“What have you done to me lately?”
For banks around the world, the answer to that question seems to be the determining factor in whether banks are largely trusted. In countries whose financial systems did not blow up during the worldwide recession, trust has remained high. But in some European countries where the banks were generally viewed as having caused the crisis, trust plunged and has not recovered.
Online surveys of “informed publics” in 26 countries were conducted by people hired by Edelman, a public relations firm. Respondents were asked how much they trusted banks “to do the right thing,” on a scale of one – “do not trust them at all” – to nine – “trust them a great deal.” In the 2013 survey, conducted in October and November and released this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, more than two-thirds of the respondents in seven areas – all but one of them in Asia – thought the banks were worthy of trust. They were Indonesia, India, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico.
At the other end of the spectrum, fewer than a third of the respondents in six countries – all in Europe – thought bankers could be trusted. They were Ireland, Spain, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and Italy.
