A survey shows nurses come first and lobbyists last. The finance profession? You guessed it.
Who knows? Maybe it is the retail banker who had to call you back to get a generic form resigned or a private banker who forgot to discuss the ins and outs of an investment product.
Possibly it was an investment banker trying to pull a fast one on an acquisition target or the commercial banker caught out by near-identical invoices.
Midfield at Best
Whatever the case, a 2025 survey released on Wednesday by Visual Capitalist of the professions doesn’t rate bankers all that highly. In fact, the exact opposite is true.
Using Gallup information, the average finance professional ranks twelfth. Only 23 percent of those polled deemed bankers very trustworthy, with 31 percent of respondents giving them low or very low marks.
Nurses and Lobbyists
It might be good to put that in a bit more perspective. In the survey, nurses came first, with 76 percent getting high or very high marks and only 4 percent low or very low. Lobbyists came last, with what seems like the same 4 percent giving them high ratings and 68 percent low ones.
Although the survey was US-based, it still holds important lessons for Asia and other regions as the banking profession was the first listed to fall into the net negative zone in the graphic.
Behind Auto Mechanics
You might be able to get comfortable with the fact that the finance expert near you isn’t deemed as trustworthy as an elementary school teacher, a doctor, a preacher, or a judge. But an auto mechanic? Not so much.
The one saving grace is that bankers came well ahead of lawyers and business executives. Still, this is a clear trust gap given the profession's overall societal importance, particularly in the rarified world of private banking and investment advice. Not to mention there is an entire regulatory universe out there trying to supervise conduct, fit and proper criteria included.
Judges and Executives
Still, the finding that judges rate so low on the positive side of the table is intriguing while on the negative side, it is the poor performance of business executives.
It is hard to decipher what to make of the former except to attribute it to recent unexpected decisions by the Supreme Court or the newly created Trumpian label of «lawfare» while the business executive side of things probably has a smack of Big Tech in it.
Fractured Geopolitics
The short of it is getting a banker's reasoned, and reasonable, view and perspective is going to be more important than commonly thought in an increasingly AI-dominated, digital-asset-driven world that is likely to continue to experience fractured geopolitics, and heightened financial market volatility, under Trump 2.0.
But you can also turn the whole thing on its head and take the comfortable internal always-positive-no-matter-what corporate take. Bankers didn’t do quite as badly as, say, newspaper reporters, who rated well below nursing home operators, and whose ranking hit rather close to home.
Not Last
And no one was ranked at the bottom of the list, which included car sellers, advertisers, television reporters, and members of Congress, the previously mentioned lobbyists took a distant last place.
Perhaps it is a lesson for all the professions that are not dealing constantly with health, sickness, life, death, and safety daily. We can and should all be doing much better to engender trust, particularly in these convoluted times.
