Gordon C Neave: Mad banker disease has to be stamped out

Published on 15/09/2012 00:00

TRUE retail banking reform will not happen until mad banker disease (MBD) is eradicated.

After the “big bang” in 1986, senior bankers and certain building society board members were converted from herbivores, solid and rational members of the financial community, into carnivorous monsters motivated by commissions, bonuses and greed.

Their banks became one-stop shops for ever more genetically-modified financial products, which in turn were fed to an unsuspecting, yet trusting public, because of their 300-year history of competence and integrity.

Senior herbivorous bankers became a liability and have been replaced by cheaper younger herbivores who do what they are told and learn by example whether ethically right or wrong. These inexperienced employees are given grand titles such as Relationship Manager and are the first line of defence in complaints handling although they have no authority to make any strategic decisions.

Meanwhile, the senior managing carnivore class have become ever more arrogant and remote from their loyal customers.

If this is not bad enough, the Treasury and the Bank of England with their quantative easing programme are supporting their mendacious claims that they remain bankers when for the past five years they have been operating as bonus-driven debt collectors devoid of vision or consideration for their customers’ needs.

There is an antidote to MBD about to hit the market in the form of a tsunami of damages claims currently in preparation which will have an equivalent effect on the banking elite as the First World War had on the aristocracy of the time.

It is also beyond me how government can stand by and allow NAB subsidiaries Clydesdale & Yorkshire Bank to rapidly withdraw from commercial property lending when that is one of the main sectors from which recovery will flow.

Precedence is being given to repairing their balance sheets rather than service to customers. Without a healthy property market there can never be a healthy economy and rapid recovery.

• Gordon C Neave is from Laurie Neave, Property Asset Managers.