World Finance Banking Awards 2021 | World Finance Magazine | TBA

Finding a purpose
Even if disruption from the coronavirus continues throughout the entirety of 2020 – or even beyond – there are some banking trends that are likely to continue unchanged. For a number of years now, customers have been demanding that their financial institutions adopt more sustainable and ethically sound policies. They want a bank driven by purpose, not profit.

The need to please this new breed of customer doesn’t necessarily mean upsetting investors: many banks are choosing to move away from supporting ethically questionable organisations, like fossil fuel companies, because it is financially prudent to do so. Earlier this year, research undertaken by asset manager BlackRock found that funds with high sustainability ratings performed better during a market sell-off.

In order to ensure banks consider the needs of all their stakeholders, relationship managers will become increasingly important. They will be tasked with accumulating important feedback from clients and customers about how the bank is performing, what services are operating satisfactorily and which ones are being badly received. Some banks struggled to maintain relationships during the height of the coronavirus pandemic as more of their staff worked remotely. As social distancing measures are eased globally, these relationship managers will be tasked with shoring up any damaged partnerships while also securing new ones.

Relationship managers – and, indeed, their colleagues in other roles – will also have to keep customers from leaving their traditional banks to access services from non-bank lenders or shadow banks. Although the number of these institutions has fallen this year, they remain widely available and have previously posed a significant risk for the finance sector in markets like India and China.