Georges Elhedery's promotion to HSBC's CEO is a big day for the bank's Lebanese elite
Georges Elhedery is the new CEO of HSBC. The search consultants retained by the bank to benchmark external candidates presumably didn't come up with anyone better than Georges, who's been there since 2005 and was once the EMEA head of structured rates and inflation trading for Goldman Sachs in London.
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As we noted earlier, Elhedery's ascension looks like good news for HSBC's trading business, which now has one of its own in charge. It could also be good news for various of Elhedery's colleagues who occupy senior roles at the bank and who were part of the same cohort of high performing Lebanese traders nurtured by Samir Assaf, the former co-head of HSBC's global banking and markets business, whom Elhedery replaced in 2020.
Like Assaf, Elhedery grew up in Lebanon before being educated at a French grandes école. Like Assaf, he went into fixed income trading. He's not the only one at HSBC with this profile: Assaf developed an inner circle of other senior Lebanese and Arabic traders at the bank, including Elhedery, Emin Mazi (global head of debt markets), Marwen Daghar (head of markets and securities services for continental Europe, who is Turkish), and Elie El Hayek, the former head of fixed income trading at HSBC, who joined Brevan Howard in 2021.
Assaf is still chairman of the board for HSBC's Middle East business. Suggestions that Assaf's circle would be weakened when he left for General Atlantic three years ago, seem to have been premature.
Now that Elhedery has the prime position, he may, however, have less time to spend with friends in Europe and the Middle East. Noel Quinn, his predecessor as HSBC CEO, complained that the role was "intense", probably by virtue of the relentless travel in and out of Asia.
After his six-month sabbatical devoted to personal growth and learning Mandarin, Elhedery appears ready to make sacrifices. Bloomberg reports that he already gave up his west London flat in favour of something more proximate to HSBC's Canary Wharf office. At one point, Elhedery was on a list of people HSBC was moving to Hong Kong. His name seemed to be dropped from that list in 2021. Even if Georges doesn't move to full time to HK as CEO in 2024, he can expect to spend a lot more time there in the future.
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