Stephen Green, Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint

Stephen Green was born on 7 November 1948 to Dudley Keith Green and Dorothy Rosamund Mary Green (née Wickham).[2] After a private education at Lancing College, near his family home in Brighton, he attended Exeter College, Oxford, obtaining a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in 1966. Green's parents were active churchgoers and influenced his religious activities both as a young man and later in life; after graduating he spent a year volunteering in the East End of London at a hostel for recovering alcoholics, a move also reputedly influenced by a visit from a Church of England vicar.[3][4] It was during his time at the hostel that he met Janian Joy, a fellow volunteer, whom he married in 1971.[2] In 1975 (during a Harkness Fellowship, on secondment from the Overseas Development Administration) Green also obtained a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[5]

In 1971, Green began his professional life as a civil servant in the British government's Ministry of Overseas Development (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), where he spent the next six years.[5] In 1977, he joined McKinsey & Co Inc. management consultants,[4] with whom he undertook assignments in Europe, North America and the Middle East.

As a result of being headhunted, Green joined the then Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation in 1982, initially on a two-year contract,[2] with responsibility for corporate planning activities. In 1985 he was put in charge of the development of the bank's global treasury operations, and in 1992 became group treasurer of HSBC Holdings plc with responsibility for the HSBC Group's treasury and capital markets businesses globally.

In March 1998 Green was appointed to the board of HSBC Holdings plc as executive director of Investment Banking and Markets, responsible for the investment banking, private banking and asset management activities of the Group. He assumed additional responsibility for the group's corporate banking business in May 2002. As executive director, Green cancelled all executive bonuses in both 2001 and 2002, telling The Wall Street Journal in March 2003: "We took the view that a business that had not performed for the shareholder couldn't expect to receive bonuses".[2] The decision saw some key staff leave in protest but it also won the company some praise; Institutional Investor magazine quoted HSBC's then chairman, Sir John Bond, as saying: "We had corporate clients come up to us and say, 'Thank God you've taken a stand'".[6]

In the year before becoming chief executive, Green earned below £1m; HSBC's annual report for the period showed that none of the company's five top-earning employees was a board member. Green told The Guardian in October 2003: "Plenty of people in this organisation earn more than me. I genuinely don't care. I can hardly be described as lowly paid. Since when was money the be-all and end-all?" Asked by the newspaper's reporter Jill Treanor how he reconciled the organization's high salaries and bonuses with his religious faith, he replied: "Do I personally feel some kind of incompatibility between what I believe and being in financial services markets? I can only say no".[7]

His appointment as group chief executive took effect on 1 June 2003. Shortly afterwards, in October 2003, HSBC announced that it would offshore the work done by its UK finance processing centres in Birmingham, Sheffield, Brentwood and Swansea to India, Malaysia and China within two years. The move, which represented the largest such offshoring in the financial services sector at that time and would lead to the loss of 4,000 British jobs, led the UK trade union UNIFI to warn Green that the "gloves were off". He defended the decision, telling The Guardian's Jill Treanor:

"If you are a responsible company like us we do need to think about this on a global basis. We have to approach this in a responsible and human way. I also have to bear in mind that people are going to get jobs in India (and elsewhere). It's wrong to pretend you can protect the existing jobs and wrong to pretend there isn't going to be change. It can't be the right response to say that emerging markets have no right to jobs." He added: "Cost minimisation cannot be the only driver of this. There is no way we want to jeopardise the quality of customer service".[7]

Green also oversaw HSBC's acquisition of Household International, a US subprime lender,[4] as well as its integration into the parent company. He later came to regret the deal,[8] which was the largest acquisition in a series conducted by HSBC in the five years leading up to his appointment as its chief executive.[2]

In January 2005, Green became chairman of HSBC Bank plc, the group's UK clearing bank subsidiary, and group executive chairman in June 2006. In its July 2005 issue, Bloomberg Markets magazine reported that HSBC was allowing money laundering by drug dealers and state sponsors of terrorism; the magazine alleged that this had included a transfer of $100,000 in April 2000 to the Taliban in Afghanistan which had subsequently resulted in a fine levied by the US Treasury Department. Green denied the allegations, calling them "a singular and wholly irresponsible attack on the bank's international compliance procedures".[9] Subsequent investigations however, confirmed that money laundering had taken place at HSBC[10] for several years throughout Green's tenure as chief executive and chairman,[11][12] chiefly for the Sinaloa Cartel.[13] Green earned well over £25 million per year at the time. Green's successor as the top of HSBC, Stuart Gulliver, said "between 2004 and 2010, our anti-money laundering controls should have been stronger and more effective and we failed to spot and deal with unacceptable behaviour."[14]

Some of his prior directorships included the Bank of Bermuda Limited, HSBC Mexico, SA and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited. He was also chairman of HSBC Private Banking Holdings (Suisse) SA and HSBC North America Holdings Inc., deputy chairman of HSBC Trinkaus & Burkhardt AG and was a board member of HSBC France. In 2005 he was appointed a trustee of the British Museum, a position from which he resigned before his appointment as Minister of State.[25] In 2014 he was appointed a trustee of the Natural History Museum by the Prime Minister David Cameron for a period of four years, and was elected chair by the board of trustees from 1 April 2014.[26]

Green is an ordained priest in the Church of England,[28] having studied theology at Manchester University's Northern Ordination course while in Hong Kong,[29] and he is the author of the book Serving God? Serving Mammon?[30] He has since described the book as "out of print and out of date".[7] During his time as a senior banking executive, he was known to compose his sermons while travelling around the world on business.[2]

Green was awarded an honorary doctor's degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London in 2010.[31]

He is married to Janian and has two daughters, Suzannah and Ruth. He has a sister, Elizabeth, who lives in the US and a brother, George Francis Green, who is professor of Labour Economics and Skills Development at the Institute of Education, University of London.

• Green, Stephen (7 May 1996). Serving God? Serving Mammon?. Marshall Pickering. ISBN 978-0551029828.
• Green, Stephen (3 June 2010). Good Value: Choosing a Better Life in Business. Penguin. ISBN 978-0141042428.
• Green, Stephen (December 2014). Reluctant Meister: How Germany's Past is Shaping its European Future. Haus Publishing. ISBN 9781908323682.
• Green, Stephen (October 2015). The European Identity: Historical and Cultural Realities We Cannot Deny. Haus Publishing. ISBN 9781910376171.
• Green, Stephen (September 2017). Dear Germany: Liebeserklärung an ein Land mit Vergangenheit. Theiss. ISBN 9783806236330.
• Green, Stephen (May 2017). Brexit and the British: Who Are We Now?. Haus Publishing. ISBN 9781910376713.

• Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint – UK Parliament
• "Video: Stephen Green discusses his book 'Good Value' and the need for corporate social responsibility". Asia Society New York. 17 February 2010.
• BBC Radio 4 Profile