Only a handful of candidates remain for the post of chairman of J Sainsbury and the smart money is moving to David Tyler, the former finance director of GUS.

Mr Tyler, chairman of Logica, the software group, has emerged as the front-runner to succeed Sir Philip Hampton, who is stepping down to become chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland.

John McAdam, the Rentokil chairman and a Sainsbury’s non-executive director, is leading the search with Egon Zehnder, the City headhunting firm, but hopes of naming a successor before the annual meeting on Wednesday next week have been abandoned.

John Peace, the former GUS chief executive and the early favourite, is out of the running, having accepted the chairmanship of Standard Chartered. Two other names often mentioned — Niall FitzGerald, Thomson Reuters’ deputy chairman, and Sir Crispin Davis, the former Reed Elsevier chief executive — are also understood to be non-runners.

That leaves Mr Tyler, 56, as the man to catch. The chairmanship of Sainsbury’s would cap a business career that has taken in corporate life and the City and which began at Unilever, one of Sainsbury’s biggest trading partners.

Educated at Rendcomb College, Cirencester, Mr Tyler read Economics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before joining the consumer goods giant, where he remained for 11 years. In 1986, he moved to County NatWest, the investment bank. Three years later, he became finance director of Christie’s, the auctioneer. He served on the board for seven years before it moved its group headquarters to New York in 1997.

Mr Tyler, who married his wife, Sharon, in 1977 and has a son and a daughter, decided not to uproot his family and soon afterwards joined GUS as finance director — supervising its complex demerger.

He subsquently became deputy chairman and then chairman of Logica, where, alongside Andy Green, the chief executive, he has presided over a turnaround. Other directorships include Reckitt Benckiser, another big trading partner of Sainsbury’s, which he would be expected to give up should he succeed Sir Philip.

Bob Wigley, chairman of Yell, who knows him well, said that Mr Tyler would make an excellent Sainsbury’s chairman: “He’s very solid, very analytical. At GUS he was a thinking man’s finance director — almost a chief operating officer. He’s totally trustworthy, completely straight, very commercial and a very nice bloke.”