Those who know him say that the former Charles Schwab exec is a bright, experienced and fiercely independent manager who has a good shot at getting the firm back on track. "He's a no-nonsense executive," in the words of a former colleague.

Scheid has already made one change: He told investors and analysts last month that he would accept about one third less pay than the $4 million a year his predecessor, Mark Whiston, took home. Whiston resigned in April, seven months after Janus was first identified as one of the firms the government had targeted in its probe of market timing of mutual funds.

Although he has never run a mutual fund company, Scheid brings a mix of finance and marketing skills to his new job. The former Arthur Andersen banking consultant spent more than a decade at Allied Bankshares and in 1988 became CFO of First Interstate Bancorp after the Los Angeles bank bought Allied. He joined Schwab in 1996 as CFO and four years later was named to head the firm's retail operation, overseeing everything from its branches to Internet brokerage.

Former Schwab colleagues remember Scheid for clashing with the brokerage's president, David Pottruck, over strategy. "Steve had the intellectual rigor to question Pottruck," one recalls. Pottruck, today Schwab's CEO, declines to comment. Scheid resigned from the firm in February 2002.

The Kansas native has had a perfect vantage point from which to assess Janus's recent problems. He joined the firm's parent, Stilwell Financial, as an independent board member in December 2002, when Janus, hit by big shortfalls in performance and massive investment outflows, was struggling to reorganize into a new, publicly traded entity that would eliminate the Stilwell holding company structure. News of the government's inquiry into Janus's trading practices broke last September. On January 1, Scheid was appointed chairman of the Janus Capital board. Now he gets to run a firm with a big marketing challenge but a cleaner legal slate: Last month Janus paid $226 million to settle the government's charges.