Alan Thompson was the man at the helm of Butterfield Bank through eight years of growth and success, culminating in near collapse.

By the time the bank's board of directors asked him to resign early this year, two years before his contract was due to expire, he was no longer the darling of shareholders that he had been a few years earlier.

CEOs, like football coaches, take the bulk of the credit or the blame for their organisations' results, regardless of the contributions of others in the team. Such is the responsibility that comes with leadership.

By the end of his tenure, Mr. Thompson's results did not look too good. The bank's shareholders' equity had been in the area of $300 million when he took over at the start of 2002.

By the end of the first quarter, just after Mr. Thompson's departure, the bank's shareholders' equity was just under $750 million. But if issuances of new equity were discounted, in the form of $200 million of preference shares in June 2009 and $550 million of new investors' capital in March this year, shareholders' equity would have been zero. And the share price had plunged to $1.45.

Mr. Thompson was no novice by the time he succeeded Calum Johnston as Butterfield CEO in January, 2002. The American, the holder of an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance, arrived in Bermuda with 30 years of banking experience.

Between 1996 and 2001, he was CEO of Riyadh Bank in Saudi Arabia, which had total assets of $18.5 billion at the end of 2001, when he stood down. Before that, he had enjoyed a 23-year career at First Interstate Bancorp, in the US and in Singapore. His focus from the start was clear. In a July 2002 interview with The Royal Gazette, Mr. Thompson spoke about his preferred measure of performance — return on equity. "In the January to March quarter our return on equity was 20.8 percent," Mr. Thompson said. "That is down from previous quarters, but looking at it on an international scale it still puts us on a very high performance level."

One source who worked at the bank during part of Mr. Thompson's tenure, said the 20 percent ROE was a key target for the CEO. He managed to repeatedly surpass it. In the six years between 2002 and 2007, only 2003's 19.75 percent return on common equity failed to better the target.

Another of Mr. Thompson's publicly stated key objectives was the creation of shareholder wealth. In November 2003, he was quoted as saying: "In today's world of corporate governance, we have to focus on shareholder value — everything is driven by shareholder value." During the first few years at the bank's helm, shareholders did see their wealth grow rapidly. In August 2003, Butterfield declared the first of five 10 percent stock dividends during Mr. Thompson's time in charge, as profits soared 43 percent to $19.9 million despite a low interest rate environment.

The good times continued to roll. In September 2005, Mr. Thompson said in a speech at the Rotary Club that Butterfield shareholders who had reinvested dividends in bank shares from January 2003 had seen a 117 percent increase in shareholder value. "It is quite favourable," the CEO added. In comparison, a similar investment in the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Index over the same period had increased in value by 21.3 percent. "The business model appears to be working," Mr. Thompson said.

Along the way, Butterfield was making acquisitions and expanding into new jurisdictions. In 2003 and 2004, Butterfield purchased three Nassau financial institutions to give itself a foothold in the Bahamas, as well as a bank in Barbados and the Leopold Joseph bank in London, known as the bank to stars including The Rolling Stones.

In October 2007, Butterfield acquired wealth management group Bentley Reid Group, with offices in Hong Kong, Malta and London and $500 million under management. The bank also opened asset management and trust operations in Switzerland.

The profits were skyrocketing. Net income topped $100 million for the first time in 2005 and in 2007 had reached a record $146 million. Mr. Thompson, a family man with three daughters, was also establishing himself and his bank's charitable arm as one of the Island's most active philanthropists.

But by the end of 2007, there were signs that the Butterfield success story might be too good to be true, as the bank's exposure to the emerging sub-prime mortgage crisis became clearer. At the bank's annual general meeting in 2008, the mood was upbeat as shareholders had the previous year's record profits on which to reflect on. The popular CEO reassured shareholders that the bank was weathering the sub-prime crisis well.

"As at December 31, 2007, the bank's investment in US residential collateralised mortgage obligations (CMOs) totalled $479 million, with a fair value of $371 million, reflecting the general widening of credit spreads," Mr. Thompson said. "Based on our analysis, we believe the bank will collect all amounts due." He added that the bank had ceased further investment in asset-backed securities in mid-2007, which had "proved a wise decision".

Things went rapidly downhill for Mr. Thompson and the bank from there. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on September 2008 and the consequent credit crisis hit the bank's investment portfolio hard and brought hundreds of millions of dollars in further write-downs of its mortgage-linked securities. The CEO's string of 20-plus percent ROE years came to an abrupt halt. The ROE for 2008 was 0.84 percent and negative 51 percent for 2009. The Butterfield train was coming off the rails.

The CEO's efforts to raise capital to ensure Butterfield could withstand the impact of a severe downturn came to naught, as no money was available at remotely reasonable interest rates. The $200 million preference share capital raise followed, after shareholders had grilled Mr. Thompson at a special meeting to give permission for the issuance. As the bank's share price plummeted, dividends were cut and then suspended. The dramatic about-turn in Butterfield's fortunes led to the departure of the entire senior management team. Stalwarts such as former executive vice-president, international Graham Brooks, Butterfield Asset Management managing director Ian Coulman and chief financial officer Richard Ferrett all departed last year. Finally, the bank announced that Mr. Thompson had "retired" at the end of February. Later chairman Robert Mulderig clarified to shareholders that he had been asked to retire.

For most of his eight years at Butterfield, Mr. Thompson took the bank to ever greater heights, but he will be best remembered for the dramatic fall at the end. It was the risks he and his team accumulated in achieving some of those remarkable results that eventually proved to be his downfall.