1. Dame Colette Bowe has never taken the easy option – and she is discreet.She began her working life as a civil servant, and within a few years became embroiled in a scandal: a leaked document concerning the Westland affair, the battle over ownership of a helicopter company that smeared Lord Heseltine, who was in conflict with her boss, Lord Brittan.
Her policy was silence in the face of a media storm that saw the press camped on her doorstep. Did she leak the document to the Press Association on the instruction of Lord Brittan and the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher? They denied it. She said nothing and left the civil service shortly afterwards for a stellar career in regulation and industry. Today, interviewing Dame Colette about her tough new job as Chairman of the Banking Standards Board (BSB) in modest offices a few doors down from the Bank of England, I find her as discreet as she was then.

Would she comment, I ask, on the recent headlines about massive penalties imposed on banks for rigging foreign exchange markets? She wouldn’t.

How about the possible effect of Britain leaving Europe? No.

How about the similarity between the phone hacking and the banking scandals, that there was a company ethos that some employees felt they had to adhere to? The answer to that was “no comment” too, this last because of her most recent role as Chairman of the communications regulator Ofcom, which was itself involved in the former.

But, of course, she is quite right. The BSB has been formed to help reform the banking industry. As its Chairman, her job is to recruit and drive a lively and varied board down the road of leading that reform. And that means not commenting on each new scandal that hits the headlines, not least because some events will be sub judice.

2. There is general agreement that she was the right choice. Her appointment was welcomed by Sir Richard Lambert FCSI(Hon), the former Financial Times editor and Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry, who had recommended the creation of the board and had been interim Chairman: “I am very pleased to be passing the baton to Colette Bowe. She gets things done and I could not imagine anyone better qualified to take on this important and worthwhile job.”

3. She thinks the job is worthwhile but accepts that it is potentially difficult.“Well, I did think that it was going to be extremely worthwhile if we could all make it happen and I also thought that the experience I would bring gave it a reasonable chance of being able to make it hold. So, it was a combination of those two things – thinking it is something really worth doing and also thinking that I could bring something to it. 

“I wasn’t under any illusions about the fact that this endeavour that we’re all engaged on is going to be difficult. To bring about or to support/facilitate a change in the culture of an industry is a hard job, but I knew the people who had come together to invite Richard to write this report, the seven institutions; I knew that they were all deeply serious.”

She decided early on that it should be a small operation that called in people with the right expertise when they were needed.

4. With the help of Sir Richard Lambert, her predecessor, she has recruited a strong board. The Chief Executive, Alison Cottrell, former Director of Financial Services at HM Treasury, had been a City economist with firms including HSBC and PaineWebber before joining the Treasury in 2001.

Cottrell, says Dame Colette, is “somebody with good experience, somebody from the City, somebody who understands this world and also somebody who would be prepared to come in here and do a start-up. As you see, this isn’t a huge marble hall; this room and the room you just saw is it, and I needed somebody of the kind of temperament who would see that as a really interesting challenge.”

For the board itself, she believed that two sorts of people were needed – practitioners, people from across the City – “We’ve got big investment banks, we’ve got a mutual, we’ve got a challenger, we’ve got HSBC, so we’ve got, I think, representatives of most of the strands of the City” – and non-practitioners, people who come from a range of different walks of life.

The first board meeting took place a week before we met. “The board was really working very constructively together to help us start to shape the work and the programme.

“People are having to invent this project and the board members have all got their sleeves rolled up and are working on it. It’s very, very satisfying to see."

5. Her background makes her ideally suited to the post. “I suppose my favourite previous job was the one I stopped doing last year, which was chairing Ofcom for five years. I think the greatest achievement was making sure that that very formidable organisation stayed focused on the end customer, because that’s what it’s about.

“I wasn’t the only person taking that view at Ofcom, but as chairman you do try to set a certain tone and the thing I always wanted to hang onto were the interests of the consumer.” 

Dame Colette was born and raised in Liverpool. She still has friends and family there and goes back regularly to visit from her north London home.

“Outside of work, I’m very fond of music and I’m very fond of watching football as well. Liverpool are my team. I’m a Liverpool supporter to the extent that my colleagues find very boring.

“I listen to music all the time. I’m a very, very bad amateur musician myself; I play the cello really badly. One of the things I do with the other bits of my time is to chair the exam board for music exams.

“I went to a marvellous primary school in Liverpool and I was fortunate enough to have a state education right through university and I think the opportunities I had were amazing, so I have a strong interest in education.” 

“The best decision I ever made was when I was 19 and I decided to stop studying modern languages and start to study economics,” she says. That was at Queen Mary College, London, where she is now Chairman of the governing body. She studied under Lord [Maurice] Peston, the father of BBC Economics Editor Robert Peston, who had just created an economics department and allowed her to switch course.

6. Her ambitions for the BSB are wide-ranging. “I’d like to see us as an established part of the business world of the UK and acknowledged as contributing real value to the strengthening of British business.” We spoke about the changing balance of men and women in British boardrooms. The top three positions at the board, she points out, are held by women, but she was so occupied with choosing the right person for each job that this didn’t occur to her.

"So, the direction of travel, we hope, is to be able to produce properly grounded evidence about how the culture of this industry is being shaped, how the board and the leaders of these businesses are taking responsibility for what they’re shaping, how the people working in the industry think it’s going and how their customers in various ways, whether it’s the retail customers or other parts of the business, think it’s going.” The board is also intending to take a close look at the types of professional qualifications that are on offer. It has already had productive talks with bodies offering different financial qualifications, including the CISI, and will be asking what employers in the industry want in terms of professional qualifications – and whether they are currently available.

“How can we encourage more people to get professional qualifications? How can we encourage more firms to place value explicitly on professional qualifications?

I’m not for a moment, by the way, suggesting that the BSB should be running any of this.” 

Ethics is another area of close focus. “We think that might be an area where we can help to put things together, maybe support a bit of research ourselves, [perhaps] a conference particularly aimed towards banking, where people could come together and talk about what really constitutes ethical practice in this industry – and how you can disseminate that to very large firms.

“People have often talked about something called ‘the tone from the top’, which is tremendously important. People at the top of any business, not just banks, have to express a certain set of values by the way they do things. But there’s a lot more to this than getting that right: how you disseminate that down the business, how you make sure people are trained, how you make sure people are confident in their own understanding of what’s required. Are people confident enough to say no? I don’t think so.

The scandals that have come to light “massively damage the trust of the people currently in the industry. The industry has got a long way to go to make itself worthy… and it’s so important, that, because we need banks.

“What banks do is integral to how a society like ours functions and if people feel that the banking industry is not trustworthy, that’s a serious problem for a society like ours. I’m now straying off into giving a sermon, but I do feel rather strongly about that.

“The after-effects of the financial crisis are still going on. But I think it acted as a tremendous catalyst for people having to rethink how they do this business, and these are complex businesses.

“The whole industry is going through a big process and we are kind of part of that, I would say. So, yes, things have changed.

People are now talking about issues in ways that I think would not have been the case a decade ago.”

So what is next on the agenda? “By the summer, we hope to be able to publish what our year-long work programme will cover.” Then the board will ask more banks and building societies to join the six banks and one building society that are already members.

“What we’re doing is really closely aligned with a lot of what banks are already doing themselves. I’ve met quite a few really interesting people working in banks, who are working in the field of leadership and delivery and all the things we’ve been talking about – so various kinds of professionalism, thinking through what sort of training you have, how you empower people so that they know what they need to do in any situation and if they can get this right, of course. To some extent, you don’t need regulatory rule books.” 

The original version of this article was published in the June 2015 print edition of the Review.