Barclays hired a Credit Suisse veteran to sort out its reputation and conduct issues

Barclays has brought in a Credit Suisse banker with more than three decades of experience in audit, compliance, and quality assurance to help protect its reputation, which has been marred by scandals over the last few years.

Stefano Toffolo joined Barclays as a managing director earlier this month in London. He will head the Chief Control Office and oversee its partnership with the compliance division and the company secretariat on key group reputation and conduct risk programmes, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Barclays has been hit by a succession of scandals in recent years. They include controversies related to manipulating LIBOR, which resulted in a $453 million fine from U.S. and U.K. regulators in 2012, manipulating foreign exchange rates which landed the bank with $2.4 billion fine by the U.S. government in 2015, and mortgage mis-selling in the run-up to the financial crisis which saw the bank paying $2 billion to the U.S. regulators earlier this year. Barclays was also fined £72m pounds by British regulators in 2015 for failing to safeguard against the risk of being used to facilitate financial crime.

The most recent scandal to hit Barclays was chief executive Jes Staley’s attempts to unmask a whistleblower who sent letters to the board in 2016. This led to Staley himself being fined £642k by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority in May.

Toffolo's expertise may therefore come in useful. Prior to joining Barclays, he spent almost two decades at Credit Suisse. He started out at the Swiss bank as a director in 1998 and rose through the ranks to become a managing director in 2007. During his tenure at CS, Toffolo had various roles including global head of investment banking operations, head of investment banking front to back process design and delivery, and chief compliance and regulatory affairs officer (enterprise front to back) and compliance QA.

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