In choosing Eugene Sheehy as the replacement for Michael Buckley, the board of AIB has delivered a vote of confidence in the bank's management and more significantly its internal culture. In the months since Mr Buckley announced his intention to retire there has been considerable speculation that the Republic's largest bank would look outside its own ranks for a new chief executive in order to draw a line under a number of unhappy events which punctuated an otherwise successful tenure at the top for Mr Buckley.
AIB may have reported the largest ever profit by a quoted Irish company during his watch, but it also lost €691 million in a foreign exchange fraud perpetrated at its US subsidiary. More recently, the bank has been engulfed in a series of overcharging scandals and - most damagingly - it emerged that a number of very senior executives were involved in, and in some cases, may have been facilitated by the bank in tax evasion during the 1990s.
The common thread in all these scandals was a failure of internal management controls and an apparent unwillingness of employees lower down the chain to pass the bad news up to the top level. While an external investigation commissioned by the bank last year may have found no evidence of endemic corruption, the collective reputation of AIB's management was left badly tarnished.
After a 30-year career with the bank, Mr Sheehy is very much a product of AIB's corporate culture, but at the same time there is some daylight between him and the embarrassments of recent years. He was dispatched to Baltimore in the wake of the Rusnak affair and oversaw the subsequent sale of Allfirst to M&T Bank, an outcome which pleased investors. He has spent the past three years working in the US at a senior level with M&T and his absence from Bankcentre insulated him, to a certain extent, from the fall out from last year's damaging revelations.
The choice of Mr Sheehy appears to be acceptable to the financial institutions which are the major shareholders in AIB. Not least because it implies a continuation of the strategy that saw the bank deliver profits of €1.4 billion last year. This no doubt outweighs any lingering concerns they may have about the bank's history of corporate governance failures.
How Mr Sheehy's tenure will play with the bank's customers depends on how successful he is in avoiding the sort of difficulties that dogged his predecessor's time in office and undermined the bond of trust that forms the heart of a bank's relationship with its customers.