Sticks or carrots? How to make British Banks more socially responsible

Abstract

The relationship between banks and society in UK remains fragile more than 10 years after the financial crisis. The level of public mistrust, though lower than in the aftermath of the crisis, still re-mains at unsatisfactory levels especially as scandals continue to plague the sector. This raises the question of the effectiveness of reforms adopted in UK during the past 10 years to improve the public oversight of banks and change their culture. The reforms resulted in a significant expansion of the scope of financial regulation through the adoption of large numbers of new rules with binding effect on banks. In addition, new supervisory bodies were created to more closely monitor bank activities. This paper reviews the effects of the reforms on bank culture and concludes that expanded regulation and compulsory norms brought about mixed results and had only moderate effect on re-pairing the relationship between banks and UK society. The paper argues that more significant cultural change could come only from the banks themselves and therefore, going forward, the scope of compulsory norms should be reduced. The paper contributes to the ongoing dialogue between industry experts, policy makers and lawyers about the optimum levels of financial regulation especially in light of recent calls for rolling back parts of public interventions in the financial sector.