Philip Butterfield says being CEO of the Bank of Bermuda - a role he has held since the bank's sale to multinational banking giant HSBC was inked by shareholders on February 16 - is unlike anything he has ever experienced before, but he says the job has been made easier by working with a team that is ‘on the same page'.

Mr. Butterfield, 58, became the first black CEO of a major Island bank on the very day the bank closed its sale to the world's second largest bank by market capitalisation, with his posting being just one of the changes at the bank with the operations and financial reins being turned over to HSBC executives.

Named to those posts were Andy Gent and Nigel Crow, both with HSBC since 1977, and who are now COO and CFO respectively. Speaking with The Royal Gazette last month, Mr. Butterfield said: “When I come in the morning, I am not starting from scratch, I am interacting with a group of people that want the same results that I am in pursuit of.”

He continued: “The most personally rewarding aspect of that has been my time working with my colleagues. I am very privileged to be working with a group of people that share the same set of objectives that I do, in that it is our foremost desire to make the organisation as successful as it possibly can be.”

Mr. Butterfield - who was named COO of the bank in 2000 after a long career with Citibank - said a typical work day sees him get into the office around 8 a.m and he may not leave until 7 p.m. or later.

He concedes that there are challenges in the new job and things that might keep him awake.

“Thinking about the right people in the right job is certainly one of the challenges. Other areas of challenge are thinking about what it is that I don't know that I should know so that I can do my job as effectively as I can. In that respect I really do rely on information flow from my colleagues.

"My management style is I do not like surprises, so I depend on the candour, forthright exchange with my colleagues so that I am properly informed.

“If there is anything that keeps me awake at night it is what do I need to do to ensure that the persons that are in critical roles remain in those positions for a period of time, and do we have the capacity within the organisation to backfill if an unfortunate event were to occur.”

But he thinks things are going well: “Every person that has ever sat in this seat is different so there has naturally been change in the organisation now that I am sitting in the chair. But I think to date, we have handled most of our challenges reasonably effectively.”

In order to be an effective manager, Mr. Butterfield said he has made sure he is accessible to staff when they have a gripe, as well as letting people know about developments even if only in an e-mail message.

“I give out my phone number and e-mail address to everyone. I encourage people to access me, to talk to me directly.”

He said he also sends out a group-wide e-mail every few weeks “on what are the hot issues we've been dealing with, the successes we've experienced as an organisation, new policies, practices or benefits that we are providing to staff or customers. We are trying to use that mechanism as a means of regularly informing all of our colleagues in the jurisdiction (Bermuda) of what is going on.”

Mr. Butterfield also plans to periodically meet with the bank's nearly 1,100 staff personally. “I am not absenting myself from the responsibility to move around the organisation but I also wish to empower the people that are running the respective parts of this business; to take accountability, to communicate, to share ideas, to acquire information and to make sure that the colleagues with which they work are as informed as they can be.”

Although sitting at the top of one of the Island's largest employers, Mr. Butterfield seems to have a micro view of what is happening within the bank's walls - especially on the customer front.

A case in point is illustrated in this anecdote from Mr. Butterfield: “A senior civil servant was travelling in Europe with his family and in the space of a couple of hours had been to a high-end jewellery store, leather goods store and purchases at a meaningful level.

"When those transactions came into our system, because we had never previously had a series of charges on a foreign soil, we immediately shut down the card because we thought there was the possibility of fraud.

“Luckily, we received a telephone call and were able to put the card back on. The civil servant was appreciative of the fact that we acted quickly, but we also increased the limit so he could continue to treat his family in the way that they had become accustomed.”

Although only one of any number of anecdotes from his first months leading the bank, Mr. Butterfield said it underscores just one of the ways the bank is changing under HSBC.

Mr. Butterfield says through HSBC's more advanced technological platform - with the bank doing a multi-million dollar migration over the next two year's to HSBC's HUB system - the bank will be able to improve several areas of service, including being able to “credit score” its clients.

This, in a nutshell, will allow the bank to “take a look at our customers, take into consideration their past buying habits, give some consideration to the sorts of things they might consider doing and give them the capacity to have increases in their credit card limits reflective of their overall financial stability. Right now we have to choose across-the-board- thresholds that we can easily monitor because we do not have the refined systems capabilities,” he said.