Nasty Banky Boo-Boo

There’s a tiresome kid in the playground called Banky. Banky gets into loads of scrapes. When someone hurts him, he expects you to put a bandage on and get out the Savlon. Poor Banky Boo-Boo. When he wins a fight, he sells you the bandages and the Savlon. Nasty Banky Boo-Boo.

This behaviour is what less deranged people articulate as “Privatize the gains; socialise the losses.”

As interest rates are plumped up like Banky Boo-Boo’s girlfriend’s lips, he makes more money. And he keeps it. The gains are all for him. When Banky Boo-Boo gets hurt, the Government bails him out. Hmmm.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is why most people dislike banks. This power imbalance plays out on a more day-to-day level too. They take 40 minutes after a rate hike to text us about higher costs. And 4 months to notify us about the extra 0.1% interest we might get in cash. The gains are theirs and the losses are ours.

A Rose by any other name would still smell as sweet

Well, not this week. Nigel Farage is having fun masquerading as the Robin Hood of the unbanked people, the Tories are outraged that a high-profile public figure has made a mistake, and the Bankers to Beaglers are reeling as Coutts is plunged into chaos.

Alison Rose clearly made a huge blunder in chatting to a BBC journalist about a customer. I’m sure she will kick herself until the end of time for this moment of muppetry, and regret not going home on 3rd July and putting her PJs on to watch bad telly instead.

But despite my views on banks as institutions, I also think that to err is human, and she was let down by her team. There is a huge difference between arrogant, blatant liars who wilfully bend every rule in sight. (Readers, who could I possibly mean?!) And someone whose brain temporarily dribbles out of their left ear hole for 10 minutes. Isn’t there? I think she was an experienced pair of hands doing a good job at a time of huge instability and I think it’s a shame she’s gone.

Let’s Poke Woke

Another debate is how much do we want or even expect our banks to have a say? To make a stand. Champion values. Have an opinion? The battle on so-called ‘woke capitalism’ is heating up.

Anti-woke sentiment directed at financial services firms is more advanced in the US today. There is a whole website called BlackRockLovesChina.com, where the world’s largest asset manager is taken to task by an angry digital collective who see hypocrisy in the group’s ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ promises and statements. In Florida, the Governor passed legislation to ban state officials from investing public money to promote these ESG goals.

Closer to home, we know people hate greenwashing. One-quarter of investors are put off investing sustainably because of concerns about greenwashing.

I’m sympathetic to this and see huge amounts of posturing and nonsense all around. I personally get gnarled up in minor rage every International Women’s Day as large financial brands post the obligatory ‘YAY LADIES WE LUV YA’ messages, and then do stuff-all for the other 364 days to tackle the Gender Investment Gap beyond issuing press releases articulating the problem.

And when a bank buys some bee hives or donates 0.0001% of profits to social projects, the problem which people have with this is not the undoubted good intentions of mid-level staff, but the perceived hypocrisy. Most of us would rather have a better and fair rate on our cash savings, rather than the ability to select the Meow pronoun on our comms.

But money talks

On the flip side of this, money talks. The only language most large corporates really understand is a financial boot on the neck. I fundamentally and vehemently believe that we have a collective power through our pensions and our ISAs, through the companies we own, to use capital to create change. I don’t think this is woke. I think it’s common bloody sense. This is how we will force change on the issues that really matter. And make long-term money too.

My word is my bond. Sometimes.

So as all the debate about banks, who gets to decide what and woke capitalism rages, the elephant in the room here is the word ‘trust’. The lack of earned trust by nasty Banky Boo-Boo is the problem at the very core of our major financial institutions. Farage is just plugging into the socket of public anger and using it to power his narcissist thirst for attention.

My word is my bond. Well. Unless it all goes t1ts up. And then my needs are your bond. But I’ll leave you with a final thought. As much as we instinctively might lack any trust in our banks, do we really want the politicians to step in and dictate who we should trust? That, my friends, is a bloody slippery slope.

Enough already! The weekend beckons. I hope you have a lovely one, whatever your plans. A final request from our research team. They’re doing a lot of work on understanding retirement and pensions. If you are amenable to taking 2 minutes to tell us about your plans and thoughts on retirement, it would really help us to make sure we’re thinking about this in a way which matches the reality of people’s lives.

Thanks everyone,

Holly

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