Importantly the bank’s assets will be locked in a way that prevents sale or takeover – and the author is well aware of the fate of other Quaker businesses. Bank governance is based on the idea that all people are of equal worth, a principle known as the Quaker Testimony to Equality. From the earliest days the Quakers gave equal weight to the spiritual authority of women and refused to use formal forms of address for ‘betters’.
The Quaker Business Method is a particularly noteworthy and practical model for introducing faith-inspired themes into management policies[19]. It includes such prescriptions that in meetings everyone is listened to in silence, followed by a period of complete silence for reflection; there is no chairman, only a clerk who summarises the ‘sense of the meeting’, which results in a minute that all present need to agree without voting. For the Quaker Bank this does not imply it will be anarchy, Lovatt explains: there will be an executive, but he/she will have to operate under the bank’s articles, which draw attention to the Testimony to Equality, forbid imperious behaviour and encourage consensus and transparency. The author admits those more used to traditional businesses might well wonder if the bank will ever get anything done – but the methods have been used in other successful Quaker businesses in history. Lovatt describes high ethical aims, claiming that the bank will –
never force a borrower into bankruptcy (although it may try to recover its losses where others have forced bankruptcy). It won’t seek any assets as security other than those purchased by a loan, it won’t sell insurance policies to the borrower to reduce the QFT’s risks. If a borrower gets into trouble the QFT should pay for business advice. Bank risks and costs will therefore rise “but this type of ‘gentle banking’ will be part of a package… which we hope is characteristic of a Christian bank. (p. 13)
Charging interest to borrowers is a particularly difficult problem, one that has been debated by the church as a whole for all of its existence, and Lovatt does not appear to have any new answers. The Quaker Bank believes that charging interest is acceptable so long as the rate is not oppressive: if lending has made a business successful then they are not being oppressed. Lovatt says the bank intends therefore not to charge interest on loans but to charge a percentage of the profits of any project it finances. Lovatt does not explain how this will be translated into the real world, where the discretion a business has over massaging its profit margins downwards is very high. The author admits that the method of lending to private individuals has not been finalised, but speculates that individuals would be invited to donate to the Quaker Bank. He also says this would work better if the individuals were members of a Quaker local meeting where others could share in problems and help each other out, a solution that contradicts the bank’s stated goal of being a bank for everyone regardless of faith.