Stories and Storytelling in UΚ Banking

Abstract

The twenty first century has witnessed wide-ranging changes in the banking industry and these changes have brought a number of challenges for customers and employees. Many banks have looked to employ storytelling as one way of trying to help both customers and employees to accommodate these changes and challenges. This exploratory paper looks provide a range of illustrations of the ways in which the UK‘s leading banks have publicly employed stories on the Internet as part of their external and internal communication programmes and offers some reflections on the role of stories within such programmes. The paper reveals that the UK‘s five leading banks all publicly employ stories, which address a number of issues including business successes and achievements, customers‘ experiences, environmental and social commitments, career development, employees‘ work experiences and the history of banks and their branches. The authors suggest that these themes collectively looked to reinforce the banks‘ fundamental emphasis on trust, confidence, and customer relationships. At the same time, while the findings of the paper revealed that the stories are exclusively positive and are essentially scripted to cast banks in a favourable light, the authors counsel caution in that there is a danger that such stories may not always be fully representative of a bank‘s relationships with its customers and employees.