Ashok Vaswani pledges action to cut customer complaints, including PPI issues which have cost Barclays £4bn
Humility is not a word often associated with bankers but the head o f Barclays' high-street branch network insists that that is what guides him.
Ashok Vaswani, who has a key role in a new management team charged with altering the culture at the scandal-hit bank, says: "If you are not humble you cannot learn. It is a core value that drives me a lot."
Sitting in a meeting room above a busy branch on Borough high street, London, the 52-year-old is keen to get across the message that he wants to put customers at the heart of everything done by himself and his 30,000 branch staff across the UK.
He describes the data recording complaints against the bank as horrendous. There were 381,740 complaints in the first six months of this year. He insists, though, he is cutting out problems such as requirements for customers to send faxes and inform the bank of their travel plans to be able to use a credit card abroad.
In the last six months of 2012 Barclays was the most complained about bank in Britain – by some measures with more than 400,000 complaints.
"I want to put the company out there to say we are totally committed to driving these complaints down," Vaswani said.
Referring to Barclays' slogan promoting itself as the "go to" bank – a line devised by his boss, Antony Jenkins, after he was promoted to chief executive in the wake of the Libor scandal, – Vaswani said: "What is 'go to'? Antony would say it was an emotional connectiveness to the brand. You can't build emotional connectiveness with a brand if you've got so many complaints."
Vaswani joined Barclays in 2010. He knew Jenkins from their work at the vast US banking empire of Citigroup
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| Ashok Vaswani faces creating a better service for bank users, after almost 400,000 customer complaints over six monthsHe arrived in the Middle East with just $14 in his pocket and met the India-born daughter of a client whom he later married. Their daughter was born in Dubai. |
From there he went to Turkey, Brussels, New York and Singapore, then back to New York. No sooner had he arrived in London than he was running Barclays' African operations. He gained his current role, that of running 1,577 UK branches, and 797 branches elsewhere in Europe, by stepping into Jenkins' shoes when he moved up from retail chief to the top job.
He got a Singaporean passport after falling in love with the island city state while running Citi's Asian operations, a career route that left him returning to New York 15 times a year to visit his wife and daughter who preferred to stay in the US.
During the banking crisis, when Citi incurred heavy losses, he was working in private equity with former colleagues from Citi before returning to banking again with Barclays.
He says he now intends to publish Barclays' complaints data every three months, twice as often as required by the Financial Conduct Authority, and to outline the key causes of complaints.
Payment protection insurance has been a leading cause of customer anger, and has cost Barclays £4bn. The bank had 381,740 complaints in the first six months of the year. Vaswani would rather focus on the numbers without PPI, where complaints were down 46% to 91,215 in the first six months of the year.
Vaswani is keen on digital banking, technology and social media. He has ruled out job cuts.
As a member of the executive committee he finds his pay does not need to be disclosed. It seems likely he receives about £2m a year. He admits that, as "for any normal person, money is important" but what motivates him, he says, is his desire to improve the banking culture.
In a lecture this year to the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies he defined culture as being about "how you behave when no one else is looking". It a definition that was used by Bob Diamond, the former Barclays CEO ousted during the Libor scandal, and Vaswani admitted that culture could be hard to instil across a large workforce.
"This is about looking at the end of the assignment, looking at myself in the mirror and saying I was a trustee for a great company and a great franchise and I did everything humanly possible to make it a better franchise [for the successor]," he says.
An only child, his mother, an Indian government official, was his main motivator after his father, a businessman, died when he was six. If his father had lived longer his career path could have been different, he suggests. But it was his mother, he says, who encouraged humility, and it was the opening of his mind to learning that "was the huge thing" she gave him.
Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk
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