Trust issues facing Australia’s banks can’t be solved by ‘comms’, says Anna Bligh
The Australian banking industry will need more than PR and comms to move beyond its current trust issues, the Australian Bankers’ Association CEO Anna Bligh told the opening keynote of the Mumbrella Finance Marketing Summit.
Bligh also flagged a fundamental cultural shift and technology investments as important in winning the trust of Millennial consumers.
Former Queensland premier Bligh now works for the ABA
“You can’t comms your way out of a problem as big as the trust issue facing Australian banks at the moment,” said Bligh. “There has to be real consistent and focused effort around culture and conduct and there has to be significant investment in new technology that will make the customer experience as good as it can be.
“You have to do the hard years on change but then you have to do a much better job than in the recent past in communicating how banks communicate their role in Australian society.”
Catering to young consumers is a key part of Australian banks’ future, Bligh told the audience: “These are things banks would never have given thought to 10 years ago. Telstra, in their recent Millennials, Mobiles & Money report, found when asked which platforms or organisations they trust with personal information, 76% of Millennials nominated banks.”
Blight believes this is due to Australian banks’ embrace of technology: “This I think reflects their high degree of comfort in that virtual digital space. No other provider came close to this level of trust.”
“This ‘trust capital’ with Millennials will be enormously important to the banking industry as it seeks to change the way Australians feel about banks. Harnessing that goodwill in that cohort will be one of the critical factors.”
Bligh rejected the view that a royal commission on banking is necessary, pointing out that the industry’s reputational issues are not due to systematic corruption or fraud and that such an enquiry would be a distraction for management.
“There’s a genuine concern that an enquiry of that scale will slow down the pace of reform,” Bligh said before going on to point out the potential damage on international capital markets which Australian banks rely on for around 40% of their funding needs.
Bligh concluded by flagging that the banking industry will be explaining how the sector distributes around three quarters of its profits in dividends to Australians, making the health of the sector important to the community’s financial wellbeing.
To conclude, she hoped that were she to appear next year, there would be less bad news. “I’d love to be addressing you when no bank is on the front page of any newspaper,” she said. “I think we can genuinely aspire as an industry to do much better.”
Absolutely, Anna Bligh. It’s pretty amazing to see full page colour ads in the AFR about HOW MUCH COMMBANK IS DOING FOR REGULAR MUMS AND DADS IN AUSTRALIA.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a full page colour ad in the AFR. It must be costing a fortune.
Just imagine how much they’ll contribute to every day Australians when Austrac fines them $28bn for all those breaches! That ought to put the budget into surplus too. Winner.
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I don’t think the community buys green wash any more. If you want to rebuild trust, demonstrate that senior staff have stronger incentive to ethical business by kpi rewards which reflect them and negative kpi which penalize. As it stands were seeing hand wringing and big fat bonus cheques.
Community feel good ad campaigns are an American we can do without. Mummy, what’s an axa is pretty piss weak. If you look at the nest egg symbolism, it’s no surprise industry funds can leverage ordinary people iconography. And yet, bank super is being rammed down our throats by the federal lnp determined to rebalance industry super boards?
I think Ms Bligh has her work cut out.
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There is simply no excuse for organisations as large and profitable as CBA to make ‘coding errors’ that result in illegalities – whether its offshore drug money laundering, or ‘accidentally’ charging customers for transferring between accounts within the same bank. Yet these sorts of issues keep coming year after year, with the banks just paying a fine and/or reimbursing customers – but not one of them vows a root and branch investigation of the underlying code to ensure that the ‘right’ fees and charges are levied.
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