Roger McCormick On Sustainable Banking

Workshop on the Financial Sustainability of Banks, Speaker: Professor Roger McCormick (London School of Economics) Chair: Professor Emilios Avgouleas (University of Edinburgh) held at UCL Faculty of Laws, Bentham House, Endsleigh Gardens, WC1H 0EG on Feb 6, 2013. 

A league table of Bad Banks might lead to improvements in the ethics of Banking, argued LSE’s Professor Roger McCormick at a UCL’s Centre for Ethics and Law event on Sustainable Banking. He drew on evidence to the Banking Standards Committee criticising the idea that what Banks needed were more lawyers and compliance staff. Doubting the efficacy of Codes of Conduct, he advocated a focus on steps that might genuinely influence banking conduct. If it is the case that codes and process measures can simply be worked round and recognising that basic values may be important it was necessary to find other techniques. Structures played a role: Professor McCormick pointed to the de-federalisation of Barclay as a positive sign that the Bank might be taking control of the compliance and ethics problems it faced, with reporting lines direct into the CEO.

But there was a profound need to realign the interests of boards who had often not been informed of illegalities and other problems in their Companies.