Once again, senior executives paid to have better judgment have proved themselves to be completely out of touch.
Read this hogwash first: “As we continue reimagining ourselves as a financial services platforms company for the future, changing our ticker to BNY reflects who we are today and where we’re headed. We’re proud of our history, focused on the future, and always committed to delivering for our clients and helping them navigate what’s next.”
Yes, that’s the CEO of BNY, Robin Vince, talking about the impending change of the bank’s NYSE ticker from BK to BNY. Now, you may think this is trivial – so what? you might be asking. It’s just a ticker symbol, after all.
Well, yes and no. BK was the first ticker symbol of what would become the New York Stock Exchange. Previous management teams were understandably proud of that heritage, and saw no reason to change it. No one can imagine J. Carter Bacot, the architect of today’s BNY model, who was CEO between 1982 and 1998, spending even 30 seconds of his day contemplating such a change.
So what is the value of saying “we’re proud of our history” when you clearly are not? That history is a lot more than a Broadway musical and a modest archive room in its Manhattan HQ.
And herein lies the problem. Vince has imported so many C-suite executives who neither know nor, apparently, care about BNY’s rich heritage that the culture of the bank has been almost completely eroded. Somebody very senior – quite possibly an ex-Goldman Sachs colleague of Vince’s – actually thought this change was important enough to pursue it and escalate it all the way to the CEO. Whoever this was, they don’t have enough to do.
The BNY ExCo is woefully short of people with an in-depth appreciation of what the BNY brand and culture stand for. A handful – Jim Crowley, Hani Kablawi, Brian Ruane – have long service and should have counselled against this. The board, unsurprisingly, was asleep at the wheel, and probably just nodded it through after a good lunch.
The marketing flute music – “the BNY ticker symbol aligns the company’s market identity more closely with its brand, strategic direction, and ambition” – is typically vacuous. But…it is not unique.
What about State Street’s 2023 re-brand, overseen by a marketing executive who had, coincidentally, moved from BNY? The re-brand saw the iconic clipper disappear, replaced by a couple of squiggles that, apparently, “reflect the full strength of our business, and our refreshed look and feel has been built to deliver an impactful, seamless experience”. Undoubtedly, somebody at State Street had decided that the clipper had overtones of slavery, and must go, a dumb decision that tells you all you need to know about the ExCo’s tenuous grasp of American history. Nonetheless, a senior executive gushed: “Our new brand reflects our identity and the future of our organisation – one that is leading, transformative and client-centric”. Who knew you could fit all that into two squiggles and a straight line?
Once again, the ExCo and board demonstrated a shocking lack of appreciation of the bank’s heritage. As with BNY, not enough people on the ExCo have significant long service within the organisation. Clearly, no one held their hand up to defend the clipper. So now State Street looks and feels like any other bank, although not as well run.
Why is all this important? Once you decide to cast aside the values and history of the brand, it is the start of a rot that permeates the entire enterprise. Gig workers come and go and never learn what it means to work at the firm, especially with the growth of remote working. Values are no longer values, but nothing more than something in a dusty manual that nobody ever reads. A fish rots from the head. If senior management cannot ,or will not, maintain and defend the culture and values, what example does that set to the lower levels?
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” When Chase and J.P. Morgan merged in 2000, the Chase brand was quickly discarded for the investor services business. A Chase executive at that time told me that it was “a five minute conversation”. Yet the Chase brand was undoubtedly the stronger of the two – “Nobody ever got fired for hiring Chase” – and the rest is history. Leadership at both BNY and State Street should be a lot more careful about preserving the culture and values that got them to their current leadership positions.