Earlier this month, Interview Magazine published a photo-shoot article featuring four young bankers from three leading finance firms, headlined “Meet the Finest Boys in Finance”.
According to the Financial Times, the bankers were dressed in an array of expensive finery – Giorgio Armani, Hermès, Omega and Rolex watches. And the blurb exceeded the photo bling. One banker quoted said he had splurged “$3,000 on a Moncler jacket he ‘definitely did not need’.”
Internally and externally, the interview ‘caused a stir’. Poor judgement and insensitivity to external perceptions of the banking industry were on the list of indictments.
The key takeaway is how high-risk industries, in terms of public perception, present themselves to the world when they engage with the media.
One commentator, Craig Coben, was previously global head of equity capital markets at Bank of America. He knows something of the fraught media environment confronting the finance world (2008 global financial crisis, banker bonuses and high street insolvencies, etc.) and offered two key insights.
The first concerns the industry’s relationship with the media: “Far from being tone deaf, senior leaders are acutely aware of the sector’s tarnished public image. The default stance is therefore one of cautious wariness with the media.”
Likely then, the young bankers apparently gave the interview without approval and seriously breached policy. However, then the policy of engaging the media needs to be widely disseminated internally long before external harm occurs.
However, between the old-fashioned view of bankers as corporate stiffs and the new generation’s obsession with posting every element of life on social media lies a demographic culture gap.
Coben provides a useful elaboration on the difference between these two worlds and generations:
“The Interview quartet may have simply assumed, naively, that the article would be a harmless lark. For a generation raised on curating their lives on social media, being photographed and published can feel natural. Yet where every online platform encourages visibility and self-promotion, investment banking demands discretion and a kind of performative modesty. The Interview quartet did not recognise that.”
This sound analysis, though, errs in one crucial aspect. It is not generational. Currently, the world confronts the greatest energy crisis in memory, triggered by the US-Israel-Iran war. Yet it is being led by a 79-year-old American president who disregards the old norms of diplomacy and even war – back-channel negotiations, carefully curated statements and calculated engagements.
Instead, President Donald Trump uses his own media platform, Truth Social (6m followers), and Facebook (40m likes) to provide commentary and insight into his evolving war aims, threats and expectations.
Regardless then of where you sit in the corporate hierarchy – or in which industry – it is now an operational urgency to have both a professional and thoughtful media engagement policy and specific guidelines on social media postings.
As the four bankers have discovered, the latitude the President of the United States allows himself is strictly not transferable.
– Tony Leon
Executive Chairman