The banking industry must undergo further reform before it can introduce an equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, Sir Richard Lambert has said.
Speaking at the launch event for the ResPublica report Virtuous banking: placing ethos and purpose at the heart of finance, Sir Lambert said it had identified important industry issues including the need to work out the role of financial services.
The report also proposes to toughen shareholder fiduciary duties, reclassify small businesses as consumers and encourage banks to compete on customer satisfaction.
Sir Lambert, who heads the Banking Standards Review, said: “What we have seen over the past 15 or 20 years is that norms of behaviour did shift in quite a lot of ways, and what had been unacceptable in year one is standard practice in year 10, and a culture of entitlement had become hard to shake.”
And he warned that broader reform of the sector would be necessary before an oath for bankers could work.
He said: “I think that this (the oath) should come at the end of the process rather than at beginning.
“You need to establish the robust framework and then think about imposing an oath. In a sense what we are doing with our council is trying to do that.”
