The original idea for the body came from the work of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards [1] and the subsequent Lambert Review,[2] which called for a new type of organisation, different from traditional regulators, that would look at banking standards, culture and the root causes of poor behaviour.
[3] The organisation was funded by the banks, but acts independently of them through its mission and a board composed primarily of non-bankers.
[5] Sir Brendan Barber served as vice-chair, and Alison Cottrell was the CEO of the organisation.
[6][7][8][9][10][11] The organisation's approach to assessing culture combines methods from economics, behavioural science, data science and ethnography,[12][13][6] and has been described by Gillian Tett as "anthropologists with big data trying to use ways to track what bankers are doing, what they're feeling, to work out whether they have a good culture or not".
[21][22] Members of the Treasury Committee examining the work of the BSB in 2018 criticised the slow progress made on fixing the UK's banking culture.