Bell calls time

The Australian Bankers Association announced yesterday that its long-serving chief executive, David Bell, would step down.

Bell spent nine years in the job, coming in at a time when banks were on the nose. Widespread branch closures in the 1990s and a shift in the pricing model, with the introduction of a range of fees to compensate for lower lending margins, made the banks very unpopular with consumers.

The ABA was also in strife for having tried to buy favourable comment from a couple of influential radio announcers.

Duntroon-trained, Bell's approach to dealing with all this was to keep a low profile and make the banks and the ABA small targets.

He gave few interviews and they were brief when they happened. It was much the same when it came to the conference circuit.

The utterances attributed to him in ABA press releases were invariably anodyne. His strategy appears to have been to convince people that bankers were too boring to hate.