Those who insist on bashing the banks are ignorant of the real purpose of the economic enterprise. The for-profit corporation has a single objective: satisfy its shareholders within legal and regulatory constraints. The definition of “satisfaction” is always across four dimensions: what does the shareholder consider to be “value”; how is the “benefit” to be delivered; what within the corporation is intended to “grow”; and what does the shareholder consider to be “risk” and how much of it is acceptable?

Therefore, the role of boards and executives is the optimisation of these four variables, and not the maximisation of any single one of them.

In order to do this, corporations must manage their various stakeholders in a manner that will enable optimisation. Although it is socially insensitive to say it, no listed corporation exists for its customers, staff, suppliers, the community or any other of a myriad of entities and interests. That’s the reality – they are all “enablers”. However, corporations must manage those stakeholders in a way that they will deliver the required benefit to the organisation and generally that means “keeping them happy”. Therefore long-term dissatisfaction by, for example, customers, is inevitably unsustainable and bad business.

Therefore, the accusation against banks that they have “screwed” customers fails to acknowledge that banks will extract benefits from customers (and others) for as long as they can, or until customers stop supporting them, or until a regulatory/legislative environment constrains them.

Stop blaming the banks – they are only doing what we all should understand they are motivated and designed to do – create benefit for their shareholders – and this year they have done that exceptionally well.

The reason that customers are not easily able to change their “supplier” is because of the costs and difficulty of changing. Moves are afoot to lubricate and cheapen the process of change which will immediately change the “value proposition” offered to bank customers. If society wants banks to act in a certain way, then that’s OK, but government must legislate for it so that all banks are treated equally and so that shareholders of any particular bank are not disadvantaged by the subjective judgements of directors and managers.