What bankers must do to earn customers’ trust
Revd ‘Budge’ Firth, preaching more than half a century ago, reminded the City of its moral obligations
It is required of stewards, that a man be found faithful.
1 Corinthians iv 2
In preparing this address, I thought at once of the text which I have chosen, and searched no further. For a steward is one who is entrusted with the safety, the good condition and the use of the property of somebody else. He is a highly responsible agent, an expert in his own department; he has to take decisions, often far-reaching, on his own, without the beneficiary being compelled to check, or even being able to check, what he is doing. Yet all the time he must remember that the property is not his own; the true steward never forgets that he is a steward only, acting for a principal.
Now in this way and now in that, all the great professions have in them this element of stewardship; and Our Lord Himself, during his earthly ministry, made it clear that He was not here to do His own will but the will of the Father. The clergy are bidden to be ministers of God’s word and faithful dispensers of God’s sacraments. Teachers are set to be faithful dispensers of truth, moral and intellectual alike, to children who are not their own. It is the first rule of true medicine that it always puts the patient first.
But of no profession in the world is it more obviously and directly the case than it is of your own that its members are called to be stewards. You — the bankers — are stewards in the clearest possible sense, for you look after the public’s money, and do for the public what it could not do for itself, or at least would be very ill-advised to attempt.
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