“It was a strategy pursued not only by the bank of England but also the East India Company and the South Sea Company. In the case of the bank, the building view created an external view that, in the words of Clare Walcot, conveyed a polite public image appropriate for a city street, and the self identity of a corporate institution”
–Virtuous Bankers: A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England
“The Bank’s dominance, moreover, was not just about money. Whatever the institution’s shortcomings—its weak communication skills under Preston, its sluggish response to the environmental movement—there was no question about its intellectual caliber. The environmental issue was a case in point. After a slow start, the Bank had by the mid-1990s assembled a strong environmental staff; it had helped virtually all its borrowers to prepare National Environmental Action Plans; it was producing, in the view of one frequently hostile observer, “an outpouring of high-quality research reports on environment-development interactions, making the Bank arguably the largest center for such research in the world.”
Excerpt From: Sebastian Mallaby. “The World’s Banker.”
“The concept of the digital application You Only Need One (YONO), devised by SBI, started off as a germ of an idea, emerging from the bank’s decision to create an ‘Online Marketplace’ in order to attract the millennial generation. It was widely felt that SBI, while successfully projecting itself as the ‘banker to every Indian’, was actually lagging behind in its ability to acquire the younger generation of customers. It was felt that this gap could be bridged by creating an e-commerce marketplace which would attract young and new customers into the SBI fold. In its original form, therefore, YONO (or ‘Project Lotus’, as it was initially called) was a finite concept with a limited shelf life—it would help the bank attract new customers through the marketplace with the hope of converting some of them into SBI customers; and this would entail an added benefit of embellishing the digital credentials of SBI.”
Excerpt From: Rajnish Kumar. “The Custodian of Trust.”
