HE is, say his peers, a banker's banker.

Not the banker's banker of popular myth who trousers multimillion-dollar bonuses while flicking two fingers at the rest of the community, but one, it is said, who leads HSBC by values and methods founded on long-term customer relationships.

Michael Francis Geoghegan, of Irish stock, was born almost 56 years ago in Windsor, where he was educated. He later went to school in Ireland, where he was offered a place at University College Dublin. He turned it down, preferring to take up a job in the international division of HSBC. He has been with the bank ever since.

By the age of 46, he was running HSBC's South American operations, but in 2004 he returned home to Weybridge to become UK head.

By 2006, he was HSBC's £1.6 million a year group chief executive, the hard cop to the soft cop of HSBC's cerebral executive chairman Stephen Green.

Together they are credited with taking HSBC to its new-found status as the most valuable banking brand on the planet. It is, as the advertising poster claims, the world's local bank. It has 10,000 branches in 85 countries and, unlike a Wall Street bank, isn't hobbled by excess.

Geoghegan's banking mantras are simple: you can never have enough capital on your balance sheet, and there is no substitute for knowing your customer.

The HSBC chief's management style is similarly straightforward: “There is nothing wrong with being wrong but there is if you don't tell others they are wrong.”