It is not unusual these days to interview senior Australian bankers and have them admit their industry has lost the trust of the community. It is their standard response after being battered from pillar to post with the slogan "banks are bastards".
Many have been forced to accept they contributed to this image of banks, which is deeply ingrained in our culture.
What is out of the ordinary is for the bankers to follow up that admission with concrete suggestions for changing community perceptions.
Make no mistake, changing that perception is essential.
The financial services landscape is heading into a period of profound upheaval caused by digital disruption, low barriers to entry, fickle consumer attitudes to brands and disdain for large corporations.
Failing to take action to rebuild trust will enhance the prospects for the newcomers. The costs of not addressing the community confidence issue will be shared widely, considering most bank customers also are bank shareholders through their superannuation funds.
It is with this context in mind that it was refreshing when two leading bankers willingly shared their creative solutions for dealing with the banks' deficit of trust.
Chanticleer caught up with Shayne Elliott, who is chief executive of ANZ Banking Group, and Mike Baird, who is chief customer officer, corporate and institutional banking at National Australia Bank, on Thursday and Friday.
Other banks could learn from their ideas about how to rebuild trust in an industry that has been on the nose ever since Chanticleer started writing about banks in 1992.
It helps that both men appear to have more than the usual quotient of emotional intelligence.
Elliott says the banking industry now requires a different set of skills to those that prevailed in the past. He says understanding and handling political and regulatory challenges has become paramount.
He says the banking industry is going through the same transition that occurred in the global oil industry. "For many years the leading companies in the global oil industry were in the business of finding and pumping oil out of the ground," he says.
"The CEOs of those businesses were in that mould – that's what they did. But today you could argue that actually if you look at the CEOs of those businesses more and more of their job is protecting their social licence to operate."
Elliott says this has to be a bigger part of what banks do. There are sound commercial reasons for that.
He says that over the past five years the biggest impact upon bank profits came from political and regulatory issues. The regulatory uncertainty was lifted this week with new capital rules released by the prudential regulator.
But the political uncertainty remains. Politicians, Elliott says, are simply reflecting back what their constituents are telling them.
"I think part of the reason we've got ourselves into this situation is because we took it for granted we would always have the social licence to operate," he says.
"We assumed that as long as we kept doing what we were doing that we would be left alone."
So what is ANZ doing about it? How is the bank connecting with its customers? What is it doing to show it genuinely has their interests at heart?
"One of the things we're trying to do at the bank – it's early days – is just get our senior people out there," he says.
"Most of our employees at the bank they are the elite despite our old slogan – 'we live in your world' – we don't.
"Most of our people don't live in average Australia. So we've got to strengthen that connection."
Elliott says the people in the branches and those living and working in regional Australia are connected to the average Australian.
But ANZ senior executives living in South Yarra in Melbourne and Double Bay in Sydney are clearly not connected. "We need to spend more time in small towns and in suburban Australia with our customers and hearing from them," he says.
Elliott says ANZ is currently running a series of workshops with the top 200 executives.
He says they are being asked questions such as: Why does the situation exist around the community distrust? Why is there falling trust in institutions? How did we get here? And what do we do about it?
Elliott, who watched last week's 60 Minutes attack on Commonwealth Banks, says "there's a fertile audience who want to believe those stories that banks are bastards and did terrible things to this customer".
"How do you win that argument when you've got some real Australian from the bush or regional Australia – a good Aussie bloke versus a guy in a suit sitting in a head office?" he asks.
Baird, who was premier of NSW until earlier this year, says banks have to work out ways to win back trust. "If you are trying to participate in a broad economy it's very hard if your customers and shareholders, as part of the community, are in the position of mums and dads who hear about banks and don't like what they hear," he says.
Baird's answer is to use the resources of NAB's institutional bank to help communities pitch for new infrastructure projects.
He says for example NAB could help the communities on the northern beaches of Sydney put forward viable ideas for funding and building a new road tunnel into the CBD.
Baird says the other important contribution banks can make is through inclusion programs that help poorer people such as NAB's microfinance scheme.
"Our response has to be, 'How do we win back the trust and respect of the community?" he says. "That's something that we're wrestling with very deeply."
