The sinners of the banking industry seem so uncowed by regulators and prosecutors that one country is trying a higher deterrent: the fear of God.
In the financial industry equivalent of the Ice Bucket Challenge, executives in the Netherlands have been taking the bankers’ oath.
“I swear that I will endeavor to maintain and promote confidence in the financial sector,” the oath reads in part. “So help me God.”
So far, the Dutch banking industry has required the oath only for top executives. But starting next year, all 90,000 of the country’s bankers will be required to swear it. If they break the pledge — which consists of eight integrity vows, including putting clients’ interests first and taking care of shareholders — they can face fines or suspensions, or be blacklisted.
Whether it will have any effect, only God knows. But the Dutch say that six years after the global financial crisis, a steady stream of subsequent scandals has done little to instill public confidence that sin has been exorcised from the banking industry — in their country or elsewhere.
Just last month, the United States, Britain and Switzerland fined five of the world’s biggest banks a total of more than $3 billion for conspiring to manipulate the foreign currency markets. And few people have forgotten the admission by a former Goldman Sachs banker that the company treated its clients like “Muppets.”
“The confidence of society in the banking industry has been shaken, and this is a way to make it clear that the lessons of the crisis have been learned,” said Chris Buijink, the chairman of the Dutch Banking Association, which is leading the bankers’ oath campaign. “We are renewing the way we do business, from the top of the bank to the bottom.”
“Seeing your clients as Muppets would not be in conformity with the oath,” Mr. Buijink added.
For bankers whose beliefs or inclinations prevent them from swearing oaths to God, the association will accept a simple “I promise.” But in a country that likes to promote its Calvinist work ethic, bankers who have taken the oath speak of it in solemn tones.
“It was a sacred moment,” Rien Nagel, a prominent Dutch banker, recalls of his signing the pledge last year.
“I remember it because it was caused by the crisis and all the lack of trust in banking,” said Mr. Nagel, a member of the executive board of the Rabobank Groep, one of the country’s biggest financial institutions.
At the time, Rabobank had recently been implicated in one of the biggest industry scandals since Lehman Brothers fell: a scam in which traders manipulated global benchmark interest rates to make illicit profits. More than two dozen Rabobank employees were involved. Regulators fined the bank $1 billion, and the chairman resigned.
During the financial crisis, Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, was ridiculed for stating that bankers were doing “God’s work.” But there is a belief in the Netherlands that banks have a centuries-old “special responsibility” toward the people they serve, said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister.
“Our Calvinist approach to life is that you have to work hard, to behave, be sensible about your money,” Mr. Dijsselbloem said. “And the culture in the financial system sort of floated away from that.”
The Netherlands government is not ready to put blind trust in the bankers’ oath. After all, three of its biggest banks — Rabobank, ABN Amro and the ING Groep — have been involved in scandals that hurt consumers, or were nationalized during the financial crisis, costing taxpayers more than $140 billion.
The government has required Dutch banks to set aside more capital as a cushion against risk. It has begun scrutinizing decisions made by bank boards. And in the strictest such move by any country, it has capped banker bonuses at 20 percent of salary.
But while those legal measures sound fine, Mr. Buijink of the banking association said, ethics must come from within. “It’s only meaningful if there is real cultural renewal,” he said.
And will the oath really have that effect?
“The truth is,” said Mr. Dijsselbloem, the finance minister, “we don’t know.”
Equally unclear is whether the Dutch approach would work elsewhere — like London, where bankers in the City seem to have been as embroiled in scandal as their Wall Street counterparts.
“Every week there’s a new crime,” said Phillip Blond, the director of ResPublica, an independent London-based research group. “If you have a culture that’s bad, no amount of regulation or punitive sanctions will shift it to favor the idea that people need to be held individually accountable.”
ResPublica wants the British banking industry to follow the Dutch example. “The reason why oaths work is they make clear and explicit what the goal of your activity is,” Mr. Blond said. “By doing that, you also know when you cross the line.”
Yet the idea has been slow to catch on in Britain, even after a parliamentary commission on banking standards declared the industry “morally bankrupt.”
And after considerable debate, the Banking Standards Review Council, an industry-based group designed to police bankers, decided that a Dutch-style oath would have less impact than tougher government oversight.
In the United States, regulators and banking organizations are keeping an eye on how the Dutch pledge is panning out, Mr. Buijink said. “But they told me it was one thing to talk about plans, and another to see how it works in practice.”
To put teeth into the oath when it becomes mandatory, the Dutch will have financial penalties for backsliders and arbitrators to review client complaints.
Still, said Mr. Nagel, the Rabobank executive, change has to come from the heart. “The oath should be taken as an honor,” he said. “You have to change because you want to change.”
Which is why many of the Dutch might believe it when they see it.
“If money is involved, some people will act dirty anyway,” Nina Bakker, a student of environmental issues at the University of Amsterdam, said as she paused during a bike ride in the center of the city. “With all the scandals, why should they all of a sudden start acting like decent people?”