Mark Kleinman: Nationwide’s pride should be dented by member election bid (City AM)
By Mark Kleinman, Sky News City Editor
Wednesday 08 July 2026 6:36 pm
LINK: https://www.cityam.com/mark-kleinman-nationwides-pride-should-be-dented-by-member-election-bid/
Mark Kleinman is Sky News’ City Editor and the man who gets the Square Mile talking in his City AM column
‘Proud to be different’, ran the long-running Nationwide advertising slogan. Well, quite: it’s hard to see any of Britain’s big high street banks making quite the same mess of an entirely valid claim by one of its customers to be elected to its board.
To recap, James Sherwin-Smith has put his name forward on the ballot paper for Nationwide’s annual meeting this month. He argues, perfectly legitimately, that the move would improve governance and accountability at the UK’s biggest building society at a time when Dame Debbie Crosbie’s multimillion pound pay package is under rightful scrutiny.
This is the same Nationwide, after all, which specialises in virtue-signalling TV commercials contrasting Dominic West as a rapacious bank executive with the values-oriented mutual which gives something back to its ‘shareholders’ – ie members.
Unfortunately, Nationwide’s treatment of Sherwin-Smith almost wholly invalidates the line of attack it pursues in its marketing campaigns.
It has painted him out to be ill-equipped for the rigours of a major financial institution’s board, and in that, it might conceivably be right. Nationwide has made it hard to vote in Sherwin-Smith’s favour because of its ‘quick-voting’ system which defaults to the board’s recommendations on all AGM resolutions.
Astonishingly – and he says he has a recording of a phone call to back him up – Sherwin-Smith says he was offered help by a senior Nationwide executive to find a boardroom role elsewhere if he agreed to drop his campaign.
Ten days after my original query to Nationwide, and after an earlier obfuscatory statement full of language about “recollections”, the building society said: “No offer of any kind of role was made to Mr Sherwin-Smith in return for him dropping his campaign.”
Why not say that straight away then? “Nationwide’s advertising asks the public to believe that mutual ownership makes it fundamentally different from the big banks. That claim deserves much closer scrutiny,” Sherwin-Smith told me this week.
In practice, Sherwin-Smith is unlikely to inflict more than a bloody nose on Nationwide next week. His campaign is, though, a reminder of the dangers of corporate arrogance, even – or perhaps especially – when it proclaims to be different to everyone else.