Lloyds’s Eric Daniels: the quiet American

Amidst the crisis in the financial sector, an unlikely hero has emerged. A year ago Eric Daniels, chief executive of Lloyds TSB, was known as "the boring man of British banking". But now Lloyds is effectively taking over HBOS - a bank almost twice its size - and Daniels is being quickly reinvented as the dashing saviour of capitalism.

Since taking over at Lloyds in June 2003 he has been playing it safe. While his counterparts at Barclays, HBOS and the Royal Bank of Scotland engaged in aggressive acquisition battles, Daniels kept his head down; like Brer Fox he lay low. In City circles he became known as the 'Quiet American'.

But Daniels, 57, has been vindicated with a deal which is a merger in name alone, Lloyds effectively taking over HBOS. He will relish the prospect of a place in the bank's history. "Lloyds has been around for 243 years and you have to think that we are stewards," he says. "Are we leaving it in better shape than when we found it?"

His family background is far from dull. The son of a German university professor and Chinese mother he was brought up in Montana and his wife is from Panama. Daniels stands out among colleagues by drinking a tumbler of Scotch over lunch, constantly smoking and speaking with a deep American drawl.

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