Lies, damned lies... and laughable statistics

by Robin Amlôt
Surveys have a tendency to bring out the schoolboy in me. I can’t help it. It’s just that some of the numbers that get generated make me giggle. I’m sorry. Let me give you an example from PwC’s 16th annual Global CEO Survey. According to the survey results for banking and capital markets CEOs, 54 per cent see lack of trust in the industry as a threat to growth. So what?

You might well ask. I turn that number on its head and arrive at a statistic which tells me that 46 per cent of CEOs surveyed within the banking and capital markets sector either don’t give a hoot about the fact that they are considered untrustworthy or, perhaps, even view it as a positive benefit for growth prospects. Huh?

Here’s another example, 61 per cent of banking and capital markets CEOs are increasing their focus on ways to support a culture of ethical behaviour. Turn that on its head and you have 39 per cent of them apparently not interested in supporting a culture of ethical behaviour!

I suppose we should be grateful that the survey also tells us that 71 per cent of banking and capital markets CEOs have made growing their customer base a top three investment priority and that 89 per cent are planning to strengthen customer engagement.

Then come the duck-billed platitudes; take this, quoted from a bank in Hungary although I imagine it is the kind of PR-speak that many bankers are now being told to spout, “Clearly, the most important stakeholders are our clients because, quite simply, without them we would be out of business.”

Yes indeed, but do you believe? I said, DO YOU BELIEVE? Let me hear you say, “I believe!” My apologies for turning revivalist there but it really is the kind of comment that should be true, should be taken to be true and yet is little more than meaningless white noise.

I believe that this is underlined by the more than four-fifths (81 per cent) of financial sector CEOs who apparently see over-regulation as a threat to growth. This from a global industry, some of whose members have proved to be as safe and reliable as an arsonist in a gunpowder factory!

It would be nice to think that the banker who told PwC, “The bank is a business, but we also feel responsible for contributing to the country’s economic development. We have a business, but if we do not comply with the objective of being agents of economic progress through offering credit, we are not fulfilling our fundamental role of distributing the savings in the economy,” meant every word.

Regaining customer trust, both corporate and consumer, is a matter of transparency. Adam Smith had it right more than 200 years ago when he noted that whenever traders meet in private, ‘the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices’.

To succeed in banking in the post-financial crisis, brave new world of this decade, you should be taking advantage of changing technologies to improve customer service, lower costs and increase speed to market; improving customer transparency while getting customer targeting and cross-sale opportunities right; and, ego notwithstanding, be prepared to cut your losses both moral and financial by simplifying operations and exiting underperforming businesses and assets. It is time, as Barclays CEO Antony Jenkins recently told legislators in the UK to start ‘shredding’ a banking culture that has been both ‘aggressive’ and ‘self-serving’.

Read this article in cpifinancial.net