CNBC Business | Banking On Change

Banking On Change

As banking stocks lead a tentative market recovery and European authorities politely tussle with their Anglo-American counterparts over how best to tackle bonuses, rein in hedge funds and police tax havens it really does feel now as though the white-knuckle ride that started with the collapse of Lehman Brothers is over. 

Yet, as the banker-turned-author Philip Augar muses in our cover story, the energies of Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have been expended trying to reboot the very system that nearly brought the entire world to its knees, not retooling it in any groundbreaking manner.  

But this, thankfully, is not the whole picture. There is actually a rich array of entrepreneurial alternatives to the business-as-usual banking model, all founded out of frustration with a system that rides roughshod over the banking needs of whole sections of society in its tooth-and-claw pursuit of profit. As Dutch ethical bank pioneer Peter Blom says, it would be great if, for starters, we could get back to the original function of a bank, which is simply to bring together two sets of people; those who have money to spare and those who need to borrow it.  

Combine that with group, rather than individual, loans and other forms of micro-credit, and the default rates on even highly risky creditors in emerging markets are astonishingly small — less than 2% in the case of Muhammad Yunus’s Bangladeshi Grameen Bank.  

If you compare this to the wholesale default that has occurred on all manner of supposedly rational loans by Western banks — particularly those entangled with opaque real estate transactions — what once appeared to be a collection of ramshackle sideshows suddenly look like paradigms of future financial architecture.  

It doesn’t even matter that some of the examples of alternative banks examined in this month’s issue are charities, while others are cooperatives or for-profit outfits. What they all share is a conviction that there is an ongoing battle for, what another reformed Wall Street titan John Bogle described as, the soul of capitalism.  

While nobody is suggesting that the entire financial landscape will suddenly shift, the current surge of social entrepreneurialism means that a more equitable type of capitalism is closer than at any time during the past three decades. This is surely a far bigger reason to be cheerful about the future than any immediate FTSE and Dow gains. 

Richard Lofthouse 

CNBC European Business Editor richard.lofthouse@cnbceb.com