Lloyds loses third insurance chief in as many months

Lloyds Banking Group has lost a third senior insurance executive in as many months after Phil Loney, the group's head of life and pensions, announced he was leaving Scottish Widows to become chief executive of rival Royal London.

The surprise announcement from Loney, pictured below, follows the retirement two weeks ago of Archie Kane, the group executive director of insurance.

Andy Briggs, who was Loney's counterpart at the bank's general insurance business, said in January that he was leaving to take the top job at Friends Provident.

A spokesman for the bank confirmed it was recruiting to find replacements for both Loney and Briggs. Loney is expected to stay with the bank until October, while Briggs will leave Lloyds in June or July.

Loney had only been in the job for just over a year when the life and pensions business was formed to include Scottish Widows and the former HBoS insurance group, Clerical Medical.

The exodus of the top three heads of Lloyds' insurance and pensions business marks a rapid period of change for the group since the new Lloyds chief executive Antonio Horta-Osrio took control of the bank at the beginning of the month.

One of his first actions was fast-track the sale of over 600 bank branches, including 185 Lloyds TSB branches in Scotland. Horta-Osrio's predecessor, Eric Daniels, was minded to wait until the 2013 deadline set by the European Commission, which ordered the bank to sell the branches as a condition for receiving billions in state aid.

On Monday, Lloyds confirmed it had hired JP Morgan and Citigroup to advise on the sale of the branches which will see the bank sell about 5 per cent of all UK current accounts.

However, the sale will still give Lloyds a "considerably larger market share" than the second biggest bank in the market, Royal Bank of Scotland.

Horta-Osrio also axed Lloyds board director Helen Weir this month. The bank's head of retail, Weir was initially seen to be a potential successor to Daniels to run the bank.

But the Lloyds chief has also lured a number of key lieutenants from his previous bank, Santander UK.

The latest of these was Alison Brittain, Santander's executive director for retail distribution, to run the Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB branch networks.

Former Santander finance director Antonio Lorenzo became Lloyds' director of the wealth and international division, which oversees asset management business Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (Swip), although the bank's general insurance division and the life and pensions business report directly to Horta-Osrio.

He promoted Philip Grant, managing director of Lloyds' UK private banking business, into the role of chairman of the bank's Scottish executive committee to replace Kane, although Grant will not take Kane's place on the bank's main board.

Royal London, the UK's largest mutual life and pensions company, has been searching for a chief executive since August after Mike Yardley announced he was leaving the group, having been in the role for 12 years.

Loney said Royal London was "an impressive company which has changed radically over the past decade".