​All about the slogan

7 min read

Marketing slogans are by their very nature cheesy. But which bank has the silliest, oddest or most unfortunately inappropriate slogan out there? Barclays’ ‘Go to’ may have been close to Antony Jenkins’ heart but it irritates the hell out of everyone else.

And as the bank feels its way towards its uncertain future shape, clearly feeling its way in the dark bearing in mind the jaw-dropping incompetence with which Mike Rake’s departure was handled, ‘Go to’ has got to be up there. Also because it’s been too easily kidnapped by ‘Go to…somewhere else’.

Deutsche Bank’s ‘Passion to Perform’ has an almost gloomy touch of the ‘…if only we could’ to it. Commerzbank is not bad as ‘The Bank at your Side’; nor is BNP Paribas as ‘the Bank for a Changing World’. SocGen’s has that sporty and rather upbeat ‘Building Together – Team Spirit’, while UBS’s ‘Doing the right thing – both now and in the future’ is introverted and overly auto-chastising.

I reckon Standard Chartered’s ‘Here for Good’ takes the prize as the cheesiest because it’s just, well, a bit vacuous and self-important. Bill Winters needs to find something better and I reckon he should put this at the top of deputy CEO Mike Rees’s new set of duties as head of brand and marketing. ‘Here for good … maybe’ doesn’t quite cut it but you know what I mean.

Talking of StanChart, unveiling the new management team didn’t take Winters long. As a re-org geared around simplified regional and client segment constructs, it was straightforward and if truth be told, a bit of a snore for anyone seeking drama. It’s intended to do those things all classic management re-orgs are supposed to do these days: improve accountability, speed up decision making, reduce bureaucracy and get the group to its cost savings target, of US$1.8bn by 2017. The bigger focus will be the year-end plan to address future group performance.

Even though Winters kept Rees in the tent as one of the triumvirate of executive directors overseeing the group, along with himself and CFO Andy Halford, people still don’t really expect Rees to be part of the set-up long-term despite – or is that because of? – Winters’ slightly over-the-top bigging him up in his management reveal.

Forever interim?

I also wonder whether Mark Dowie will be hanging around long in his new role as head of corporate and institutional banking, the group’s investment bank. I only say that because he is interim-only CEO of the investment bank and Winters told us to expect the announcement of a permanent head in due course. For me that spells change, though an insider tells me the interim thing was Dowie’s own choice, having taken the decision to move back to London from Singapore earlier this year for family reasons.

My insider also reckons Winters will want him to stay. We’ll see. In the last year or so, Dowie has had more jobs than I can shake a stick at. I wonder if he’s just had enough of having short-term as well as interim jobs layered on top of his nominal day job. Think about it: he was head of corporate finance until Lenny Feder quit as head of financial markets last August, at which point Dowie additionally took on the role of interim head of financial markets. Jonathan Paul was only hired to replace Feder this April – eight months later.

When Sean Wallace, head of the chunky corporate and institutional client group, walked a few weeks ago, Dowie initially also took on some of his top-line responsibilities too, although global head of corporates James Courtenay is doing most of the heavy lifting, having been asked to run the group operationally on an interim basis.

By the time Wallace quit, Dowie had anyway moved to London and his role had shifted again to vice chairman, clients and products where he managed business development and client relationship management. Sumit Dayal had been named to succeed him in April as head of corporate finance. Dowie’s vice-chairmanship lasted a matter of weeks before he ended up in this latest interim role.

It’s all been a bit of a whirlwind as so many senior people in the investment banking division have walked. Given that Winters hasn’t really started in earnest – and ahead of that year-end performance plan – your money has to be on more change. Interim, it seems, has become a bit of a permanent feature of life at StanChart.

If you remember, syndicated loans head Phil Cracknell served as interim head of capital markets for a full year after Christian Wait moved into financial markets sales. Wait’s eventual replacement Carsten Stoehr lasted a little over a year in the role before following Wait into sales and handing over the capital markets mantle to Anand Kumar. He in turn lasted just a few months before quitting and handing capital markets to current incumbent Henrik Raber less than a year ago. For a nominally plum role, I wonder what’s jinxing it.

● I don’t usually get into gender politics in banking but one thing I did note is that Bill’s 13-strong management team has strong female representation – five of the team are women. That’s a refreshing change from the male-dominated leadership teams at other banks.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch also scores relatively well here – four of the 13-strong leadership team are women – but compare and contrast with, on a declining percentage scale, the following:

RBS and JP Morgan Chase – two women respectively out of 10 on each leadership committee; Barclays (two in 11); SG (two in 13); Lloyds Commercial Banking (two in 14); Morgan Stanley (two in 17); HSBC (one in nine); Goldman and Credit Suisse (one in 10); Citigroup (two in 20); BNP Paribas (one in 17) and UBS and Deutsche Bank – wait for it – both scoring zero! More work needed here, I reckon.

Keith Mullin