Barry Shailer will have plenty to do in retirement.

Although hanging up his banker's hat this Friday, Mr. Shailer - who has been with the Bank of Bermuda for 33 years and in the post of chief compliance officer since 2000 - will take up management of a local company.

Mr. Shailer (pictured) said: "I have been happy to work long hours but I wanted to have a little more time for myself and to travel a bit more with my wife, Pam, and family. But I am taking on the management of a small group of exempt companies here in Bermuda. But that is not meant to be a full-time position, otherwise I would stay at the bank," he said.

Mr. Shailer ends his career with the bank after a marathon of responsibilities in recent years. Not only did Mr. Shailer oversee the bank meeting technological Y2K compliance at the turn of the century but he has also been engrossed over the last three years in preparations for the bank's listing on the US stock exchange Nasdaq.

The listing, which is technically a secondary listing as the bank was already listed on the Bermuda Stock Exchange, was completed earlier this year.

Mr. Shailer said: "There is a lot of preparation that a corporation has to go through for this (listing), to really prepare for the kind of intense scrutiny that the company is going to come under by analysts and by regulators.

"In addition there are certain corporate governance and management structures that must be in place and functioning the way they should be. And it was necessary to demonstrate that the client mechanism in the bank was of a global standard," he said.

Looking back this week, Mr. Shailer reflected on the vast changes that have taken place at the bank during his tenure of more than three decades.

Sitting in his fifth floor office with views over Hamilton Harbour, Mr. Shailer remembered that when he came to Bermuda in 1969 the bank had not even grown to fit its Front Street office. "At that time, the fifth floor was rented out to Conyers, Dill & Pearman. But in three decades I have seen the bank expand to operations in effectively 14 countries around the world. "This has been my life for 33 years, it really has," he added.

Mr. Shailer said he has also seen significant change in the way the bank is run: "You can imagine how Bermuda-centric our organisation was especially in senior management in the last 60s and 70s."

Looking back over the years Mr. Shailer concluded that the bank has now become a global organisation, and he cited the company's Luxembourg office where there are 16 different nationalities working out of approximately 250 employees.