IT COULD take up to a decade for Barclays to regain customer trust after a series of scandals that have beset the bank, its chief executive has said.
Antony Jenkins, who took over the reins of Barclays in August in the wake of the Libor scandal and who was guest-editing BBC Radio 4's Today programme, said he was determined to change the culture at the bank towards long-term sustainability.
Mr Jenkins said: "Trust is a very easy thing to lose, and a very hard thing to win back.
"In my view it will takes several years - probably five to 10 - to rebuild trust in Barclays."
Barclays was the first bank to admit traders manipulated interest lending rates and was slapped with a £290 million fine 18 months ago. It was also caught up in the PPI mis-selling scandal.
Mr Jenkins, formerly head of the retail banking arm at the bank, hinted at a long-term strategy to overhaul the bank in September, pledging to restore Barclay's shattered reputation.
As Today's guest editor, he chose to focus on leadership and the "importance of long-term thinking".
He said: "My point is not that short-term markets are bad or inaccurate. They serve a very useful purpose. It is susceptible to elevator analysis - this is up, this is down.
"In addition to looking at the short term and what that tells us, how do we focus on longer-term drivers of the economy?"
London School of Economics economist John Kay told the programme that the banks "by the way they have behaved over the last 20 years" have systematically destroyed their relationship with their customers, with management setting up "misaligned incentives" that effectively pay corrupt bankers.
Mr Kay said he was not particularly optimistic about the future of the banking sector.
"We're starting to have the right debate but we're quite a long way from understanding how corrupt parts of the financial services sector had become or in rethinking the ways in which we approach business," he said.
Mr Jenkins said he agreed with much of the economist's comments, but he said that under the right leadership banks still had the ability to redeem themselves from past failures.
"In my view, leadership sets the culture in big organisations and culture drives organisational performance," he said.
"If you want a different sort of organisational performance, a more ethical business, you're going to have to change culture. Culture takes time to change and it comes back to leader-ship. If you take a long-term perspective, you'll build the right culture."
"I can only be responsible for Barclays but I'm hoping in what we do at Barclays we can also rebuild trust in banking."