格兰皇家银行的信任。关键是我们如何开始且恰当地重建信任。”
Mr McEwan’s plan, which he repeats mantra-like, is based on “having customers at the centre of everything we do”. One of his daughters is in the process of setting up a business and he says this has shown him what banks are like to deal with from the other side.
麦克尤恩像念咒一样不断重复自己的计划，该计划建立在“我们做任何事情都要围绕客户这个中心”的基础之上。他的一个女儿正在开办一家企业，麦克尤恩表示，这让他从另一个侧面了解与银行打交道是什么样子的。
He describes the allegations about the GRG restructuring team as “probably the only area that I’ve got quite emotional about in my time here, in the sense that it hit to the core of our business”. The unit is still being investigated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Mr McEwan defends its record, arguing it was impossible to cope with an eightfold rise in the number of struggling businesses moved to GRG after the crisis.
麦克尤恩表示：“在苏格兰皇家银行任职期间，可能只有关于重组团队GRG的指控让我非常情绪化，从某种意义上来说它直击我们业务的核心”。该部门现在仍在接受英国金融市场行为监管局(Financial Conduct Authority)的调查。麦克尤恩为该部门进行了辩解，他说，在危机爆发之后，因陷入困境而不得不接受GRG帮助的企业数量增长了8倍，GRG根本不可能应付得过来。
“There is no way any organisation can get all of those cases right,” he says. “That is where some of the accusations come from . . . we will have applied a methodology that I suspect was in some cases right and in some cases won’t have been. But that is sheer volume.”
他说：“任何组织都不可能恰当地处理所有这些情况。这就是一些指控的由来……我们将会运用一套方法，我觉得这种方法可能在某些情况下适用而在某些情况下不适用。但它是个浩大的工程。”
The GRG unit has recently been disbanded, many of its top managers have left and it is being folded into other parts of the bank. Mr McEwan says RBS has clarified its charges and the process for transferring companies to its restructuring team. “Our fee structure was a mystery to some,” he admits.
GRG部门最近已被解散，许多高级经理离职，它将并入苏格兰皇家银行的其他部门。麦克尤恩表示，苏格兰皇家银行已经向重组团队说明了相关指控以及各公司转变安排。他承认：“我们的收费结构对某些人来说很神秘。”
Another embarrassing episode that led to RBS being fined by regulators was the meltdown of its IT systems in 2012 that left millions of customers without access to their money for several days.
另一个导致苏格兰皇家银行被监管机构罚款的尴尬插曲是2012年IT系统崩溃，结果造成数百万客户连续数天无法动用他们的资金。
Mr McEwan says this has been addressed, partly by replacing the “core processing engine” of the bank at a cost of £750m.
麦克尤恩表示，问题已经得到解决，部分解决方案是花费7.5亿英镑换掉了该行的“核心处理引擎”。
“I know now that what we have is a much more resilient IT platform that we can be comfortable with and that will hold up,” he says, adding: “If it does fall over it will be for much shorter periods of time.” However, he concedes there is still a big job to reduce the number of systems and applications at RBS from more than 3,000.
他表示：“我现在知道，我们有一个适应能力更强的IT平台，我们对它感到放心，而且它也靠得住。如果它确实出现问题，时间也会短得多。”然而，他承认，削减苏格兰皇家银行的3000多个系统和应用仍是一个大工程。
A bugbear for Mr McEwan is the temporary “teaser” rates many banks offer on credit cards and savings products — a practice that does not exist in Australia or New Zealand, he says, and one he has curtailed at RBS.
麦克尤恩的一个麻烦在于，许多银行针对信用卡和储蓄产品提供的临时“初始优惠利率”(teaser rate)——他表示，澳大利亚或者新西兰不存在这种做法，他在苏格兰皇家银行也取消了这种做法。
“You would have thought you would get a better rate for staying, rather than a worse rate for staying and a better rate for going,” he says, adding that since RBS ditched teaser rates its credit card business has suffered but its savings book has grown.
麦克尤恩表示：“你本以为留下来会得到更优惠的利率，而不是留下来利率降低，离开则会得到更高的利率。”他补充称，苏格兰皇家银行取消初始优惠利率后，其信用卡业务受到了影响，但其储蓄业务出现了增长。
The RBS boss, who started his career as a human resources manager at Unilever in New Zealand, still has several hurdles to clear. One is the need to settle allegations in the US that the bank mis-sold mortgage-backed securities before the crisis, which analysts expect to cost £5bn. The bank also aims to cut its stake in Citizens, the US retail lender it floated last year, below 30 per cent by the end of the year — a key step to lift RBS’s capital ratio above its target of 12 per cent.
麦克尤恩是从在联合利华(Unilever)新西兰公司当一名人力资源经理开始其职业生涯的。他仍有数项障碍要克服。一个是有必要解决在美国面临的指控，即该行在危机前不当销售抵押贷款支持证券，分析师预计该行可能得付出50亿英镑的代价。苏格兰皇家银行还计划在今年年底前将其在美国零售银行Citizens中的权益削减至30%以下，这是将其资本比率提高至12%的目标之上的关键一步——苏格兰皇家银行去年让Citizens上了市。
Faced with all this, Mr McEwan and most of his top executives have agreed not to take a bonus for three years. But ultimately, the New Zealander knows he will be judged on only one thing: whether the bank’s share price — which closed at 384p last Friday — hits the 500p level at which the government can start selling its 81 per cent stake at a profit.
面对所有这些障碍，麦克尤恩和其大部分高管同意3年不拿奖金。但最终，这位新西兰人知道，评判他成败的依据将只有一件事：苏格兰皇家银行的股价是否达到500便士（该行3月27日的收盘价是343便士），即英国政府可以开始获利卖出其持有的81%的股份。
Cattle-farming offers a respite for the man in charge of the bailed-out bank’s retrenchment, writes Martin Arnold
麦克尤恩大刀阔斧地对这家接受政府援助的银行实施收缩战略，养牛让他有了一些放松的空间。
