By Sarah Davidson, Editor, Mortgage Introducer
The past two days have seen more than 500 delegates walk through the doors of the annual Building Societies Association conference at the ICC in Birmingham.
We’ve heard from industry luminaries from across the mutual sector, politicians, journalists, businessmen and entrepreneurs. We’ve had talks on regulation, leadership, global economy, European influences and more.
But perhaps most interesting was the optimism that permeated the conference. There has been a general feeling that now is the building societies’ time.
With their banking cousins still in such disrepute with the general public, many of the speakers acknowledged that mutuals perhaps have more of an opportunity to capture people’s loyalty than they thought they did.
Core values of community, stability and shared interest have always stood the mutual sector in good stead and in many ways, we are now in the perfect storm.
As one of Tony Blair’s former speech writers, Phil Collins, said, there is a real opportunity to persuade government and the Conservatives in particular, that this is the time for small businesses, entrepreneurship and diversity in retail financial services.
In theory they know this but in practice, the likely future of Northern Rock being sold as a bank rather than remutualised belies that government hasn’t thrown itself in with mutuals whole-heartedly.
The next election could be still four years away. That seems like a decent length of time for societies to get their game together and establish the sector as the means to diversify and stabilise the retail financial services sector.
How they go about doing it will be interesting to see. But there were many sensible and practical suggestions made this week that would be a good starting point.
Innovation on the product side, significantly improving online services and communicating to government and the public the specific reasons why building societies rather than banks are better for the consumer don’t seem like too tall an order for the next four years.
And with people on the street still seething about the mess the banks have got us into, as new BSA chairman David Webster said, the sector is pushing at an open door.
