The profound changes that banking has undergone in Portugal give rise to reflection on the new role that the financial system has ahead of it. In a context of more demanding global economic competitiveness, we all have to be mobilized to define an agenda that mobilizes business agents and others for the restructuring that needs to be carried out. In other words, business agents, to use Ram Charan’s happy expression at a conference in Lisbon, “have to reinvent their mission, change the financing structure and design new products and services for the future”. We need more than ever a bank focused on the future and which acts as a value accelerator for our economy.
This contract of trust between the Financial System and the Business System cannot, in any way, be based solely on a formal definition by decree, endorsed by the Central Authorities — it must materialize in the effective operationalization of concrete actions, in the day-to-day economic activity, centered on the activation of the circuits on which the value chain of wealth creation is based and which involves all those who are able to add a component of qualitative differentiation in the conception of new products and services: banks must know how to assume their role objectively as an active Operating Partner in this collective project to reinvent the Portuguese Economy and its capacity for international affirmation.
There are mainly two areas that require systemic intervention — deep organizational and structural renewal of (mainly) industrial sectors and an integrated focus on the use of Innovation as a lever for creating market value. The active mobilization of economic actors in a logic of permanent operational strategic pact must be a central condition for the success of this new approach, under penalty of isolated interventions not being able to actually produce the desired effects. After all this time, reading the results is not at all flattering — excluding the well-known and publicized cases of internal and sectoral reconversion achieved with some success, in most classic industrial sectors the necessary renewal was not carried out and the closure of companies and loss of effective participation in some markets is the more than evident result.
This new trust contract will have to be based on a logic of focusing on clear priorities. Ensuring that Companies reinvent themselves as central actors in a new commitment to creating value involves firstly going through a complex, but necessary, process of reconversion of the national business fabric. But it’s not enough. It is indeed fundamental that the other actors in the System, with particular emphasis on banking, assume their responsibilities.
What is truly at stake is the system’s ability to regain self-functioning capacity as a network. This requires confidence for the future.
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