Trevor Matthews was in ebullient mood in his first day in the office at Friends Provident, the embattled insurer where he is now chief executive.

The affable Australian, fresh from six months of gardening leave after Friends poached him from Standard Life in Edinburgh, has spent most of the day in internal meetings at the firm's head offfice in Dorking, Surrey, getting to know his new staff.

"It's been a good day," Mr Matthews told Times Online, joking that his new office was probably not as big as at his previous employer, where he could look out at Edinburgh castle from the firm's modern headquarters south of the city centre.

"I've got a nice tree there though," he said.

But Mr Matthews, who has relocated his family from Scotland to a home in West London, will have to hit the ground running in his new job.

He joins a company trying hard to rebuild its reputation after being spurned as a merger partner by Resolution, the closed life funds consolidator, late last year.

Friends Provident, which ousted its previous boss, Philip Moore, in the wake of the collapsed merger, is streamlining itself as a life and pensions player in its new guise.

Mr Matthews arrives at the firm just a week before it is scheduled to update the City on two asset sales: the sale of Lombard, the tax driven investment firm, and its plan to offload its 52 per cent stake in F&C Asset Management, the fund manager.

Mr Matthews was tight-lipped about the process today, stating only that the strategy was proceeding and an update would be forthcoming next week.

But he said there was "no reason" why Friends could not be returned to its former glory, when it was the UK's number four life and pensions provider and beloved by the country's legions of financial advisers.

"My job is to restore its perception to where it should be," Mr Matthews said.

He said he had no plans to make substantial changes to Friends strategy over the coming months, arguing that the firm had strong foundations in its group pensions business and life insurance sales division.

From that, he aims to capitalise on its increasingly strong international arm, Mr Matthews said.

He has clearly been busy, despite his six month break. Having rented a property, he has now bought a house for his family and found a preparatory school for his children in south-west London.

Mr Matthews, an extremely popular executive internally at Standard Life, described his exit as "tumultuous at the time". With Friends still surrounded by permanent takeover speculation, that tumult is likely to continue.

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