Adrian Evans

Anyone looking at the curriculum vitae of the banker Adrian Evans, who has died aged 60 - Stowe school, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Lazard - might feel that here was a predictable City figure. How wrong they would be. Not that he rejected the establishment - indeed, he prospered in the mainstream of London power and influence - but to that world he brought radicalism, humanity and wisdom.

Evans's management ability would have taken him to the top in any field, but his charitable work received the same energy and thought as his business life. He chaired the Gap work-placement scheme for young people awaiting university, and, in1997, became a founder-trustee of the Stowe House Preservation Trust, which secured lottery funding for the building's preservation.

He was a governor of Stowe from 1988 to 1999, a founder trustee of the Cliveden Trust, and actively involved in work for Goodenough College, the postgraduate centre in Mecklenburgh Square, Bloomsbury.

Evans was the son of the theatrical agent Lawrence Evans and the actor Barbara Waring, but the couple divorced shortly after his birth and he was to develop a strong relationship with his mother's second husband, Geoffrey Cunliffe, chairman of British Aluminium.

An unsettled childhood, for all its sadness, can lay the foundations for exceptional and positive behaviour, and Adrian's ability to reach out to people, his curiosity and relish for life, probably came from that background of showbusiness frailties mixed with the expectations of corporate life.

Educated at St Ronan's preparatory school, Hawkhurst, Kent, and Stowe - where he was head boy - he read history at Cambridge, before joining Citibank, in New York and Dublin. In 1971, he moved to First National Financial Corporation, just as it was about to be hit by the secondary banking crisis; his negotiating skills won it a larger slice of the Bank of England's rescue fund than any other bank.

Five years later, he joined Grindlays, where, until 1985, he headed its Indian business operation; it was India that inspired Evans to broaden the lives of so many students through the Gap scheme.

Back in London, he became chief executive of Benchmark, before joining Lazard in 1991. In 1995, he was appointed deputy chief executive, and chief executive five years later. Last year, he became chief executive of Lazard worldwide.

Evans's interests extended beyond Britain and made him more European than his contemporaries. Colleagues were surprised that he had a house not in Wiltshire, like many bankers, but in Maugny, near Geneva.

He is survived by two daughters from his 1962 marriage to Caroline Ireland; they divorced in 1981, and their son died in 1989. In 1983, he married Ingela Byng; she also survives him, as do his two stepsons, and his father.

· Laurence Adrian Waring Evans, banker, born June 19 1941; died April 14 2002

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