Standard Chartered Iran claims: Standard enters unchartered reputational territory

Doomed I tell thee, to the point where an acquisition and culling of the brand may be the only option. This is evidenced by a FTSE100 share price that fell nearly 20% this morning.

Why is this more severe than HSBC and its alleged money laundering of drug money? Well, Standard Chartered (Standard) is accused of doing things in far higher sphere of evil (in America’s eyes), i.e. playing with a nation that they consider to be of a terrorist persuasion.

But, and, similar to my good self, this is a big BUT... word in the City is that this time those god-fearing Americans may have gone too far in their accusations.

Standard is not helping itself by not really releasing any worthwhile statements. You know, those kind of statements PRs dream of issuing when you have been wronged - e.g. “We would like to reaffirm that we will be sending in the Dogs of War to seek vengeance upon American regulators for their entirely wrong accusations”, that kind of thing.

The reality though is that Standard can say very little if anything without fear of it affecting any subsequent inquiry.

Before we look at the reputational recovery options, we must first understand the context in which the shizzle has hit the fan and this brings us nicely back to our bestest-buddies from over the pond.

I am inclined to agree with one City Editor who feel this is just America’s latest attempt to punish London banks and financial institutions for, in their eyes, becoming too big for their boots.

In addition, it is starting to emerge that the US division of Standard had no dealings with Iran and that any dealings that went on came from the UK side. Before we ready the knives though, that is not necessarily illegal.

The accusations refer to many years ago, at a time where (apparently) the UK and Euro financial Gods did not decree shenanigans upon Iran, unlike the Americans, and as such, the UK banks were ok to go play with their Iranian friends.

Put the accusations into context like this and you may start to feel, as I do, that is America trying to pro-actively force its foreign policy upon external nations just because it can.

I have massively simplified the situation but if this was the case, Standard did nothing wrong and for the sake of its reputation it needs to say so, far more clearly than it has so far done, and very quickly.

If it did have dealings with Iran, via its UK division, but within the realms of the governing body in which it operated, this is something that may give them a short-term headache but no longer-lasting problems. Standard need to declare this, highlight they did nothing wrong and quickly move on.

The “admit and move on” PR tactic has been successfully deployed so far by HSBC, a company with a comms team that everyone, myself included, admires for its high quality execution of campaigns.

Wider than Standard Chartered, maybe this is the time where the City itself needs to seriously engage with its American counterparts to try and repair damaged bridges. In normal, very dull, PR speak we would probably label this a stakeholder or lobbying campaign. In less dull speak, we need to give Team America’s financial Gods reason to love us again.

Our top City Dogs (not those of war this time) should get over to America, pronto. They need to find out what is going down and why our gun-toting mates keep producing tub-thumping 20-odd page documents ripping our banks apart.

Internally Standard will no doubt be hunting high and low to get the facts of what happened across to their most senior people so that a decision on what statements need to come out next can be issued. My advice would also be to set up a small rebuttal team to make sure any of the obviously made-up nonsense that seeps into the mainstream press can be clarified and removed.

They also need to keep communicating with wider partners and alike. For example, they sponsor a fairly well known team of soccer-kickers in the North West of the UK, Liverpool I think, and given they have American owners, they could come under pressure to be sacked as the sponsor. This would create wider headlines, prolong the story in the press, and be a serious distraction from the main fight.

Keeping Liverpool’s commercial team on board and abreast of the situation is key to shutting down this potential storm.

What Standard Chartered does over the next few days will be key. The world’s media is watching them and they need to be seen as being pro-active, leading the story, not just chasing it and reacting to ever more probing questions.

Good luck Standard Chartered, I for one will be cheering you on.

Andy Barr has worked for a number of financial institutions including AXA and Chelsea Building Society (neither of which were involved with such high profile accusations), he has also worked in a number of senior PR roles for the likes of FirstGroup before before co-founding 10 Yetis.

He once wrote a comment piece that upset Al-Queda’s comms team (yes, they have one) and has since learnt his lesson about not saying bad things about controversial organisations in public. Go Team Iran.