Joining in May from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Julia Hoggett will walk straight in to the regulator’s overworked supervision division.
Carney has already stressed that the FX allegations could be more serious than the recent Libor scandal, so we can only hope that no more banking institutions are implicated in any wrong doing.
This appointment follows a number of top-line FCA recruits this year in the division, led by Clive Adamson. These include Robert Taylor as head of wealth management and private banking and James Kelly as an adviser in the wholesale banking and investment management division.
Karina McTeague was also recruited from Lloyds last year as director of retail banking and she, together with Hoggett, will be buoyed by EY’s latest Global Consumer Banking Survey released this week which found trust in the UK banking sector has stabilised somewhat after years of decline.
UK still lagging
However, the responses found the UK still lags behind other countries, with 37% of respondents here saying their trust in banks had declined over the past year.
Room for improvement then and continuing negative headlines about the state-owned RBS and the Co-operative Bank in recent days doesn’t help.
More evidence of improvement comes from the Institute of Customer Service’s UKCSI survey – of more than 12,000 UK customers – which looks at trust and customer satisfaction.
It found that although worse than many sectors, banking is improving customer satisfaction and working hard to use this to rebuild the trust lost over the financial/banking scandals of recent years.
“The banking sector has some way to go to regain customers’ trust, which has been eroded in recent years,” said CEO Jo Causon.
Rebuilding trust
“Focusing on serving customer needs and improving the customer experience are tangible steps banks can make to rebuild trust.
“Our research shows that the organisations that score highest in UKCSI achieve the highest levels of trust, customer retention and recommendations to others – very important aspects for a sector that expects customers to entrust it with their life savings.”
It is food for thought for the whole financial services industry, not just customers but the fund groups, platforms and wealth managers which also work within the sector.
From a UK fund manager perspective, how important are bank stocks? Find out here.
