Tomorrow's interim report of the Financial System Inquiry will be one more cog in a dynamic and effective machine.The forces for change in banking in Australia are essentially organic and indigenous, produced by a management class bent on wealth accumulation.The organisation of the banking industry in the 1970s when Keith Campbell began leading work on the first of these inquiries was fragmented and inefficient. It was wrapped, as the main criticism of the day claimed, within the tentacles of government control.For better or worse the directors of the day set about reform, pursuing bank mergers informed by the advances made by finance companies, the ripples of the 1970s oil shock and the evident interest of foreign banks which were envious, even then, of a mining boom.Smaller entities, often mutuals, joined the quest, turning a movement founded (in the case of credit unions in the 1940s) on the principles of self-improvement into a vehicle for self-enrichment.NSW Permanent Building & Investment Society was the first mutual to shed its skin in 1984, morphing into Advance Bank after a member meeting treated by the media as pantomime.The first demutualisation inspired others. The systematic fleecing of mutual interests, especially in Queensland, followed in the 1990s.State banks misunderstood the market in the 1980s, all, ultimately, crumbling.The privatisation of Commonwealth Bank in 1991 was the seminal event in this chronology, a process not completed until the work of the Wallis panel was underway. The chief architect on the CBA side of this project, David Murray, is head of the present inquiry's panel.The Reserve Bank of Australia lists more than 40 former banks with histories to reflect on, all brushed aside since 1980.The Australian Credit Union Archives holds records for 570 entities, an echo of an era of parish and pooled workplace savings now long past.Instead of mutual help the quest in finance became one of self-enrichment.