By Joe Wallace

HSBC Chairman Mark Tucker will step down this year, kicking off a hunt for a leader who can steer the Asia-focused bank through a trade war that threatens its efforts to bridge China and the West.

Tucker, 67 years old, has told the board he intends to retire as chair by the end of 2025, about a year ahead of a term limit dictated by U.K. guidelines on corporate governance. The bank said he would stay on as an adviser to HSBC's recently appointed chief executive, Georges Elhedery, before a permanent successor is in place.

HSBC is likely to look both internally and externally. The bank, founded in 1865 in Hong Kong to finance trade with Europe, broke its tradition of placing insiders at the helm when it installed Tucker -- a veteran insurance executive -- in the fall of 2017.

Since then, the hard-charging chair has helped steer Europe's biggest bank through trade tensions in President Trump's first term and the collapse in global commerce during the pandemic. Elhedery is the fourth CEO that Tucker has worked with.

HSBC is confronting the start of a new, fiercer trade war with China, which sparked a sharp fall in its share price in early April. The shares have since recovered somewhat. Under Tucker, they have performed in line with London's FTSE 100 large-cap index.

Perhaps the most bruising period of his term began in 2022 when HSBC fought a pitched battle with China's Ping An Insurance. The insurer, which was then HSBC's largest shareholder, pushed for a radical reorganization, at one point proposing that HSBC split its Asian businesses off from the rest of the company.

Tucker, who had known Ping An's own chair for decades, played a hands-on role in successfully fending off the effort.

Tucker's job has been one of the most difficult in finance given the shocks to the world economy during his tenure, and he seems to have put in many more hours than a U.K. chair normally would, said Edward Firth, a banking analyst at KBW.

Nonetheless, Firth said HSBC appears to have lost confidence in its ability to be a genuinely global bank. " JPMorgan has just left them for dead," he said.

Tucker's replacement will require diplomatic ability and a bulging Rolodex alongside financial smarts, because of the unique position HSBC occupies in the world economy.

Based in London but earning most of its money in Hong Kong and mainland China, HSBC is a rare bank that straddles both hemispheres. It funds global trade, handles cross-border payments and moves capital between continents in huge volumes. Citigroup is its closest parallel in the U.S.

Under successive chief executives, the bank has narrowed its focus around its most profitable markets: the U.K. and Hong Kong. It has retrenched from numerous markets and shed tens of thousands of staff. But HSBC depends on good relations with regulators and government agencies in the U.S., given that most global trade is funded and paid for in dollars.

This January, Tucker accompanied U.K. Treasury chief Rachel Reeves on a trip to Beijing. He said at the time the U.K. needed to join with China, the world's second-biggest economy, on trade and investment to deliver growth at home.

As tensions between Western governments and Beijing have mounted in recent years, HSBC has sometimes struggled to please both sides.

In 2018, U.S. prosecutors used information provided by the bank to help build a fraud case against the finance chief of the Chinese telecom company Huawei, a case that was tied to U.S. sanctions on Iran.

Two years later, a public signal of support for a national-security law China was preparing to impose on Hong Kong set off criticism among some employees and customers. Also in 2020, HSBC suspended its dividend in response to pressure from the Bank of England, lighting a firestorm among its many individual investors in Hong Kong.

Tucker later apologized to shareholders, saying the move had caused distress and pain.

Tucker, who was previously chief executive of Hong Kong-based insurer AIA and served on the board of Goldman Sachs, has told associates his work for HSBC is his third priority behind family and soccer. He is an ardent fan of Premier League soccer club Chelsea, and was an aspiring professional player in his youth.

Yet he has developed a reputation inside HSBC for being an unusually activist chair. Tucker ousted John Flint as CEO after just 18 months in 2019, saying the bank needed more decisive leadership. Noel Quinn, Flint's successor, stood down unexpectedly in 2024.

Elhedery, who has shaken up HSBC's bureaucratic structure and axed layers of management since taking over last fall, is seen by HSBC followers as a close ally of Tucker.

Write to Joe Wallace at joe.wallace@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 01, 2025 11:56 ET (15:56 GMT)

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