BRADFORD & Bingley is poised to appoint Richard Pym, the former boss of Alliance & Leicester, as its new chief executive.

The announcement of Pym’s appointment could come as early as tomorrow and will bring an end to a search for a replacement for Steven Crawshaw, who stepped down in June for health reasons.

The company hopes that the appointment of City veteran Pym will signify the end of a tumultuous period for the country's biggest buy-to-let lender.

B&B raised £400m in a rights issue last week but institutional investors took up only 20 per cent of the new shares.

The rights issue twice had to be restructured after TPG, the American private equity group, pulled out of a deal to inject fresh capital in exchange for a near-quarter stake in the struggling group.

Crawshaw quit in the midst of the turmoil, forcing Rod Kent, the chairman, to take over as acting chief executive. Headhunters are looking for his replacement as well.

With its balance sheet strengthened and greater clarity now over its leadership, B&B is expected to step up efforts to find a bidder. There had been fears that the search for a successor for Crawshaw could be drawn out over many months given the difficulty of B&B’s position.

The company relies on the wholesale funding markets for nearly half of its needs. That market has seen rates soar and avaibility shrink as the credit crunch has worsened. Its heavy exposure to the buy-to-let market amid the plummeting housing market has also worried investors. B&B has lost 70 per cent of its market value in the past six months alone.

Some analysts expect the company to follow in the footsteps of Pym’s former employer, A&L. The small lender, heavily exposed to the troubled mortgage market, agreed to sell out to Santander of Spain last month rather than try to continue on its own.

Pym’s arrival will be welcomed by the City. He spent 15 years at A&L before stepping down last summer.

Earlier this year he agreed to take over as chief executive at Northern Rock as part of the JC Flowers’s failed attempt to buy the lender.

Pym, 58, is chairman of the retailer Halfords and is also a non-executive director of Old Mutual, the investment group. He has served on the board of retailer Selfridges and held finance and management roles at British Gas, BAT and Burton.

His will be one of the most challenging jobs in the City. The paltry take-up of last week’s rights issue means that much of the slack will be taken up by UBS and Citigroup, the underwriters, as well as six other banks and four top shareholders who signed up as sub-underwriters: Standard Life, Legal & General, M&G and Insight.

Most of B&B’s roughly 1m retail shareholders are thought to have shunned the deal.

The lender’s shares ended Friday at 55.25p, just a quarter of a penny above the 55p issue price.

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