HSBC's miserable results will make it hard for Noel Quinn to upgrade his ‘interim CEO’ tag

HSBC looked like an Olympic archer stepping up to shoot having first consumed two bottles of neat Scotch when presenting its third-quarter results: it missed the target with just about every shot.

If there were numbers among the reams of them analysts have to produce that the bank managed to hit it was probably more through luck than judgment.

Poor Noel Quinn. The straight-talking Brummie, who was installed as interim CEO following the ousting of John Flint, could be what this most pompous of institutions needs.

He’s a 180-degree switch on his predecessor and he’s certainly been making an energetic pitch for the job since chairman Mark Tucker handed him the reins on a temporary basis.

Trouble is, even though, as a placeholder, he can’t be held fully responsible for putting this dog’s dinner in the bowl, he’s nonetheless having to serve it up to the bank’s investors.

He has the unenviable task of explaining to them why the Pedigree Chum… no, no HSBC hasn’t been that for a while… so why the supermarket own-brand dog food they thought they were getting has been replaced by an unmarked tin of something nasty from the back of the larder.

The smell of the stuff inside it is inevitably going to hang around him even though he’s only been in the hot seat for a couple of months. And it smells pretty bad. An 18 per cent fall in pre-tax profits and a 3 per cent fall in revenues. Asia did OK (earnings were up by 4 per cent) and it might have been better still without the turmoil in Hong Kong and the US-China trade war.

There’s obviously Brexit, which won’t have helped the bank’s commercial and City businesses in the UK. But it would probably still have looked a bit rubbish even without that, as did the European and US businesses. Given its franchise, HSBC should be doing better all-round.

Quinn says he wants to “re-model the bank”. That’s his pitch. His big idea. What it means in practice is that he’s going to swing the axe. Thousands of jobs would be set to go.

Here’s the problem. When I was discussing this story with a colleague their response was this: “Isn’t that what HSBC has been doing for the past 10 years?”

And it has, along with indulging in outbreaks of fighting at the top, unveiling strategic rejigs, humming and harring about flouncing out of London (as regards the HQ), talking up global trade flows and don’t forget China’s Pearl River Delta (courtesy of Quinn’s predecessor Stuart Gulliver).

After it all, people are still talking about HSBC’s bloated cost base and the need to remodel the bank while it continues to slip down the league table of heavyweights.

A lot of names have been offered up as part of the game of pick the CEO the media likes to play when a big job comes up.

Tidjane Thiam, currently at Credit Suisse, Andrea Orcel, formerly of UBS, even António Horta-Osório from Lloyds, they’ve all picked up a mention or two. So has Ewen Stevenson. He’s the bank’s current finance director, but has only been with it since January having been hired from RBS. So he’d be a compromise, a sort of internal/external hire. Coming from RBS, he’d know a thing or two about turbulence and restructuring.

Inevitably, people have been looking at JP Morgan, a bank that turns everyone connected with HSBC green with envy given how it has zoomed past and now seems to be on a completely different (and much faster) road. Could Tucker poach a member of its senior management team?

Fairly or not, this dismal set of results will increase the pressure on him to do that, or to look to another of the external names in the frame, to undertake the “remodelling” Quinn thinks HSBC needs, regardless of how much he likes the latter.