banking

The Land of Smiles: What a Bank Can Be

A COMPLIMENT IN MONTE CARLO: I received an amazing compliment in Monte Carlo last month. A grizzled and seasoned banker looked at me owlishly over his tortoise-shell spectacles and said, “Mr. Hansen, you come from a land of smiles. But we are bankers and we care about just one thing in life: making money.”

I sat with this compliment for some time, thinking about what it meant for me personally. And, as I sat, I kept coming back to the theme of happiness. How am I happy? How is this banker happy? How is my family happy? How is this banker’s family happy? Is it really money that makes a person happy? Or is it something else?

THE HISTORY OF MONEY: When one looks at the history of money itself, it becomes very clear that the pursuit of money alone does not yield happiness. In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson writes, “And yet the silver of the New World could not bring the rebellious Dutch Republic to heel; could not secure England for the Spanish crown; could not save Spain from an inexorable economic and imperial decline. Like King Midas, the Spanish monarchs of the sixteenth century, Charles V and Philip II, found that an abundance of precious metal could be as much a curse as a blessing…What the Spaniards had failed to understand is that the value of precious metal is not absolute…an increase in its supply will not make a society richer…”

REAL SUCCESS: The real value that people seek is an in-the-flesh connection to other human beings in the context of love. And no amount of money in the world can buy this. Maria Elita, a Greek-Australian healer, has said, “Success to me is being able to look after my grand-daughter when I can, help my children grow up respectfully, spend time with my aging parents, listen to other people’s stories of hope, kiss my boyfriend often, spend every Sunday night with my crazy Greek family, express my truth as only I can, forgive the past, embrace the future and remember The Miracle that I am. None of my success is monetary or material .. Because TRUE SUCCESS has no dollar value, cannot be measured, and does not need awards.”

My hypothesis is that the “land of smiles” is precisely where the banker in Monte Carlo wants to be. This desired place is, as Miss Elita writes, where the awards have to do with family, friends, kisses and hugs.

Now I could stop there and feel self-satisfied about this little piece I’ve written on this sunny morning with coffee, fresh orange juice, steaming croissants and love by my side.

But I won’t.

Because the journey that I want to take is with this banker. In person.

PiedPiperWithChildren

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS FROM BANKERS: I want this particular banker to find a way “out” of the vault of his office and into the sunlight of his family’s embrace. He has a family, he has a life outside the bank. And that family does not get enough of his presence. And, deep down, he does not get enough of their presence.

Yes, this banker likes his bank and the adventure of business. And this keeps his blood pumping. But there’s a missing piece of the story: how can he take this sense of adventure, this exhilaration of the “hunt”, this heady rush of blood that comes from successful risk-taking and turn it into a gift to humanity? How can he turn his creativity with digits into a creative act for communities, for families and for the world at large. Because that’s what the world needs from bankers now.

One of the world’s most powerful bankers, Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, has said, “Investment bankers are just doing God’s work.” But how can bankers fulfill on this statement of Mr. Blankfein’s? Because most of the rest of the world would disagree with him.

WHAT A BANK CAN BE: Banks have always been solid pillars in society, providing a reference point with a promise of strength, stability and assurance. The bank manager has always been a respected and acknowledged expert leader in the community. A facilitator of conversation. An authoritative source of advice and assurance. But this role lessened in the age of mass distribution and mass communication. It became a game of mass advertising, selling mass product through mass distribution.

Online gathering places allow institutions such as banks to reclaim their position of community leadership. By opening up and facilitating one on one conversation within the supercharged online community environment. And as banks listen to their customers and follow their lives, a new relationship between a bank and a customer emerges. In this relationship, the bank brings a new and deeper emotional and social intelligence to working with human beings.

BANKS TAKING THEIR PROPER PLACE IN THE COMMUNITY: Banks should take their place within the community created through human-centered actions, in ways that are consistent with their institutional strength and provision. Acting in this way in the context of community, the bank will gain true human dimension: by interacting with the community and assuming its place as a pillar in society.

This is an incredibly worthwhile objective, which provides added value and a distinct competitive advantage for banks that choose this path. It’s a path bankers can lead humanity along into the land of smiles.

Good technology serves and nurtures humanity

We must place the pace of the human heart before the pace of the machine. This is vital.

Yesterday, in Athens, Greece, a 77 year-old man took his life in broad daylight because the government had severed his pension and his debts had run too high. Rather than eat from garbage cans and saddle his children with debt, he chose to end his life. Greek psychologists on the radio called this a murder by the State and a failed system.

One way of understanding this event is through the lens of the human heart, the emotional center of the human being. The Greek system had its own pace, a momentum and rhythm out of sync with the individual who took his life. If the system had been in sync with this gentleman, he would have received what he needed on that day, in that week, during that month. The system would have been in tune with this man and his pain, his loss, his need. And he would have had a number, an email, a chat room, a physical person to reveal his situation to. And this person would have made a plan with him to ease the weight for that week at least, or even that month. And a life would have been saved.

The machine in current times bears much the same complexion as in decades and centuries past – a banking and corporate system driven by supply and demand, by profit and loss. The difference in today’s world is the sheer velocity of the machine we now interact with: from the millisecond pace of the currency trading world to the speed of next-day delivery, humans have upped the ante in terms of “estimated time of arrival.” And, in the case of the 77-year-old gentleman in Athens, we have accelerated the “estimated time of departure” as well. That man did not need to go when he did. And the way to change this is to incorporate a system that compliments or matches human pace.

Debt is an excellent market niche to locate the discussion of human and machine pace. The varying strata within the loan universe carry varying levels of velocity in terms of repayment. Most are inhuman, determined by an equation vs. the natural pace of the individual being lent the money. Some systems are different and more human. Let us take an option called Cumulus Funding. With Cumulus, the human being can share his particulars and then be lent money based upon his income potential (as measured by what the IRS has recorded). And, over a period of 8 years, this individual is charged a minor percentage each month of his varying income. If his income ceases for a time due to sickness or loss of job, then Cumulus will not draw from his account. When he finds a job again or his health improves, then Cumulus begins drawing again. Cumulus Funding is an example of a human-based lending system, based upon the natural rhythms of a typical human life and career. And, in the ideal Cumulus world, both the individual and the lender win.

Such a system is precisely what the 77-year-old gentleman in Athens needed. He needed a system that understood the needs of his stage of life, of his week, of his month. He needed to be in relation to an intelligence machine…one could even say, an emotionally intelligent machine. We need a culture of technologists oriented toward the human animal. We need a banking culture oriented toward the human family. To be clear: It is vital that humans leverage technology to create a more humane world. Business must be about pleasing the heart vs. pleasing machines.