After a gruelling eternity of Zoom meetings, Euromoney recently took to the road to re-engage face-to-face with the global banking industry. The experience has been illuminating.
In August, we visited several banks in New York City for the first time since the pandemic. Following understandably exhaustive pre-appointment online questioning of our health, we arrived suitably sanitized in eerily quiet Manhattan office blocks that are usually filled with a cavernous cacophony of chatter. It was a far cry from the traditional battle through a packed bank lobby and fight to get into a crammed elevator to a distant executive floor.
We are often in the city for Awards for Excellence pitch meetings, where some banks try to squeeze as many people into the room as they can, perhaps to indicate the attention and resources that they devote to the particular business line they are pitching for. This time it was slightly disconcerting to frequently find oneself at one end of a very long boardroom table with a single banker, scarcely visible, at the other.
What was undeniable was just how much more rewarding and productive an in-person interview was after the limitations of the remote alternative
It was also unsettling to be led across mostly deserted trading floors with just a few hardy individuals plugged into their stations.
What was undeniable was just how much more rewarding and productive an in-person interview was after the limitations of the remote alternative.
There was certainly a sense of camaraderie across the firms we visited. At one, the comms staffer escorting us to the meeting was greeted tearfully along the way by many people that she had clearly not seen for a very long time. As they had obviously not seen a journalist for a very long time either, this extended to robust and expletive-laden assessments of the bank’s management of the crisis so far.
Another comms executive was so excited to take a journalist out for coffee for the first time in 18 months that she forgot her purse, leaving it back in her newly reinhabited office. Euromoney promptly produced our credit card which by fortuitous serendipity was issued by the very bank we were sitting down with. The happy moment was somewhat marred by the card subsequently malfunctioning, but no-one said that transitioning back into real life was going to be easy.
Questions to grapple
In Europe, Euromoney’s first trip to the continent since the pandemic was by train, not plane, and revolved around a fintech conference in Amsterdam in September.
It was also the first time we had crossed the English Channel since the end of the Brexit transition agreement. Getting your passport stamped, and being greeted by customs officers at Gare du Nord in Paris, was not a happy development.
Meetings at bank headquarters were somewhat awkward at times too. Can we shake hands now, or should we pretend it’s still fun to bump elbows? Can we take off masks? It’s clear that many big banks in Europe are still grappling with these questions.
Travelling on to Amsterdam was easier than getting into a café in Paris, where you now need to show you’ve been vaccinated to sit down. Getting in to the Money2020 conference, meanwhile, also involved getting a wristband to show your Covid test or vaccination had been checked.
Once inside the conference, though, the atmosphere was notably more relaxed. People were clearly delighted to see each other – clients and investors they had sometimes never have met before in person. Unsurprisingly, the hardest part of the whole experience was getting back into the UK, which nevertheless still has far higher Covid infection rates than anywhere else in Europe.
Smoother travels
For Euromoney’s Asia-based team it has been an uncommonly concentrated Covid in Singapore. Most people have not left the island – where you can’t drive half an hour in any direction without falling into the sea – for at least 18 months.
We therefore jumped at the proposal of a Vaccinated Travel Lane – a travel bubble between Germany and Singapore which allows for no quarantine at either end provided a rigorous series of tests and vaccinations are undertaken.
The two countries are obvious choices for this experimental partnership: data-savvy, efficient to the point of stereotype, and (in Singapore especially) not much vexed about having to follow rules. They’re also wealthy states, which is just as well, because none of this is cheap.
At Munich airport, there are now tiers available for PCR tests: €69 for a 24-hour turnaround, for the organized or unhurried; €139 for a 75-minute turnaround, for those who want to do the test the same day as the flight; and €239 for a 35-minute result, for those who try to check in only to find they’ve had the wrong test done and get turned away. That latter group has a choice between paying through the nose or missing the flight.
In Euromoney’s brief experience, they always pay up.
