Welcome to your weekly digest of for board directors — with our musings and must-reads for directors.

Up first this week, I question the nostalgia sparked by Santander’s decision to roll TSB into its global brand, alongside top stories on activist investor nuns, co-CEOs and patience.

If you want to catch up on recent briefings, you can explore the FT Infosys Board Network hub, where you’ll find links to FT.com articles, research and our archive of newsletters.

Do you have comments or suggestions for us? Send them to me at Andrew Hill at andrew.hill@ft.com or Kate Hodge at kate.hodge@ft.com.

Thanks for reading.

Bank directors have so much on their plate, given the complex regulatory and governance burdens they shoulder, that I dare say when “branding” appears on the agenda, they must breathe a sigh of relief.

I have no idea whether a proposal for Santander to sweep UK subsidiary TSB into the global brand even made it to the group’s board, but if it did, it must have been easy to approve.

The Spanish bank has a declared objective “to be recognised under a single, global brand”. Nobody was ever likely to make a case that the former Trustee Savings Bank should be an exception. Nostalgia about the removal of TSB from the high street after two centuries is overblown. 

Technically, the headlines are correct. The Trustee Savings Bank traces its roots back to the parish savings bank founded by Scottish cleric Henry Duncan in 1810. TSB made a big deal of those origins when it was spun off by Lloyds after the financial crisis, a price demanded by the European Commission in exchange for agreeing to the government bailout of its parent.

But even then, the connection was a stretch. TSB went on to besmirch whatever reputation it had tried to recreate by bungling the transfer of data from Lloyds to its owner Sabadell of Spain in 2018.

Bank branding and marketing exercises invariably try to project an image of friendliness, efficiency and probity that is contradicted by customers’ experience of chilliness, chaos and occasional scandal. Few banks with global brands seem to offer an actual global service to retail customers.

As Santander’s consolidation marches on, TSB’s 5,000 staff face the uncertainty of takeover and possible restructuring. The loss of the battered old brand will be the least of their concerns.

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz might be small — with fewer than 300 lawyers and one New York office — but it has become corporate law powerhouse.

However, its model is being challenged by the Big Law era and rivals are poaching talent with vast pay packages.

“Wachtell hasn’t changed in a long time . . . but the world has changed around it,” says one former partner who recently quit to join a rival firm.

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My top FT picks

‘I don’t see it as fighting’: the nun challenging Citibank and Palantir Shareholder activism: Sister Susan Francois believes shareholder advocacy holds the key to ‘better’ corporate behaviour Why co-CEOs might suit our tumultuous times People: Conventional wisdom suggests leadership is best done alone. But with all the churn and disruption, might two heads be better than one? Why the Schroder family sold up M&A: The sale of the UK’s largest independent asset manager comes after the death of a patriarch and the rise of giant US funds Apple, Berkshire and the virtue of patience Strategy: Waiting for outstanding opportunities has paid off but it is getting increasingly difficult

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1. For women on boards, prestige can be a bottleneck | Harvard Business Review The research profiled in this article shows an interesting paradox for board diversity. It found that: “Women who reach elite board positions are on average more likely than men to receive additional appointments, but that advantage reverses at the most prominent firms”.

2. What global turmoil means for company structure | MIT Sloan Management Review A fascinating article which argues that companies must recalibrate their organisation, supply chains and governance “to remain globally connected yet geopolitically separable to retain market access across competing blocks”.

3. Split decisions: The BCG CEOs and boards survey | BCG This report finds five areas where bosses and directors differ about AI including that chief executives are concerned “AI hype may be distorting boardroom judgment”.

   Board Network is written by Andrew Hill, and researched and edited by Kate Hodge.