I’m not sure if the cost to the wider economy of the necessary widespread withdrawal of mortgage credit has ever been calculated. However, if there was a positive by-product of this global event, it was that in general, across all the related industries, standards rose.
There were a number of reasons for this. With a smaller market every player had to fight very hard for the limited amount of business available. Consumers and buyers could afford to choose the very best advice and services available to them and generally voted with their feet. This pushed less efficient businesses to the margins and encouraged others to raise standards.
Recognising that standards in a number of areas were perhaps too forgiving, regulators, lenders and other businesses became far more risk averse and raised the ‘acceptable standards’ bar ever higher. If you couldn’t make this grade, you’d find you couldn’t trade.
The area that we all probably feel a little uncomfortable talking about is that area beyond poor practice that verges on criminality. By and large this behaviour has been driven out of the market- or appears to have been. Having recently heard about a petty case of business defamation, my concern is that as the market recovers and competition builds again, the temptation to head back in this direction may be on the rise.
When a whole organisation is, shall we say culturally misaligned, then today the respective regulators have a far greater ability to spot this quickly and act to curtail poor practice. Indeed we see the evidence of this often in the press these days. What is more difficult to stop is the ‘rogue’ individual within an otherwise respected and professional organisation. These individuals may not be directly seeking personal gain but through misguided behaviour may be a risk in any regard.
Over any reasonable length of time, these bad apples will be discovered and the behaviours curtailed one way or another, but the risk is the damage they may do in the meantime. As a sector, we all need to be vigilant internally and externally to prevent these individuals impacting the reputations of our businesses and our sectors as they continue to rehabilitate themselves as part of the wider economy.
Richard Sexton is director of business development for e.surv
