Negative headlines are nothing new for the big league in banking. Thirty years ago, Barclays faced an intense student campaign in the UK against its operations in apartheid South Africa. In the 1980s, employees at Westpac, the Australian bank, stopped wearing their uniforms into work for a while to avoid flak from the public over job cuts and branch closures.

In a more recent example of social pressures on banks, the cheek-by-jowl existence of wealthy financiers and low-paid office cleaners in London’s Canary Wharf has attracted publicity for a trade union campaign to improve conditions for contract workers at the world’s leading financial institutions.