Antony Jenkins' steel and passion tested in Barclays results

Barclays chairman Sir David Walker once described his chief executive Antony Jenkins as a mixture of "stainless steel and passion".

To sceptics, those may sound like the perfect ingredients for a car crash. But Mr Jenkins hopes to prove he is a safe pair of hands when he presents annual results and his new five-year strategy for the bank on Tuesday.

Dubbed Saint Antony by some City wags, he has made it his mission to clean up the bank's image, which was tarnished by a string of scandals culminating in a £290m fine for Libor rate manipulation and the ousting of his predecessor Bob Diamond.

His campaign to bring ethics back into banking will continue on Tuesday with his eight-point "balanced scorecard" including two financial targets and six "good citizen" objectives to improve relations with customers, staff and broader society.

Even though Mr Jenkins set a five to 10-year time horizon to achieve his ethical cleansing of Barclays, recent events have been conspiring against him.

The bank is still reeling from the revelation over the weekend that it suffered one of the worst customer data breaches in years caused by the alleged theft of personal details of at least 2,000 and potentially up to 27,000 of its customers.

In addition, Barclays is one of at least 15 banks being probed by regulators around the world for alleged rigging of the foreign exchange market. It recently suspended six employees in this area including its chief currency trader in London.

The pay issue is also plaguing the bank. Mr Jenkins has stressed the need for restraint and this month waived his bonus for the second year running. But the bank's overall bonus pool is still likely to rise from £2.2bn of total incentive payments in 2012.

In addition, the bank has been criticised for sidestepping a new EU rule capping bonuses to a year's salary - or twice that level with shareholder approval - by paying cash-based allowances that can be adjusted upwards or downwards each year.

To compound all this, Hector Sants, the former head of the UK financial regulator who Mr Jenkins appointed to fix the bank's compliance culture, stepped down in November on the grounds of stress and exhaustion.

For the 52-year-old Mr Jenkins, who joined Barclays as a graduate trainee in a London branch in the 1980s, one of the biggest challenges is to convince sceptics that his plan to change the bank's culture is more than empty rhetoric.

The understated chief executive, whose first job was as a grocery shop shelf-stacker, has bold plans to cut the bank's costs from their existing level above many of its rivals at 70 per cent of its income.

The Financial Times reported last month that he aims to reduce its 1,600-strong UK branch network by a quarter - something the bank has said he will not announce with Tuesday's results. But last year he reportedly told a private meeting of investors that the bank's total staff numbers could fall from 140,000 to 100,000.

A retail banker by background who ran Barclaycard and the branch network before becoming Barclays' chief executive, Mr Jenkins clearly becomes less comfortable when discussing the investment bank. But here, analysts also expect him to wield the axe by shedding more assets to meet tougher Basel III leverage ratio targets.

Shares in Barclays have risen almost two-thirds since Mr Jenkins took over in August 2012, outperforming many of its rivals. To keep this up he must progress towards his target for a return on equity above the bank's cost of capital by next year.

Yet for the Barclays chief to truly silence the sceptics he must hope that the steady stream of scandal haunting the bank will finally dry up. And for this he will need both passion and a steely resolve.

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