EU bankers dine on humble pie
‘Still the subject of anger’: CEO
Deutsche Bank AG co-Chief Executive Anshu Jain says telling people he works in banking is a conversation-killer at parties, as the industry fails to convince the general public that it’s changing.
“If you go to a party these days, you’re asked what you do and you say you’re a banker, people go all quiet,” Jain said before a conference on Europe’s finance industry began in Frankfurt. “We’re still the subject of anger.”
Europe’s top banking executives are meeting in the continent’s financial capital this week to discuss the industry’s future. Among the most hotly debated topics is how lenders can regain the public’s trust, battered by taxpayer-funded bailouts and the deepest economic slump since Second World War.
Carl Graf von Hohenthal, a consultant at public relations firm Brunswick Group, says there’s a perception that bankers are earning too much and not helping to raise living standards across economies after the crisis squeezed spending power.
“Bankers should explain why they’re relevant, they need to be part of a dialogue,” von Hohenthal said in a telephone interview from Berlin. “There’s a lot of com- plaining but one really has to ask what the alternative is.”
An Ernst & Young LLP study of more than 28,500 retail bank customers in 35 countries in March found 40 per cent of those questioned had lost trust in banks over the past year while 22 per cent gained confidence.
“We bank practitioners need to admit our mistakes,” Commerzbank AG CEO Martin Blessing said in a speech in Frankfurt Friday. “The general public still seems to be convinced that not much has changed.”
The collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in September 2008 wiped as much as $16 trillion off equity markets, erasing returns from pensions. While monetary easing by the European Central Bank has boosted the liquidity financial markets needed to function, it’s also helped push inflation to an average 2.5 per cent in the euro area. Investors get about one per cent on savings placed in German deposit accounts.