CIICPD 2023

Italy: University of Siena

Critical Incidents in a Financial Context: An empirical analysis from banking students’ and financial intermediaries workers’ experience

Maurizio Pompella, Antonio Fasano, Mario De Martino School of Economics and Management, Law and Business Studies Department

Summary: Approximately 2.2 million people work in the banking sector in the European Union. The EU countries with the highest employment rates in this sector are Germany (26%), France (18%) and Italy (12%). Banks thus play a vital role in the European economy. In an increasingly globalised and multicultural context, the financial intermediaries sector also has to deal with critical situations due to the cultural diversity of people. The fourth chapter explores the current situation of critical incident management in the academic context, where we could find that the interest of both students banking sector operators for the subject is surprisingly high. After examining the state of the art in the study of critical incidents with special reference to the financial and banking sector, the chapter analyses some data collected through surveys distributed to two samples: students of banking, on the one hand, and financial intermediaries’ workers, on the other. The authors argue that the effectiveness of prevention is based on the management’s ability to foresee the nature of crises that could occur, their impact and the vulnerability of institutions to this type of incident. Data show that the management of critical incidents cannot simply be reduced to crisis management and thus to ‘post-crisis’ activity, aimed only at reducing the severity of the consequences. Rather, it must focus on minimising the probability of the incident itself re-occurring (ex-ante approach). Keywords: banks, critical incidents, education, financial intermediaries’ workers.

For detailed analysis and a list of references, see Chapter 4, page 127–156.

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