The Moorad Choudhry Anthology, + Website

CHAPTER 18Present and Future Principles of Banking: Business Model and Customer Service

“A Commanding Officer who flew the most dangerous trips himself contributed immensely to morale. Perhaps the chief reason that he inspired such loyalty and respect was that he took the trouble to know and recognise every single man at RAF Linton. It was no mean feat, learning five hundred or more faces which changed every week. He would not ask them to do anything that he had not done himself.”

—Max Hastings, describing Leonard Cheshire VC (1917–1992), Bomber Command, Michael Joseph Limited, 1979

It is surely unarguable to state that before one can achieve a satisfactory result in any endeavour one must first ask what “satisfactory” looks like. A practitioner of any art, and banking is as much art as science, must first define greatness before attempting to create it. Most of us know what banking is and what a bank does; that isn't the hard part. But what does good banking look like? Is a bank that is in a satisfactory state the one that has generated the required rate of return for its shareholders? Or the highest rate of return? Or is it the one that pays its employees the highest salaries? Perhaps it is the one that has the most satisfied customers, or conversely the one with the fewest complaints per 1,000 customers? Or the one with the best relationship with the regulator?

Actually it's none of these. As the author is fond of saying, the first principle of good banking is to have ...