CommBank CEO Ian Narev says a renewed “spirit of openness” at the bank has replaced the “air of defensiveness” around how it handled the financial advisory scandal, and this is what it hopes to communicate through the advertising campaign promised this morning.
The planned ad campaign, which will kick off tomorrow (4 July), will seek to reassure customers and demonstrate the bank’s “determination to do the right thing by the public” but Narev swerved a question over how much reputational damage has been done to the brand, saying only that the bank is “looking ahead and are doing the right thing by customers”.
Narev reiterated that he was “unreservedly apologetic” but refused to be drawn on whether he was “embarrassed” about the bank's handling of it.
Interestingly, in a week when CommBank is facing a huge reputational and brand crisis and announced an ad campaign to tackle it, CMO Vittoria Short is on leave.
Narev said that the bank is trying to build a culture based on being compassionate and human that balances shareholder and customer interest, adding that it has recognised customer trust “cannot be taken for granted”.
“We've got to make sure we are being compassionate and long-term focused, because banking is built on relationships – that's the kind of culture we’re trying to build from the centre of the organisation. As hard as we try to drive that culture, some of our people will not act on those expectations … our goal is to set a culture that balances the interest of shareholders and customers well, make sure we're doing our best to minimise poor decision making, and when it happens put it right,' he told journalists.
Narev also stated that people would be “staggered” at the number of people, organisations and media who are trying to have a go at CommBank, and other big financial institutions, purely because they are big businesses.
CommBank has been criticised for being silent in the week following the Senate Report into its conduct and poor financial advice, and not doing enough since the issue emerged. Communications experts had described it to AdNews as a "staggaring failure in crisis PR", but today Narev said “it is never too late to do the right thing”.
The reason the bank is taking action now and announcing the creation of an independent panel to review and assess customers who suffered financial loss as a result of bad advice is a that CBA has “reflected on what we've done and decided it's time to do more,” although he said that the review panel has been in planning for some time and hasn't been “put together in a week” following the Senate Committee report.
“Because we felt that we were doing the right thing, an air of defensiveness came down about how we were dealing with the whole issue. Because we thought we were doing the right thing, we tended to see other observations as criticisms of the right approach. Over the past few weeks, one thing we have done is replaced that attitude of increasing defensiveness with a spirit of openness. Most important for me, is, we've learnt that even if we believe we have acted fairly, people can feel powerless in their discussions with a big company and that underlines the approach we have taken with that review programme.”
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