We had a great time hosting Bank Innovation 2012. Thank you to everyone who attending. It was because of you that the event was so great.
To celebrate the conference, we offer a few images of the proceedings. Enjoy!
We had a great time hosting Bank Innovation 2012. Thank you to everyone who attending. It was because of you that the event was so great.
To celebrate the conference, we offer a few images of the proceedings. Enjoy!
This looks like a bit of a stretch to say that the success of Pres-elect Obama’s soaring rhetoric and his campaign’s brilliant use of technology means that banks have to replicate it in their dealings with customers. Obama is a great salesman who made this biggest of all sales because he left so much to people’s imaginations, and the things that they imagined were of a high and noble order…remaking the world and the nation, universal “fairness” etc. etc. (Already we’re hearing that the enthralled millions are set up for crashing disappointment when reality sets in – see Fouad Ajami’s piece in the WSJ last week on the politics of crowds, for instance).
But that’s getting off track. When it comes to their banking relationships, I rather doubt that people want to be thrilled, engaged, connected, part of something much greater, and so on. I think they’ll settle for bankers who are responsive, reliable, dependable, and “there” for them when needed. If that’s what you mean when you say banks should go back to what they once were, then I agree. But you seem to be saying that they should strive to be more than that.
When I was in commercial lending, we often got caught up in thinking that we were our customers’ closest allies, hand-in-glove partners, wise and prudent counselors, yadda yadda. The reality was that, in most cases, the less they saw of us the better. As long as we could extend them the credit they needed and didn’t screw up the paperwork or bounce their checks they were perfectly happy.
The following perspective was sent by a friend in the UK. It was written by Anthony Hilton and appeared in the London Evening Standard:
“One reason why everyone is so gloomy is not that the economy is heading into recession, because in many ways people feel such a slowdown is long overdue and will provide a necessary cleansing. What really worries them is that, because so many of the banks have blown themselves up, they will be in no position to support companies through the coming hard times. As a result things will be so much worse than they would otherwise be, and there will be far more casualties in the corporate sector than there deserve to be.
“This view is so widespread it deserves to be challenged, and yesterday Leigh Skene of Lombard Street Research did just that. In a special report on the unfolding of the credit crunch and the distress of the banks, Skene made the often-overlooked point that the worst-affected banks, with the largest portfolios of bad assets, are the very same organizations that, in the good times, devoted most of their lending to fund derivatives, buyouts and other non-productive forms of financial speculation and engineering. They were not the banks that supported traditional businesses still running their companies in conventional ways in the non-financial part of the economy.
“The implication is that the banks’ shrinkage will have a much lesser impact on GDP and corporate lending than is widely assumed. These pillars of financial probity may have lost three-quarters of their balance sheets. But it was the three-quarters they were gambling with, not the part that was being devoted to genuine wealth creation in the traditional way.
“So on that basis, the banks should still have enough capacity to lend for deserving corporate causes, particularly if they are genuine in trying to go back to their roots. It is their fun money they have so carelessly lost.”