The front line
The missing word

The chiefs of nine leading UK banks launch the Chartered Banker Professional Standards Board. SIMON THOMPSON welcomes this major initiative supporting the Institute’s long campaign to create sustainable, professional foundations for our industry.

You might search diligently through all 147,000-odd words in the historic report of Sir John Vickers’ Independent Commission on Banking, and I challenge you to find the word “professionalism” anywhere among its profoundly important recommendations.

I’ve looked. I may have missed it and, if that’s so, I’ll be only too happy to stand corrected. But, on my own reading, I’m sad to say “professionalism” just isn’t there.

To be fair, culture wasn’t part of Sir John’s remit. His recommendations certainly aim to change the behaviour of banks. But one key unanswered question in his analysis, surely, is how it’s possible to change an institutional culture without, at the same time, developing and embedding those vital attitudes and behaviours among individual professional bankers which support and give expression to the corporate culture.

Well, I have news for those earnestly seeking an answer. The leaders of nine of the UK’s most important banks, serving more than 70 million UK customers and employing more than 350,000 people working in this country, have this month put their names and the muscle of their organisations behind the launch of the Chartered Banker Professional Standards Board.

Its exciting task is to supply precisely that vital word overlooked by Sir John’s seminal report: the industry’s banking chiefs have declared themselves to be in the business of defining, monitoring and enforcing those key components of ethical awareness and professional competence which, as Lady Susan Rice CBE, a Council Member and the Board’s Chair points out, are central to the restoration of public and consumer trust.

Many have called for this over the years – regulators, politicians, policy-makers and, mostly importantly, as our research consistently demonstrates, customers.

Let’s be clear: this is not yet another regulatory body. Rule-making alone won’t ever be enough. But it is a vigorous demonstration of our conviction that a huge prize can be won for the industry with leaders dedicated to sustain a professional culture. And it is thanks to the efforts of the Fellows and Members of this Institute who strove to maintain professionalism in banking over many lean years that this has come to pass.

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