What bankers must do to earn customers’ trust
Revd ‘Budge’ Firth, preaching more than half a century ago, reminded the City of its moral obligations
It is required of stewards, that a man be found faithful.
1 Corinthians iv 2
In preparing this address, I thought at once of the text which I have chosen, and searched no further. For a steward is one who is entrusted with the safety, the good condition and the use of the property of somebody else. He is a highly responsible agent, an expert in his own department; he has to take decisions, often far-reaching, on his own, without the beneficiary being compelled to check, or even being able to check, what he is doing. Yet all the time he must remember that the property is not his own; the true steward never forgets that he is a steward only, acting for a principal.
Now in this way and now in that, all the great professions have in them this element of stewardship; and Our Lord Himself, during his earthly ministry, made it clear that He was not here to do His own will but the will of the Father. The clergy are bidden to be ministers of God’s word and faithful dispensers of God’s sacraments. Teachers are set to be faithful dispensers of truth, moral and intellectual alike, to children who are not their own. It is the first rule of true medicine that it always puts the patient first.
But of no profession in the world is it more obviously and directly the case than it is of your own that its members are called to be stewards. You — the bankers — are stewards in the clearest possible sense, for you look after the public’s money, and do for the public what it could not do for itself, or at least would be very ill-advised to attempt.
One sign of your stewardship is the un-questioning trust reposed in you by your clients. People pay into you across the counter their money, about which they very reasonably care a great deal, with absolute confidence — not only without questioning but without giving the basic principle of the system, or its mechanism, a single thought. They just know that all will be well with their money, and that the amount of their deposit will be there for them to draw upon whenever they like. If this were not so, the consequences, material and psychological, would be immediate and grave; but it is so. What is more, people simply assume that, when they consult their bank — and they often talk frankly, really talk, to their bank managers — they will get the advice which is the best for them, both enlightened and disinterested. In these facts you will, I am sure, find much of your deepest professional satisfaction and your richest professional reward.
And they are very remarkable facts. In the long and, at times, chequered history of banking, this public confidence has not always been present. But it certainly exists now. It has grown up through many generations, by goodwill and confidence steadily accumulated and — perhaps we may dare to say — in our own country to an unsurpassed degree, and in a mode somewhat special to ourselves. Our race, in diverse and notable ways, has developed concerns originally of private origin into public institutions — not at all necessarily publicly owned, but in the widest sense public-spirited. What was at first founded for the honourable, but limited, purpose of private profit has become, imperceptibly, a branch of the national service. In the process, a code of ethics, largely self-imposed and internally administered, has become accepted and traditional.
It is certainly not for me, or for anyone outside your own ranks, to attempt to say anything about the detailed content of the ethics of banking. For it is of the essence of professional ethics that they are determined and judged inside the particular profession itself. For inside any profession there are temptations; and there are pressures from the world. There are forces operating upon professional men and women all the time to bribe or bully them into compliance with corrupt, ignorant or short-range considerations of what may seem right, as against what, by our training and experience, we either know to be unsound or are not sure to be right. If I may venture for a moment into the public quotation of Latin — we have to be armoured and adamant alike against the vultus instantis tyrannit and the civium ardour prava jubentium: against the frown from above and the clamour from below.
And there is the further, and more subtle, temptation which arises from the power given to us by our professional knowledge itself. The layman cannot argue or compete on equal terms with the expert surgeon in his own consulting room, the expert teacher in his own classroom or the expert banker in his own office. As you pray, then, for the moral courage to advise and to do what your professional knowledge assures you to be true and right, whatever the laity may say, will you also pray for the humility always to remember that you are indeed rightly on the vantage-ground of the expert, and yet that you, that we all, are also but ‘creatures not meant to be too wise or good for human nature’s daily food’.
If we ask, ‘upon what do professional ethics, and their claim upon us, ultimately rest?’ the answer, I would suggest, is that they derive from a simple and direct moral intuition. This intuition was once well expressed, in its most generalised form, by Sir Edward Grey, when he was asked how, as foreign secretary, he could see his way through the maze of a particularly difficult international negotiation. ‘I see my way clear,’ he replied, ‘because I have always believed that to do the right thing is the right thing to do.’ This correctly centred conscience, purifying the trained intellect, the specialised knowledge and the accumulated experience, enables true professional men and women, whatever their special vocation may be, to be faithful stewards of that which is committed to their charge, and helpful servants of those who so deeply trust them. We must pray for God’s help and protection in keeping us all steady and true in our professional life to that which, by the conscience which He has implanted within us, we already know to be right.
The Revd J.D’E.E. Firth (1900-1957), always known as Budge, was Master of the Temple: priest of the Temple Church in London. Before that, he was for many years a chaplain and housemaster at Winchester College, where as a pupil he captained the cricket XI in 1918 and took all ten wickets in the Eton match; the ball with which he did so is preserved in the Winchester archive. This sermon was preached at St Michael’s Cornhill, in the City, on 11 May 1955 for the annual service of Barclays Bank, whose chairman at the time, A.W. Tuke, was a fellow Wykehamist and classical scholar.
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