BANKER
A Style of banking
Repertoire of Topics, Informational Brochures, and Reports
Luis Valls was, as he said, “a writer, banker, and doctor of law.” This indicates that he immensely enjoyed putting his ideas in writing. To express his unique banking style and to demonstrate that transparency was one of the pillars of his management style as president of Popular, he maintained very fluid written communication with both shareholders and bank employees.
In His Own Hand
It is no secret that Luis Valls would have been happy working as a journalist . In some way, he expressed his banking chronicles in several publications that he crafted for the bank’s annual documentation. Jaime Díez Yáñez, in his thesis on Luis Valls, explains it succinctly: Jaime Díez Yáñez, in his thesis on Luis Valls 1 , succinctly explains: “The annual documentation of Banco Popular consisted primarily of three documents: the Report or Annual Report, the Informational Brochure, and the Repertoire of Topics.
The Report or Annual Report (as it would eventually be called) contained predominantly numerical or accounting content, including the year’s results – balance sheet and profit and loss account – and a description of management activities – the management report.
The information brochure detailed the bank’s operations, structure, and personnel throughout the year.
The Repertoire of Topics complemented and expanded on the previous documents with a list of events that had affected, for the most part negatively, the management of the Popular
The Originality of the Repertoire of Topics
The purpose of publishing this repertoire was not to boast about the Bank’s successes but to publicly account for everything that had gone wrong From layoffs to robberies at branches, nothing was hidden in an institution where the motto was: “Here, nothing is done that couldn’t appear on the front page of a newspaper tomorrow.”
“While the Annual Report detailed the results obtained, which were generally good, the Repertoire highlighted what had gone wrong,” recalls Díez Yáñez, who interviewed executives involved in producing these documents. They told him that Luis Valls directed and closely supervised their publication. In a way, they were part of the president’s working materials. Luis Valls was the repertoire creator and its editor-in-chief for twenty-nine years, even after stepping down as president of the Bank.
The Importance of Error
To understand how Luis Valls conceived this document, which he sent once a year to his shareholders, is useful to review what he wrote about it in July 2004. In a text titled “The Error,” collected by Pérez Sala2, he reflected on how much people talk about success and how little they talk about mistakes. He liked discussing his own and others’ mistakes, as long as they were not due to a lack of reflection or interest (which he deemed unacceptable). He believed that making mistakes is the best way to learn. We quote his reflection verbatim: “At the bank, we have published annually, for 27 years, a Repertoire of Topics that records the errors, failures, and attacks we suffer. In this, we follow Noel Clarasó’s maxim:<<Always cite your own mistakes before referring to others.’>> The Repertoire is an exercise in informational transparency – the shareholder has the right to know our mistakes, not just our successes – but it is also a valuable tool for employee training. In this regard, we have even recently had the satisfaction recently of a colleague asking us for several copies of the repertoire to use as teaching material in his employees’ training sessions.”
Bibliography
Thesis “Luis Valls. Banco Popular. Un repertorio”, by Jaime Díez Yáñez. Book “Documentos>Versión 2 Luis Valls-Taberner” (Luis Pérez-Sala, Fundación para Atenciones Sociales, 2007)
