About MetisBrown

Financial institutions face a structural shift in operating complexity – geopolitical, technological, regulatory, and climate-related – that demands a fundamentally different skill set at the top. At the same time, the sector is losing the competition for executive talent to industries with a stronger employer proposition.

The cost of getting leadership decisions wrong has never been higher. Yet most failures at the top are not failures of process. They are failures of judgment, made years earlier, when the full range of options was still available. Our framework identifies three dynamics that drive this failure consistently across otherwise well-governed institutions.

Boards consistently mistake visibility for readiness. Executives who present fluently and handle board interactions with composure tend to be labelled capable long before the conditions of the top role have ever been tested. The illusion runs in both directions: leaders themselves often overestimate their own preparedness, mistaking a natural career progression for what is in reality a fundamental shift in the nature of authority itself.

We help boards design conditions under which genuine readiness can be assessed rather than assumed.

Every regulated institution runs two governance systems simultaneously: the formal architecture of committees, charters, and documented accountabilities, and the informal network of relational authority that determines what is politically possible. Long-tenured directors, former executives, and holders of supervisory trust all possess informal veto capacity, exercised not through formal opposition but through measured hesitation, strategic silence, and carefully framed concerns about timing or optics.

This is not merely a political challenge. It is a regulatory one. Under frameworks such as the SM&CR, institutions must ensure that decision-making processes are clearly documented. Informal structures that undermine formal governance are not tolerated by supervisors, and succession is precisely the moment where undocumented influence is most likely to determine outcomes.

We map informal influence explicitly before succession begins, making power dynamics visible, manageable, and aligned with governance obligations.

Succession planning that begins when a role is vacant has already failed. The field has narrowed, political costs are highest, and judgment is most susceptible to pressure. The only effective succession advisory begins long before, when the widest range of options is still open and early intervention creates the greatest downstream value.

Each of these dynamics is amplified or mitigated by something institutions consistently underweight: corporate culture. Leaders do not merely operate within a culture – they define it. Their behaviour signals what is rewarded, what is tolerated, and what the organisation genuinely stands for. The Chair and non-executive directors carry a particular responsibility here: not only to ensure that culture is articulated, but to supervise whether it is lived, starting at the very top. Succession decisions that ignore cultural alignment risk undermining both strategic coherence and the institution’s standing in the talent market.