Financial Services

Almost two years ago, few people had heard of the term ‘credit crunch’, but fresh into June, there’s little else, except perhaps Susan Boyle and MPs expenses occupying our dinner party chat.

Lansons invited four leading journalists to its offices to share their first hand experiences of covering the credit crisis.

The event, chaired by Lansons CEO, Tony Langham and attended by a 70-strong audience of Financial Services Forum members saw Hugh Pym, BBC’s Chief Economics Correspondent, Joe Lynam, BBC’s Weekend Business Reporter, Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Editor for The Daily Telegraph and Matthew Vincent, Personal Finance Editor at The FT summarising their views about the current crisis and the impact it has had on how they do their jobs.

Discussions spanned a spectrum of topics from MPs expenses, to tweeting, to quotes from Hunter .S. Thompson, but one topic the panel kept coming back to was how the credit crunch had increased consumers’ interest in, and knowledge of, financial services.

The BBC’s Joe Lynam opened the panel discussion by sharing some insight into his working week. For him, working weekends over the past 18 months has meant that he’s been responsible for covering some of the biggest news stories of the credit crisis – such as the collapse of Northern Rock and the demise of Lehman Brothers.

“financial literacy of the public has changed dramatically”

Joe believes that since the crisis began “financial literacy of the public has changed dramatically” and that “people want to know more than ever”. Matthew Vincent, Financial Times believes that even for FT readers, the focus has shifted onto their own finances, “all (our) readers are starting to care about their own personal circumstances more than company balance sheets.” It’s an acknowledgement which has lead to a shift change in news editing policy, with more focus now on the effect of the current recession on the individual, not just the company.

Harry Wallop, Daily Telegraph believes that the very fact the “savings ratio has improved and consumers have behaved rationally” in response to the crisis, speaks volumes about the public’s financial maturity.

But will all these valuable lessons which have been learnt the hard way be forgotten when the recession is officially over and people start to feel confident enough to begin spending again? No according to Matthew Vincent who is “convinced it (the credit crisis) has made a significant difference.”

And it’s not just Joe Public’s financial literacy which has improved since the crisis began. News journalists, according to our panel, are now more likely to know the difference between an APR and a TER. News desks are now becoming more critical of financial stories, and questioning statistics even from well-respected providers- something they simply weren’t doing a year ago. Which begs the question, are we going to see as much scrutiny of the financial services industry in the news pages as we’ve seen in the PF pages?

What we can be sure about is that the ongoing recession has catapulted financial services into the headlines, and journalists have spent more time reacting to the news rather than creating it, but this, the panel believes, is now changing.

The BBC’s Hugh Pym believes there is “more scope now for PR and corporates” as the media proactively searches for stories again. He said every story/ angle the BBC receives is looked at and with the emergence of multi-media there is now a wider platform and thus more potential for stories to be covered. “If it’s not on the 10 O’clock news, there’s a good chance you’ll see it on web or radio” he commented. A point echoed by Wallop. He said at The Telegraph there is a 4 – 1 ratio of stories that appear online then also make it into paper.

"...there is “more scope now for PR and corporates” as the media proactively searches for stories again."

Gone are the days when you can just rely on TV or print for coverage. We need to be embracing a multi-media approach to news and recognising that as financial literacy for both media and public alike improves, so too does the need for us to ensure our communication is improving and adapting to meet these changes.