Sir Nicholas Goodison, magisterial Stock Exchange chairman who oversaw the ‘Big Bang’ – obituary

Sir Nicholas Goodison, who has died aged 87, was an unusually cerebral chairman of the London Stock Exchange who played a leading role in the 1980s reform of City securities markets known as "Big Bang". He was also chairman of TSB – and outside business life, a noted connoisseur of 18th-century clocks, barometers and decorative objects. Nicholas Goodison was the third-generation head of the stockbroking firm of Quilter Goodison when he was elected chairman of the Stock Exchange in January 1976, but one City columnist observed that "central casting could never have supplied this angular ambitious aesthete as a typical stockbroker". Behind his donnish and patrician manner, however, was an almost revolutionary zeal for change in a market still stuck in ways that would have been familiar to his grandfather in the late 19th century. Much earlier than most of his fellow practitioners, Goodison formed the view that the Exchange's traditional "single capacity" separation of market-making (by jobbers) from client sales functions (by brokers), combined with fixed minimum commissions, was out of tune with the way modern securities markets in London and elsewhere were developing. The future, he observed, lay in more efficient "dual capacity" (the two functions side by… Read full this story

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