Cold and faceless banks just want to be loved and trusted

Would you share your PIN with a group of strangers? That’s exactly what Chris Blackhurst was asked to do at a meeting with a banking giant in Milan

Bankers must tell their stories better to show they understand human emotions (Getty)

There was silence, then nervous laughter. The speaker, at a bankers’ conference, was asking the audience to write down their PIN numbers on a piece of paper, fold it, and put it into a bowl with all the others. They did as they were told, somewhat anxiously. The speaker was Dr Tiffany Watt Smith, a cultural historian at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Book of Human Emotions. We were at an event last week in Milan organised by the Italian banking giant Intesa Sanpaolo for its senior international staff.

The title for the day was “Moving Conversations – The Bonding Power of Emotion” and it was quite unlike any bank gathering I’ve ever been to. All credit to Intesa Sanpaolo for that. What Watt Smith and myself were talking about was how to better connect with people – with clients, stakeholders, media, anyone.

We were joined on the platform by an array of talent from the fields of human behaviour, neuroscience, branding, but also from the creative industries, from the arts, graphic design, composing music, filmmaking and novel-writing. The point was that none of us at the front worked in financial services, we were not bankers. But, in our own disciplines, we knew how to tell stories, to draw on emotion to get our messages across.