Arrival Of Ex-Barclays Director Signals Hiring Drive At GE Capital

Former Barclays’ regulatory compliance director Andrew Podd is leading a compliance recruitment drive at investment firm GE Capital in London.

Former Barclays’ regulatory compliance director Andrew Podd is leading a compliance recruitment drive at investment firm GE Capital in London. Podd was recently headhunted to the newly created role of European compliance/regulatory affairs director (CR, 3/20). Podd said the reason for increasing the compliance numbers was to keep up with the firm’s “significant and ambitious” plans for growth in financial services. “My new role is one of several that have recently been created given the significant and ambitious plans for growth that GE has in financial services,” he added. Podd would not elaborate on his recent hires but said more could follow in the near future.

During his time at Barclays, Podd helped create internal standards to ensure customers are treated fairly after the Financial Services Authority began looking at unfair practices and challenged firms and banks to improve customer treatment. This included additional cost disclosures in product literature, analyzing complaints statistics to look for possible problem areas and introducing closer advertising scrutiny (CR, 2/21/05). Podd said the new role had a wider remit than at Barclays.