The Banking Standards Board (BSB) is a body established in April 2015 in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...
, to promote good practice among
bank
A bank is a financial institution that accepts Deposit account, deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital m ...
s and
building societies
A building society is a financial institution owned by its members as a mutual organization. Building societies offer banking and related financial services, especially savings and mortgage lending. Building societies exist in the United Kingdo ...
. The original idea for the body came from the work of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards and the subsequent Lambert Review, which called for a new type of organisation, different from traditional regulators, that would look at banking standards, culture and the root causes of poor behaviour.
Governance
The organisation is funded by the banks, but acts independently of them through its mission and a board composed primarily of non-bankers. The first chair of the BSB was
Dame Colette Bowe. She was appointed by a selection committee chaired by the Governor of the Bank of England,
Mark Carney
Mark Joseph Carney (born March 16, 1965) is a Canadian economist and banker who served as the governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and the governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020. Since October 2020, he is vice chairman an ...
. She was followed as chair by
Susan Rice (banker) in 2019.
Sir Brendan Barber serves as vice-chair, and
Alison Cottrell is the CEO of the organisation.
The work of the BSB
The BSB conducts annual assessments of culture and behaviour at UK banks and building societies, and reports publicly on the state of the sector in its annual reports.
The organisation's approach to assessing culture combines methods from economics, behavioural science, data science and ethnography,
and has been described by
Gillian Tett
Gillian Tett (born 10 July 1967) is a British author and journalist at the '' Financial Times'', where she is chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US. She has written about the financial instruments that were part of the cause of th ...
as "anthropologists with big data trying to use ways to track what bankers are doing, what they're feeling, to work out whether they have a good culture or not".
The BSB's work has highlighted gaps between ethical behaviour and banking activities, pressure and stress in the banking system,
and concerns with speaking up.
Beyond the UK banking sector, elements of the BSB's culture assessments have also been conducted for Irish banks, at the New York Federal Reserve and in insurance markets.
Criticism
Members of the Treasury Committee in examining the work of the BSB in 2018 criticised the slow progress made on fixing the UK's banking culture.
References
External links
The Banking Standards Board
Banks established in 2015
2015 establishments in the United Kingdom
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