News

UNI Finance is working with Barclays to ensure that its sales and advice policy would favour quality advice over quantity of sales.

Last October, Barclays announced that the company would be moving away from product based incentives to improve customer service. UNITE, the UK based UNI Finance affiliate, had welcomed a positive step to restore customer confidence.

For UNI and its affiliates, bank employees have a key role to play to change the banking culture as they are at the forefront of customer services in their day-to-day jobs. They need to be empowered and rewarded for doing a great job, upholding ethical values and providing a service to society.

“UNITE welcomes Barclays’ commitment to implement better ethical and moral standards. But we also need to remember that ordinary staff has been working really hard, facing difficult conditions in many branches and call centres. These people should be applauded for the great job they are doing. Across financial services, many people have been paying the price of their jobs and livelihoods as redundancies follow the mistakes of senior management and boards. UNITE is calling on all banks to stop cutting jobs now,” said Dominic Hook, National Officer for Finance and Legal affairs at UNITE the Union in London.

Barclays boss Antony Jenkins has told the bank's 140,000 employees to sign up to a new code of conduct. The demand for ethical behaviour has come as Barclays employees prepare to learn what bonuses they will receive for their services in 2012. Performances would be assessed "not just on what we deliver, but on how we deliver it", said Mr. Jenkins. Staff has been told to sign up to five key values - respect, integrity, service, excellence and stewardship. Bonuses would be assessed against the new "Purpose and Values" criteria.

Mr Jenkins replaced Bob Diamond who quit over Barclays' role in rigging the Libor rate used in trillions of pounds of financial contracts. Barclays was just the first of several international banks to be implicated in the scandal, and was fined a total £290m by US and UK regulators.

The bank, along with most of the other major UK High Street lenders, has also been found culpable in recent years of mis-selling unnecessary payment protection insurance to mortgage borrowers, and over-priced interest rate to small businesses.

“The rules have changed," said Mr Jenkins. He attacked the bank's increasingly aggressive work culture of the previous 20 years, which, he said, focused too much on making a quick buck instead of upholding the values and long-term reputation of the bank.

It is unclear how the size of remuneration packages at Barclays will be affected by the new focus on ethics. The total size of Barclays' bonus pool for last year will not be disclosed until next month. Two US banks - Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan - controversially announced this week that they had decided to increase their pots by 6% and 5% respectively this year.