Nick Goodway: The uneviable task of combining banking industry bodies

Oh, the excitement of it. I can hardly contain myself. We are edging ever closer to the moment when four of the City’s main trade bodies will have to vote on whether they should merge into one. Be still my beating heart.

The British Bankers’ Association, the Council of Mortgage Lenders, Payments UK and the UK Cards Association have been sitting round a table on a regular basis since November, deciding how they should come together.

And sitting just off the edge of the table have been the Asset Based Finance Association, UK Payments Administration and Financial Fraud Action UK, who could also throw themselves into the new body.

Ed Richards, the former head of telecoms and broadcast watchdog Ofcom, has been given the unenviable job of herding these cats. His target is to get some kind of deal ready which the group’s various memberships can vote on by the end of March.

But this is not the simple task it might appear. The logic is sound. A typical bank like, say, Barclays is a member of each and every one of these organisations and could probably save itself millions if not tens of millions of pounds a year if all the lobby groups became one.

But merging four groups (or even seven if it comes to it) involves not just dealing with possibly conflicting aims and ambitions as trade bodies but also with the egos and self-perception of four different chief executives.

I am told the lobbyists are even now lobbying their own memberships to make their man or woman (actually they’re all men) the new top bod. We are talking some very nice salaries here and presumably three of them are at risk.

Each man has his own merits and shortcomings. Anthony Browne, chief executive of the BBA, for example is reckoned to have handled the trade bodies’ involvement in the Libor scandal rather well but has not done so well when it comes to the rehabilitation of bankers so loved by the Chancellor.

Paul Smee at the CML is the longest incumbent, having been there since 2011, while Maurice Cleaves at the newly renamed Payments UK has only been in situ since 2014.