Financial institutions have faced increased scrutiny surrounding their ethical practices following the Great Recession of 2008. This has placed additional pressure on boards of directors to manage the ethical reputation of the banks they serve. In an article published in the Journal of Business Ethics, researchers Emilia and Sami Vähämaa, Laura Baselga-Pascual, and Antonio Trujillo-Ponce hypothesize that a positive relationship exists between director characteristics favoring effective oversight and the ethical reputation of their financial institutions.
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Why Banks Value Navigability in Board Management Software
When your bank has the opportunity to gather industry veterans with centuries of experience between them into a single room to make decisions that affect its future, every moment counts. Working fast should never be a goal when “fast” comes at the expense of making well-informed decisions. However, streamlining aspects of your board meetings leaves more time for directors to deliberate on important topics. There are, of course, many ways to streamline your board meetings. Today, however, we’re going to focus on just one: navigating your governance technology.
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Risk Oversight on Bank Boards
While most organizations understand the value and necessity of risk oversight, banks boards face a pressure which is unique to most other industries. The worst-case scenario in failing to monitor and mitigate risk is always devastating, but unlike other organizations, banks are also burdened with their depositor’s financial well-being. Let’s take a closer look at how banks are handling their risk oversight and what they could be doing better.
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What Banks Can Learn from the Board Best Practices Report
Deloitte is one of the largest providers of professional financial services in the world; one of the “Big Four” accounting firms. In 2014, Deloitte’s Center for Corporate Governance published the ninth edition of their Board Best Practices Report. The report surveyed board members across multiple industries to provide a glimpse into the makeup and priorities of the modern board of directors.
The tenth edition of the Board Best Practices Report was published in 2016. The surveys conducted in both the ninth and tenth editions are nearly identical. While both editions offer valuable insights, governance aficionados have yet to explore all that can be learned from comparing the two. Today, we’re changing that.
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Bank Boards: Don’t Spread Your Portal Across Multiple Apps
From a management standpoint, bank boards walk a thin line when implementing a board portal; a line that exists, in part, due to the challenge that arises in overcoming a learning curve. How do you ask a group of people with decades of expertise to learn something new? There’s no way to get around it. Seamless design is great for mitigating the curve, but it doesn’t eliminate it. Introducing new technology to your board of directors is too complex and delicate a task to cover in this article (or any one article, for that matter).
Instead we’re going to focus on a major pitfall bank boards fall into when implementing a board portal. Avoiding this single hazard can mean the difference between success and failure in the implementation process.
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One Quality Banks Must Demand of Board Software
At Directorpoint, we don’t like the phrase “less is more”. “Less is more” sounds like an excuse to deliver less. Good board management software delivers more while making it feel like less. Sometimes, making it feel like less means making it look like less. That’s minimalism; little more than an aesthetic choice. What we’re talking about here is seamlessness. When bank boards choose software for their directors, they need to find a portal that offers seamless design in support of seamless functionality. Here’s why that matters.
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The Impact of CEO-Board Dynamic on Bank Performance
If you’re on the board of directors at a community bank, keeping up with the latest research and best practices in governance is important. In most cases, that requires more reading than any sane human being has time for. Don’t worry. We’ve got your back! Continue reading