The simple way to fix the finance industry

The financial management industry is bending over backwards to win back the public's trust. But as Merryn Somerset Webb explains, they still don't get it.

The financial industry wants to know how it can make the general public trust it again. It has written reams of research, and organised seminars to discuss the problem. It has also, the majority of the time, entirely missed the point.

This lack of trust is not down to any specific incident. It isn't payment protection insurance. It isn't packaged bank accounts, unusable mobile-phone insurance, or even rip-off annuities. And we don't dislike the fund-management industry because it somehow manages to underperform and to charge performance fees. These are all merely symptomatic of the real problem lack of transparency.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.