Lloyds leads the charge back to simple banking Mr Horta-Osorio is readying the bank to bring forward the implementation date when Lloyds will achieve the ring-fence. As with PPI, the Portuguese banker hopes to front-run his competitors and show that Lloyds does "get" that BMW (bitching, moaning and whining) by the banks is not the best formula for regaining public trust. Lloyds would dearly love to be the first to achieve the change, and well before the notional 2019 deadline. After his "sojourn" over stress-related issues at the end of last year, friends of Mr Horta-Osorio say he is back to full speed. Every quarter he sticks to a clear narrative. Lloyds wants to get back to being a very simple, plainest of vanilla retail bank, he says, writing down as rapidly as possible its toxic non-core assets in commercial real estate and concentrating on a core business that achieved 15pc return on equity in the first half of 2012. If it's messy and happened BAA (Before Antonio Arrived) get rid of it and tell everyone you are doing so. If it happened AAA (After Antonio Arrived) then ensure it is operating to target. Accelerated cost savings, decreases in non-core assets and a reduction in the loan to value of the mortgage book are all running ahead of plan. Against, the low interest rate environment - which will last much longer than initially thought - and regulatory costs still weigh heavy. Since the beginning of the year, Lloyds" share price is up 10.7pc. In the same period, Barclays" has fallen 15pc. Before RBS announced its share restructure, its price was down nearly 5pc. A year ago, many would have predicted that RBS would be the first bank to start selling its Government stake. Stephen Hester, the chief executive, even began mapping out an informal schedule for a sale of separate tranches - to sovereign wealth funds initially. Now Lloyds could be edging ahead in the race to lose its public ownership tag. It is still a long way off the 74p the Government bought in at, but Mr Horta-Osorio is working to a two-to-four year time frame. With a bank valued at just 0.5 book value, the share price rise is likely to continue. Follow the money There will likely be much gnashing of teeth and wailing this week when Centrica announces something of a profits bounce-back. At its half-year numbers, consensus estimates are suggesting an operating profit of £352m in its British Gas Retail division - up 26pc on last year - and an overall adjusted operating profit of £1.45bn for the whole group. The problem for Sam Laidlaw, the CEO, is that his profits are obviously linked to the gas and electricity bills paid up and down the country. Big numbers are therefore often equated with big (negative) headlines. The bounce-back can be put down to the very warm weather in the first half of 2011, which significantly reduced demand. Over the 2012 full year it is likely Centrica will be hitting similar numbers to 2011. To try to explain how it makes its money, Centrica has alighted on a clever transparency wheeze that shows the collected costs of providing energy to people. Bills are now broken down into "external costs" and "our costs." In the former, for gas, comes the cost of the commodity in the wholesale market (56pc), the delivery cost (21pc) and the Government-imposed costs of green levies and social policies (10pc). That leaves Centrica's own 8pc operating costs (which are coming down) and the final profit figure (5pc). Electricity costs offer a similar breakdown, although the costs of Government levies are far higher at nearly 20pc of the cost of the bill. Mr Laidlaw hopes that such a breakdown will help to avoid the Centrica blame game when it comes to the company's revenues. Negative headlines aside, the bigger problem for Centrica is that it finds itself horribly exposed to Whitehall dithering on some of the key challenges for the UK's future energy needs. First there is the issue of planning and providing new wind farms. The Treasury and the Department for Environment have still to come to an agreement on the subsidy level and now appear to be at war on the matter, with George Osborne pushing for a lower number. Put together with the endless delays over new nuclear, and you can understand why Mr Laidlaw sees North America as a more attractive investment proposition than the UK.