Derek Wanless

Sir Derek Wanless (29 September 1947 – 22 May 2012) was a former English banker and a former adviser to the Labour Party.

Derek Wanless was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he was educated at the Royal Grammar School. From 1967-70, he was an undergraduate at King's College Cambridge, which he attended on a support grant from Westminster Bank (a constituent of the present NatWest Bank). He was an extraordinarily gifted mathematician and graduated as Senior Wrangler in 1970. On graduation he moved into banking, qualifying as a statistician, and attended the Program for Management Development at Harvard. He was a member of the Institute of Statisticians and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, of which he was President in 1999.

He had joined Westminster Bank,a constituent of the present NatWest Bank in 1967, beginning with a Saturday job before becoming NatWest's Director of Personal Banking from 1986-1988. Then becoming the General Manager for UK Branch Business and UK Financial Services before, in 1992, taking on the role of Group Chief Executive until 1999, when he received a reported pay-off of £3,000,000. It was on Friday 8 October 1999, that BBC News reported that Derek Wanless had been ousted from his position as Chief Executive. Wanless was reportedly forced out by the bank's Non-Executive Directors, who replaced him with Sir David Rowland. Wanless had been criticised by City investors for taking the bank into investment banking, and failing to curtail high costs. As executive responsible for NatWest's card business, he led the team which invented Switch, the UK's debit card scheme. He led the NatWest Group immediately prior to its takeover, by the (then) relatively small Royal Bank of Scotland.

In 2002 he carried out a review of the future funding of the National Health Service for Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and in 2007 carried out a further review for the King's Fund.

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