Where Meridian plays

Company. Meridian — a 1,200-person mid-market European bank. Profitable, unloved by the market. Return on equity has hovered at 7% for four years. Karim El-Mansouri (49), a former head of corporate banking, has just been made CEO with a mandate to "sharpen strategy".

The situation. Meridian, on paper, does eleven things. It runs a retail branch network, a small-business lending arm, a mid-cap corporate desk, a wealth-management book, a modest capital-markets unit, an insurance-broking arm, an FX-payments platform, a startup accelerator, a corporate-card business, a small trust-services desk, and a legacy pensions administration function acquired seven years ago. None of the eleven, on any dimension the board can measure, is best in class. Several are subscale. Two are dilutive to group ROE.

What the board asked for. The chair, at Karim's first offsite, put it in plain language: "I don't want a strategic plan. I want a strategy. Come back with the three things we will not do in the next twenty-four months, and the two we will do so well that a competitor would find us hard to displace."

What Karim inherited. A 47-page strategy memo from his predecessor. It contains, in decreasing order of frequency, the words optimisation, alignment, transformation, capability, framework, and, exactly twice, the word customer. It contains no verbs of the form 'we will stop'. It contains no verbs of the form 'we will not offer'.