Sermon on The Mound.
| Author | Townley, Gemma |
| Position | Bank of Scotland |
As governor of the Bank of Scotland, Sir John Shaw has steered the bank through huge political and market upheavals. He tells Gemma Townley why all good investments are ethical and why progress should not make banking impersonal
The Bank of Scotland sits on The Mound in Edinburgh, the road that leads up a steep hill from the shopping Mecca of Princes Street. Halfway up, you find the home of the Scottish Parliament. A bit further, and you reach the imposing head office of the bank.
"I love the view from the top," explains Sir John Shaw FCMA, the bank's governor. "I can see directly from my office what the economic climate is, just by looking at the traffic on the streets below. I am much closer to what's going on than I would be in the City of London."
This preference for being where the people and businesses are led Shaw to secure the business-focused CIMA qualification. "Productivity missions to North America led to new ideas about how financial information could be used, and that really captured my imagination," he explains. Having trained as a chartered accountant during the early 1950s in Edinburgh, he moved to London to work in a major Scottish accountancy firm after completing his national service.
He enjoyed the work there and in the smaller firm in Edinburgh to which he returned as a partner. But while he describes audit as "extremely important and valuable", he thought that understanding the business would be more valuable still, and decided to train with CIMA: "For the sorts of business I was working with, the important thing was to understand what was happening to the business and to use financial systems to provide models that demonstrated where the business might be in the future."
In time, as accountancy firms consolidated by amalgamation into international combines, he became rather disillusioned with the shift to standardisation and regulation of the process of auditing. "It's perfectly proper to seek to ensure the consistency of accounting and auditing standards, but you do begin to interfere with the exercise of individual judgments which I believe should be flexible according to the specific business circumstances," he says.
In the mid 1980s, Shaw had the opportunity to join Scottish Financial Enterprise, whose mission it was -- and is -- to highlight the significance of Scotland as a UK centre for financial services. "At the time, many people in Scotland still saw financial jobs as `not proper jobs'. Scotland had been...
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