After six years in London running Barclays PLC's U.K. branch network, Deanna Oppenheimer is planning to return to the United States.
The Telegraph of London reported last week that Oppenheimer, 53, will leave Barclays at the end of this year to pursue new career opportunities, perhaps outside of the financial services industry.
The report said that Oppenheimer, named last year as American Banker Magazine's second-most powerful woman in banking, is expected to return to her home in the Seattle area, where her family still resides.
Oppenheimer is a former head of marketing at Washington Mutual Inc., where she helped transform the Seattle thrift into a national retail-banking player. (Washington Mutual failed in 2008 and was taken over by JPMorgan Chase & Co.) Barclays brought Oppenheimer on in 2005 to fix its underperforming branch network and later promoted her to vice chairman of global retail banking, which includes oversight of the bank's credit card operations.
The Telegraph said that Ashok Vaswani, currently the head of Barclays Africa, will take over as chief executive of U.K. banking and that Anthony Jenkins, the CEO of Barclays retail and business banking, will take over her other roles.
