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 North ...

, to promote good practice among

bank A bank is a financial institution that accepts 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 markets. Because ...

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 Kingd ...

. 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 Dame Mary Colette Bowe (born 1946) is an English entrepreneur and former civil servant. Born in Liverpool, Bowe has a PhD in economics from Queen Mary University of London. In her executive career, she was in the UK civil service from 1975 to 1 ...

. 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 and ...

. She was followed as chair by

Susan Rice (banker) Dame Susan Ilene Rice, Lady Rice, (née Wunsch; born 7 March 1946) is a British banker and head of the Scottish Fiscal Commission. In 2000 she became the first female leader of a British clearing bank. She is the chair of Scottish Water and ...

in 2019.

Sir Brendan Barber Sir Brendan Paul Barber (born 3 April 1951) is a British trade union official. He served as chair of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) Council until 2020. He is a former general secretary of the United Kingdom's Trades Un ...

serves as vice-chair, and

Alison Cottrell Alison Cottrell, is the CEO of the Banking Standards Board and formerly a British civil servant who worked for HM Treasury as joint Director for Financial Services and Director for Corporate Services, in which capacity she was a member of the Boar ...

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 the ...

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 {{bank-stub