If Australia's major banks have retained any vestiges of complacency, that will be rubbed out by the comments from the Lafferty Banking 500, which rated 500 banks from 73 countries for their overall quality. The report card from Lafferty's team of analysts ranked three of the four majors as substandard versus their global peers. Commonwealth Bank was assessed as the best of them, and came in at barely average. UK-based Michael Lafferty explained that this study does not take the form of a report. "It is a vast database with 19 separate metrics for each of the 500 banks. It is used by banks and others as a bank benchmarking tool," he said.The Lafferty Banking 500 also awards star-ratings to each bank that is benchmarked.    A glance at the star rating system, which ranges from five stars for the best to one star at the other extreme shows approximates a standard normal distribution with most of the rated banks (264) clustered around three stars.Lafferty provided some top-level comments for the half-dozen Australia banks that were included in this year's analysis: namely, ANZ, CBA, Bank of Queensland, Bendigo, NAB and Westpac. And nothing the former Financial Times journalist had to say was flattering."Banking should be a profession, like accounting and the law [whereas] bank CEOs in both Australia and worldwide rarely have any professional banking education. They learn on the job at best," Lafferty said.Of this group ANZ, NAB and Westpac each garnered a two-star rating (the second lowest), while Bank of Queensland, Bendigo, and CBA were each allocated three stars - an average rating. Lafferty said the smaller banks were generally better able to focus on just one or two aspects of their customers' needs, be they retail or commercial businesses.Lafferty also calculated the "average" star rankings for the countries which had four or more banks in his global study, and here Australia (2.5 stars) was shown up by all the rest: Canada (2.9 stars) France (3.0 stars), Germany (2.8) UK (3.5) and the US (2.8)."Our research looks at matters closely aligned to trust - like culture, customer satisfaction, living the brand and so forth. The bad stuff stares one in the face in bank annual reports, particularly when you get used to reading hundreds of them," he said.Among Lafferty's conclusions were:•    the best banks focus on consumer and SME and business banking;•    big investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley perform poorly; •    universal banks combining commercial banking and investment also perform badly - not least because of pervasive weaknesses in both strategy and culture.Even more damning were his views on how the culture of form over substance, or appearance over accountability, has taken hold at Australia's biggest banks. Lafferty's conclusion was that all of [the four majors] preferred to talk about some other version of their results, rather than the statutory figures they report in the audited financials."None meet our target of 10 per cent equity to assets or 4 per cent cash to assets," he noted.Among the