Charlotte Hogg is in talks about a rapid return to a top City job less than four months after resigning from the Bank of England amid a row over her failure to disclose a conflict of interest.
Sky News can reveal that Ms Hogg has been offered the post of chief executive of Visa Europe, the payments giant which handles the vast majority of debit card transactions carried out in the UK.
A source close to the Bank of England said this weekend that Visa Europe had held preliminary talks with it about the implications of Ms Hogg taking on the role.
If she does land the job, it would mark a quickfire comeback for Ms Hogg, who was effectively forced to resign as deputy governor of the Bank of England in March.
She had failed to disclose that her brother worked in a senior role at Barclays, one of the biggest lenders overseen by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) – a subsidiary of the Bank of England.
MPs on the Treasury Select Committee said that her conduct “fell short of the very high standards required”, and argued that her misdemeanour was compounded by the fact that she had played a key role in drawing up the central bank’s code of conduct.
Her abrupt exit was a humbling experience for an executive whose career had been marked by frequent plaudits and promotion.
Ms Hogg’s mother, Baroness Hogg, is a former chair of the Financial Reporting Council and current non-executive director of the Financial Conduct Authority.
Ms Hogg had only been appointed as deputy governor for markets and banking since 1 March, having held the role of chief operating officer since 2013.
She previously worked for McKinsey, the consulting firm, at the Wall Street investment bank Morgan Stanley and at Experian, the credit referencing firm, and more recently at Santander UK.
Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, expressed sympathy for Ms Hogg when she resigned in March, saying:
“While I fully respect her decision taken in accordance of her view of what was the best for this institution, I deeply regret that Charlotte Hogg has chosen to resign from the Bank of England.”
It is not clear whether the Bank of England or the Payment Systems Regulator will need to formally approve any application from Visa Europe to appoint Ms Hogg, but one City observer indicated that there was unlikely to be any formal objection.
At Visa Europe, Ms Hogg would head one of the most systemically important companies operating in the global payments industry.
Visa Europe is now a subsidiary of the New York-listed Visa Inc, which paid more than £17bn to acquire it last year.
The takeover handed huge windfalls to a large number of banks, including Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group, which were all shareholders in the payments company.
Other backers included Worldpay, which was itself the subject of a £9bn takeover bid this week from US-based rival Vantiv.
A flurry of mergers and takeovers in the payments sector have served to underline the rapidly evolving and consolidating nature of the industry as technology drives down the cost of transactions forces companies to adapt to changing consumer behaviour.
Those trends were apparent last month when Visa announced that it was making a strategic investment in Klarna, a fast-growing European online payments company.
Visa Europe has been searching for a new boss to replace Nicolas Huss, who left to join Ingenico, a French payments group.
The company’s European operations are based in the UK, although there is a possibility that some jobs will have to relocate to a country within the EU after Brexit because of strict data requirements.
A Visa Europe spokeswoman declined to comment on its talks with Ms Hogg on Saturday.
Source: Sky