Our first post in a series on the 2012 WSBI Congress “Good for you – The savings and retail banking model”, 10-11 May, in Marrakech, Morocco
In today’s world, with the acceleration of just about everything, from the vibrations of your sonic toothbrush to the apps on your smartphone, three years can seem to encompass an entire era. This is why the WSBI Congress is so important. Held once every few years since 1924, it has become the seminal event in every step of the savings and retail banking industry’s development. Since the last Congress in 2009, the world has reeled from the second greatest financial and economic crisis it has ever known, and a tsunami of regulation has been closing in on the banking industry’s shores. Technology has turned the stuff of science fiction into the yawningly quotidian. Customer behaviour, thanks in large part to technological advances, is changing drastically and forcing business to adapt. And most people, even those who have the slightest experience of banking – and even some who have none – have grown only more suspicious of banks. That last fact is probably the most important reason why you should attend the 23rd WSBI Congress.
Trust has never been more crucial to banking relationships, and it’s up to banks to figure out how to restore it. Potential clients are searching for institutions that know, talk and listen to them, and that understand the environment in which they live and work. They also seek banking partners that contribute to the local economy and support customers whether times are good or bad. Now more than ever, society demands that businesses, including banks, act responsibly and offer genuinely sustainable solutions that serve the interests of people and the planet.
Banks have to make the business case for meeting these demands, but in a way the demands themselves make the case. Born out of crisis, they are the demands of a society that sees financial cohesion as integral to its own cohesion. Simply put, if banks don’t provide it, then there is no business case for banks. Which suggests the nature of business, and the banking business above all, has to change.
If banks are going to do business at all, they need people who will do business with them, but consecutive crises have convinced many that the last thing they need is a bank. They’re right. People don’t need banks. They need good banks. Banks that tend to their financial health. Banks that are good for them.
Organised in collaboration with WSBI Moroccan members Caisse de Dépôt et de Gestion and Al Barid Bank (Poste Maroc), the 2012 WSBI Congress, “GOOD FOR YOU – The savings and retail banking model”, will examine the value and business that the savings and retail banking model brings to its wide range of stakeholders, even in a retail banking landscape still recovering from the global financial crisis. Participants will learn how the socially committed retail bank can make its business case. In addition to providing affordable and sustainable accounts and lending wisely to the real economy, banks must tap the potential of growing markets: the abundance of remittances; low-income earners hungry for a safe place to put their hard-earned cash; mobile money and innovative payments technology; and rapidly changing economies requiring the stewardship of banks that anticipate needs and accompany people and businesses whose societies are changing no less rapidly.
A bank’s role in building a socially healthy community is to make sure its customers are financially healthy. A banking sector’s role, meanwhile, is to safeguard that health by stabilising and adding diversity to the entire financial system. Savings and socially committed retail banks can do both, but the challenge has never been so daunting – not least because of potentially stifling regulation and structural transformation. The retail banking model can meet this challenge, just as it met the challenge of the financial crisis, proving its resilience and rock solid foundation. But in an era when big bank failures have overshadowed the entire industry, bankers of all stripes, even savings and retail bankers, must prove themselves anew again and again, and even reinvent themselves. Congress participants will find out how.
Register now at www.wsbi2012.com, and log on to our blog next week for an inside look at Congress Plenary Session 1: “The retail bank: rock solid and right around the corner”.
Follow us and our preparations for the WSBI Congress on LinkedIn (http://linkd.in/wBGBW3), Facebook (http://on.fb.me/wUYrZ6) and Twitter (@WSBI_Brussels).
