When Money Meets Morals: Is UK Finance Finally Changing Its Tune?

Why is this paper important?

This paper asks a simple but important question: what is the real culture inside UK finance firms, and can regulation help change it? The authors, Dr Anat Keller and Dr Andreas Kokkinis, are based at King’s College London and Birmingham University and start from the idea that finance is not just about money, numbers and markets. It is also about habits, values and power. A company’s culture is like the weather inside a workplace. Even if no one can hold it in their hands, everyone feels it, and it shapes what people do. The Financial Conduct Authority wants firms to have a healthy, purposeful culture. But the paper argues that this idea is still too vague. Firms may know they are meant to “do the right thing”, but may not always know what that looks like in practice.

The Regulatory Crossroads

The main research question was therefore about what kinds of culture exist in UK finance and what this means for regulation. The authors wanted to move beyond slogans and find out what senior people in the sector actually experience. They were especially interested in whether finance is moving away from an old culture based mainly on short-term profit, status and power, towards a newer culture that gives more weight to customers, employees, fairness, diversity and wider social value. In other words, is finance still a fast car driven mainly by profit, or is it starting to install better brakes, mirrors and a clearer destination?

What the researchers did

The study used qualitative methods. This means the authors did not run a survey with thousands of people or use statistical tests. Instead, they carried out 29 semi-structured interviews between July 2022 and October 2023. Semi-structured means the researcher has a set of planned questions or topics they want to cover, but they do not have to ask every question in the exact same order or wording. They can ask follow-up questions when someone says something interesting or important. The interviewees included senior managers, former senior managers, regulatory staff and people working around the finance sector. The sample was recruited to be varied, covering areas such as banking, insurance, investment management, regulation, professional bodies and ESG-related work. In simple terms, the “data” here are descriptive rather than mathematical: 29 interviews, most around 45 minutes, with 15 male and 14 female participants. The authors then coded the interview transcripts line by line and used ‘thematic analysis’, which is a way of looking for patterns in what people say. It is like sorting a messy box of puzzle pieces into themes until a picture starts to appear.

Workplace Culture Shapes Success

The study found three main things about culture in UK finance.

First, people working inside the finance industry think culture really matters. They do not see it as a soft or unimportant issue. They believe culture affects whether a company succeeds, how people behave at work, and whether the company has a good or bad impact on society.

Old Versus New Culture

Second, finance firms seem to be caught between an old culture and a newer one. The old culture is mainly about making money quickly. In this type of culture, the people who bring in the most money often get the most power. The newer culture is very different. It is about making profit, but not at any cost. It also means treating staff and customers fairly, thinking about people and the planet, and rewarding responsible and ethical behaviour, not just high earnings.

Four Emerging Faces of UK Finance Culture

Third, the study found signs of four different types of culture in UK finance. These are power culture, role culture, task culture and person culture. Power culture still seems to be the strongest. This means power is often held by senior leaders or high earners. Role culture is also common in parts of firms where people follow set rules and processes. Task culture and person culture seem to be growing. These focus more on teamwork, problem-solving, individual voice and treating people well. The authors suggest that encouraging these newer types of culture could help balance out too much power at the top and lead to better outcomes.

Why This Matters

A key strength of the paper is that it listens to people who have lived experience of senior roles in finance. This gives the study depth and texture. It helps show how culture is not just an official policy document or a set of values on a website. It is found in who gets promoted, who gets challenged, who is listened to, what is rewarded and what is quietly ignored. The paper is also useful because it connects these lived experiences to regulatory theory, so it does not just say “culture matters”; it asks what regulators might actually do about it.

What Can Be Done

The study does not just say that regulators should make the rules more detailed. Instead, it says they need a smarter approach. Regulators should be clearer about what good culture should achieve, how it can be measured, and how firms should manage it in practice. This matters because culture is hard to see directly, a bit like the roots of a tree. You cannot always see the roots, but they shape how strong and healthy the tree becomes. The paper argues that the FCA should not simply tell firms to achieve “good outcomes” and then leave them to decide what that means. That risks becoming self-regulation in nicer clothes. Instead, outcomes should be clearer and more measurable. For example, regulators could look more closely at whether senior people are truly held accountable, whether pay rewards good customer outcomes rather than only profit, and whether underrepresented groups are present in senior and middle management. The paper also suggests more attention to management processes, such as staff surveys, internal forums, board roles and possibly a stronger formal role for Chief People Officers.

Why We Can’t Speak For The Entire Industry

The limitations are also important. Because this is a qualitative study with 29 people, it cannot tell us how common each type of culture is across the whole UK finance sector. There are no statistical tests showing, for example, that one culture type predicts better customer outcomes. The interviewees were mostly senior people, and many were likely to be “culture champions”, so they may be more aware of culture than the average employee. Frontline staff, customers and more junior workers are less visible in the evidence. The authors also did not record the interviews, to protect anonymity, and relied on automated transcripts. That is understandable, but it may still lose some detail. So, the study is very useful for understanding ideas and experiences in depth.

A Sector in Transition: Not Yet Fully Transformed

The interviews support the claim that finance culture is mixed, contested and in transition. They also support the idea that power culture remains influential and that newer forms of task-based, employee-focused and socially aware culture are emerging. However, because it is based on a small number, the methods do not prove that the whole sector has changed, or that any one regulatory fix will definitely work. The authors’ claims are strongest when they say “this suggests” or “firms appear to be”; they would be weaker if read as hard proof about every finance firm in the UK.

Weighing The Evidence

The authors acknowledge British Academy funding for the research. There isn’t any obvious industry funding conflict in the text provided. A softer issue to keep in mind is that interviewees from within finance may have their own reasons to present culture in a positive or careful way, especially when talking about regulation, diversity or purpose. That does not make the findings invalid, but it does mean the evidence should be read as informed testimony rather than a neutral X-ray.

The Next Step

Future research could build on this study by looking at a wider range of voices, including junior staff, frontline employees and customers. This would help show whether the cultural changes described by senior finance professionals are also felt by people with less power inside firms, and by the customers those firms serve.

Is UK Finance Finally Changing Its Tune?

Overall, this paper shows that finance is not only at a regulatory crossroads, but a moral one. The real test is not whether firms can say the right words about culture, but whether those words still matter when profit is on the table.