I know it is fashionable to hate banks.
I believe it was always fashionable to hate banks, even well before the subprime circus.
The reason being that banks are notoriously bad at bonding with the public.
In the post-Madoff era, you would think that they would go out of their way to shed off the stiff language of the past and try something new.
This is why watching Standard Chartered’s video “Building a Sustainable Business” made my heart sink.
Actually, my heart went out to the communicator who had to put the video together. Convincing senior management of the need to switch communications style can feel like a Sisyphean task in a financial institution. Believe me, I have been there.
It is time to go beyond worn-out lines like “reshaping the banking industry” and making “a contribution to broader challenges”.
People are too wary of banks these days. This kind of language does very little to comfort them.
So what is the answer?
Listening to the public.
In her latest book “Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth”, Margaret Atwood writes about the collapse of a narrative according to which people for many years understood their lives. People’s trust in a society that encouraged them to incur debt has been destroyed.
How do you recover from that? The wounds are too deep. Banks will have to heal them first before thinking of rebuilding trust.
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