Professionalism is much in the news these days, with almost anyone who is not obviously a manual worker being referred to in the media as a “professional”, and the subject of whether banking is a profession being discussed by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards and the Tyrie report.
So clearly, the term professional is used fairly loosely, but the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment, as a professional body, believes that being a true professional requires more than simply doing one’s job in an accomplished and effective manner – which should be what everyone seeks to achieve anyway, whether one is sweeping the road or treating a complex medical problem.
I believe professionalism requires a blend of behaviour, skills and knowledge to achieve a defined standard. These are the three pillars of professionalism and they interact to produce a result that may be described as “professionalism”.
Putting these three pillars into practice in professional bodies involves qualifications, continued professional development and ethics and integrity.
It is perhaps unfortunate, therefore, that the Tyrie report suggested “it is questionable whether the business of banking possesses sufficient characteristics of a profession to lend itself to direct control through a professional body”.
Putting these three pillars into practice in professional bodies involves qualifications, continued professional development and ethics and integrity.The argument supporting this approach was that “banking involves a wide range of activities and lacks the large common core of learning, which is a feature of most professions”.
One might reasonably counter that by saying it is simply a problem of terminology: the sloppy use of the term “banker” to describe anyone who works in financial services is like describing anyone connected with medicine as a doctor. That has never been advanced as a reason not to professionalise the fields of medicine not performed by doctors; the Royal College of Nursing is perhaps the most obvious example.
The reasons why banking is not an established profession have more to do with history and that, for many years, bankers were despised rather than admired, with restrictions on who could be a banker and where they could undertake their activities.
But the argument over whether banking is a profession is perhaps rather sterile, particularly when the aim of the commission was to examine standards in banking and how they might be improved. Professional bodies – which seem to have been a stumbling block for Andrew Tyrie – have never claimed they represent a panacea for the weaknesses that are only too apparent.
