Pablo Sanchez had grown accustomed to the calls from headhunters. As the national director of consumer banking at JPMorgan Chase, Sanchez was prized quarry. For executive search firms, going after Pablo Sanchez was the equivalent of big game hunting.

Good luck with that. Sanchez was already comfortably entrenched at one of the industry’s biggest and most storied names, so he had become skilled at mostly ignoring the headhunters’ entreaties, sometimes listening just long enough to find out whether the position might be suitable for a friend or colleague.

Things changed the day a woman from the executive search firm of Russell Reynolds called and pronounced four letters that riveted his attention: HSBC.

The mammoth London-based bank with a sprawling transcontinental footprint encompassing 71 countries and territories and more than 47 million customers, was looking for a new head of its retail banking and wealth management divisions in the United States.