On the politics of social and sustainable banking

Social and sustainable banks (henceforth SSBs) are in the habit of presenting their specificity as being oriented towards the ‘common good’, as opposed to mainstream banks which are taken to focus on mere profit or shareholder value maximization. They claim to follow an alternative business model. This distinction, although classical by now, may be misleading and detracts from the more important issue of what ‘social’ banking actually means. Is profit maximization incompatible with a common good orientation? And is the relinquishment of profit maximization a sufficient criterion for being able to claim that one has chosen, as a commercial organization, to pursue nonfinancial value criteria? Since the answer to both of these questions is negative, the issue becomes a different one – namely, what ‘alternatives’ do SSBs actually stand for? In my point of view, they stand for a notion of the common good that is fundamentally different from the one represented by mainstream banks, and they therefore need to spell this out. Consequently, SSBs need to be much more explicit than they usually are about what, how coherent and how realistic their ‘alternative’ worldview is.