The Evolution of Financial Services

To understand fully the leadership challenge facing the financial services business in the mid-1990s, one must take a few steps backward in financial history. What follows does not pretend to be an authoritative guide to the history of banking, insurance and other sectors which now make up financial services. It does reflect, however, a search through the English language financial bibliography to identify the role played by individual leaders and the environment in which they worked. Perhaps understandably, there is little rich detail on the role played by these leaders before the fourteenth century in Western Europe, and even subsequent material tends to focus on their achievements and failures rather than how they led their institution. We would love, for example, to know more about Phormion, acknowledged by his peers to be the most outstanding Athenian banker during the city state’s Golden Age in the fourth century BC.