The Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment has welcomed the Lord Mayor of London's initiative to improve trust in business.
Launching the Business of Trust programme, the new Lord Mayor, Charles Bowman, set out his plans to improve the trustworthiness of the UK financial services sector.
The Cisi said it supports this initiative and said it expects all its members to uphold this standard in their daily lives.
Simon Culhane, chief executive of the Cisi, said: “We applaud Charles Bowman’s initiative which will help focus the spotlight on programmes committed to ethics and integrity which have been in place in our profession for some time. This will also help create a sustainable legacy of better business trusted by society.
“We were delighted to be part of the steering group which helped shape this initiative.
“Ethics is a cornerstone of CISI membership. We recently introduced a mandatory ethics element into our CPD programme for members and we were the first body in financial services to require members to take and pass our annual IntegrityMatters test and 54,000 of these tests have recently been completed by financial services professionals and Cisi members."
Mr Culhane said the importance of trust in is a focus in the Integrity at Work workshop, which it has delivered for almost a decade.
To date 68 of these workshops have been presented by the Cisi in 15 countries this year to more than 3,300 attendees.
Mr Culhane said: “We welcome the opportunity to share the lessons we have learned from delivering this workshop to financial services professionals (and others) with the Lord Mayor and with businesses. We look forward to supporting this programme.”
Mr Bowman, the 690th Lord Mayor of London, highlighted that by one recent measure, barely half of respondents trusted financial and professional services.
Speaking earlier this month he said: "This is a global issue. All over the world, in every sector of society, trust in institutions is dwindling. So although it may not be a City-specific problem, it certainly is a City-relevant problem.
"As sponsor partner of PwC’s Building Public Trust programme, I have seen these attitudes every day. And even after a decade, it still shocks me.
"Because there’s no ‘hard border’ between City and society. Every morning, when they step onto the train – in Edinburgh, Hull, Bournemouth, Bristol or Belfast – the UK’s 2.2 million workers from financial and professional services don’t cross into some parallel dimension."
damian.fantato@ft.com
