The Walker report is a lowest common denominator response to addressing corporate governance at UK banks. We need a deep overhaul of the financial system: much better regulation, longer-term thinking, and a break up of the investment banking mindsets which led to the financial crisis.
Giving non-executive directors more powers, scrutinising how they are appointed, or increasing regulation alone will make absolutely no difference.  Non-executive directors already have the powers; it’s the culture of investment banking globally which must change.
Non-executive directors must spend more time understanding the bank on whose board they sit.  They have to understand the culture, get to know the key managers in the bank, and spend more time in the bank appreciating the way business is done there.  Banks also need to spend the resources to ensure their non-executives become familiar [...]

Here are the slides from a presentation I gave at the 10th International Conference  on Corporate Governance in London on 10 October:

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Last week I gave a presentation at the EABIS Colloquium in Barcelona entitled ‘Corporate Governance: Global Issues for the Future’. Here are the slides:
Corporate Governance: Global Issues for the Future
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Let’s take a look at the corporate strategy of the large financial institutions that played an instrumental role in bringing on the financial crisis. The chief executives at these companies tended to favor an aggressive leadership style, which for a long time led them to aggressive growth; as they acquired companies, the largest companies became ‘financial supermarkets’ with a whole range of services. These financial institutions grew and grew, but eventually reached a point around 2004 where their growth stopped. The leadership of many of these companies started to be criticized for not integrating their acquisitions well. And so chief executives responded by making their companies more governance-oriented, with new constraints for things being signed off by teams. These new protocols and procedures made the financial institutions stabilize and stop growing, but they didn’t prevent the financial crisis, and the whole sector is now suffering as banks (and [...]