As a child, I was taught to admire people in certain professions. One of these professions was the local banker. The banker was someone you needed to know, someone you could trust and someone you could hopefully turn to in times of desperation. This remained true up until the last couple of years. Since then, has the banking profession been losing stature as a trusted advisor and as a respected profession?
I remember an Organization Develeopment saying, “to understand a system, you have to stress the system.” In recent years, that’s exactly what we’ve done, with the banking system being front and center. We’ve exposed the system by stressing the system. By doing this, multitudes of silent problems were exposed. What we found was not what we may have expected or wanted. We saw a world of high finance gone awry. We discovered a system where taking high risks were rewarded. We found a system with too few controls, and boards that were unwilling to challenge the system. We discovered a system that was highly, yet ineffectively regulated. Now in the aftermath, new problems are surfacing.
Today, news relating to the banking industry is front and center with news articles like, Overdraft fees wallop debit-card users by Alexis Leondis from Bloomberg News surfacing. It discusses how consumers are moving from credit cards to debit cards due to lowered credit lines, inactive accounts being closed, and to avoid avoid excessive fees (”debit cards will be used in 60.2% of card transactions in 2010, according to a Nilson Report”). One would think that debit cards would be safer, however this may not be the case, due to overdraft charges, according to the article.
It’s articles like this that begin to raise the bigger question of the future role of the banker-client relationship. As a group chair with Vistage International, the banker relationship has surfaced more than once in our discussions. In some instances, the relationship remains healthy, and positive. In other instances, the relationship has grown strained and negative. Unfortunately, its the latter that appears to have grown in frequency in the past year. With the economy stabilizing, and the future looking just a little brighter, maybe the banker can regain its role as a valued and trusted advisor. If not, the banking industry will simply become a commodity business, which would be huge loss.
Your thoughts?
