Deputy chief's new game is to mind the shop while his boss focuses on China Since he represented Australia at international rugby union in the early 1970s, life has tended to be one big road trip for Peter Sullivan, the new deputy chief executive and general manager for Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong). Having thrived as a global road warrior for three of the most globalised brand names over a 30-year period, Mr Sullivan, 56, reckons he is set for a different kind of challenge. His brief is to keep the show on the road while chief executive and executive director Peter Wong Tung-shun develops the group's Greater China business. 'We consider China to be so strategically important that [group chief executive Mervyn Davies] wants Peter to spend a bit more of his time on looking for opportunity there,' Mr Sullivan said. 'We need him to focus on developing our relationship with government and regulators in China. We came to the realisation that we needed someone to come in to run the business.' That someone was Mr Sullivan, whose track record as head of the group's African operation since 2001 convinced board to put him in a market from which more than 30 per cent of its business comes. 'Here in Hong Kong the bank is very visible and high profile so, if you're a senior person, you have a certain public demand which you'll have to meet,' Mr Sullivan said. He certainly seems to have the credentials of the typical Standard Chartered head. 'During my rugby days, I really travelled extensively with the national team and went all over the world. [It] really opened up my eyes to the opportunities outside the normal life in Australia.' Since switching careers from teaching - his first job after university - and retiring from rugby in the 1970s, Mr Sullivan has worked on most continents in a career that began at Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell before he returned to Sydney with Citibank. At Citibank he also spent time in Chicago, Singapore and London before receiving a call in 1994 from an old colleague - Mr Davies - who had jumped ship to Standard Chartered. 'Mervyn was instrumental in encouraging me to join Standard Chartered. So I left Citi in 1994 to head up corporate banking's cash management business,' Mr Sullivan said. It turned out that a new employer meant more moving - he was sent to Singapore again. This time for three years to head the region's trade and custody business before being moving back to London. It was there the real fun began. After the bank's acquisition of Grindlays Bank in 1999 - a deal that would make Standard Chartered one of the biggest foreign banks in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - Mr Sullivan was appointed to oversee the integration. 'Though I was still based in London, I had to travel like a maniac for the next two years and I was on the road the whole time,' he said. 'I had to go to India all the time because that's where the biggest chunk of the integration was.'