No Love For Financial Services

InvestmentNews.com reports that in a recent Harris Interactive survey, the financial services industry earned an approval rating of only 11%, which ties it with tobacco. That might not be as ironic as it seems, as both industries are probably viewed as causing more harm than good to their customers. Nicotine can have beneficial short term effects on mood, at the cost of emotional crashes, dependency, higher heart disease and cancer risk, and an ongoing cash drain. Talented financial services reps can lift clients’ moods in the short term, but too many clients end up worse off due to bad decisions, inattention, dependency, and excessive layers of (sometimes excessive) fees (i.e., an ongoing cash drain).

To be fair, the survey responses almost surely were inspired by institutional and economy level malfeasance and errors of judgement, as AIG was the lowest ranked financial services firm in the survey.

Whatever the perceptions behind the survey responses, it should be a wake up call to the industry.

URLs:

http://www.investmentnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090429/REG/904299977/1094/INDaily03&ht=