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This article was first published in the January 2016 international edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

The ‘credit crunch lunch’ and anxious queues outside banks may now be faded memories, but headlines about the bad behaviour of banks and their employees persist, extending a shadow that still hangs heavy over the industry. The repercussions of the financial crisis will continue to be be felt for many years, not least in the debate it raised about the purpose and role of financial institutions, who they should serve and how, and why the crisis happened.

Ethics, not historically mentioned in the same breath as banking, has become a tool for analysis and offered up a space to debate how we view and understand financial products. It is a space that accountants must occupy if we are to add value to society, and the global span of ACCA’s membership places it in a unique position at the heart of such debates.

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), spoke about ethics at the ACCA-supported awards ceremony for the Robin Cosgrove Prize, a global competition that seeks to promote imaginative thinking about ethics in finance, which took place at the end of last year in Washington, DC.

Lagarde pointed out that ‘a more ethical system is a more stable system, because ethics create trust, and a more stable system leads to more sustainable growth’; it is with this in mind that we must consider ethics as an essential part of being a finance professional. If we accept that regulation has its limits and that we don’t wish to see all risk discounted, we must ensure that those in the industry don’t work against the interests of society as a whole. We live in an ever more connected world and the collective decisions of individuals ripple out much further than the societies they are part of: finance is international and interconnected.

Against this backdrop, ACCA has been working in partnership with the Robin Cosgrove Prize to promote the role of ethics in finance, discussing culture versus regulation with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and raising the issue of ethics with European commissioner Lord Hill.

At the awards ceremony, which was hosted by the IMF, Lagarde spoke of her organisation’s commitment to ethics, which, she said, is a central strand of its work.

As the finance industry grapples with evolving technology and increasing regulatory demands, contributions from Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, Lagarde and competition entrants focused not on constraining markets but on the decisions that might incite a more ethical approach.

Several contributors rightly pointed to the rise of participative technology and competitive payment methods, but the prevailing theme was the need for a culture change – something those in the UK will recognise in the work of the FCA.

One entrant took a different tack, focused on ‘design thinking’, a concept favoured by tech start-ups and nimble businesses such as Apple.

This problem-solving approach uses empathy as the starting point, with information gathered around the end user and their interaction with the product or service. It differs from traditional problem solving as its goal is to achieve a better future situation rather than to solve a specific problem. The ‘designer’ hopes to discover hidden aspects of a problem by starting from a view of empathy, with the aim of opening up alternative solutions. Through a process of iterative thinking, the problem might end up being redefined to find a solution.

All the essays expressed an urgency of tone and a desire for governments to continue to work with the industry to achieve a step change. Starting from a point of empathy, banks may seek to reconnect with the individuals they serve.

Rosalind Goates is public affairs manager at ACCA