Meet Andy Copsey, the Yorkshire banking boss, who is committed to the personal touch

His career has taken him from Yorkshire Bank to Swedish challenger Handelsbanken and now into a role as a non-executive director at business finance specialist ABL.

While a lot has changed since he started his career in 1983 at Yorkshire Bank in Leeds, the fundamentals for Mr Copsey haven’t changed.

He said: “When I started out in my career at Yorkshire Bank, in the staff room there were two posters. One said the customer is king and the other said customers make payday possible.

“The focus then was purely on customer outcome – not because you had a really strong regulator but because bankers wanted to do the right thing. There were no bonuses, it was a collective team effort and everybody was proud to go to work.”

However, Mr Copesy says culturally the wider banking sector has changed. Personal sales targets and bonuses have required regulators to introduce rules to protect customers from financial service providers. This was a large part of what led to the financial crash of 2008.

When Mr Copsey started at Yorkshire Bank, the ceiling for his career was meant to be chief cashier. In fact, he and his parents were just happy that he had landed a job in a secure profession against a backdrop of great industrial and economic upheaval.

“In the early 80s we’d seen quite a bit of upheaval under the Thatcher Government,” he says. “We’d obviously seen the miner’s strikes.”

But he had his sights set much higher than chief cashier so Mr Copsey started a correspondence course. His efforts saw him being put on the management development stream.

“I quickly rose up Yorkshire Bank because they thought I could do a good job, the customers liked me and I was clearly committed to building a long-term career,” Mr Copsey says.

After spending nearly 18 years at Yorkshire Bank in a variety of roles, Swedish challenger bank Handelsbanken came calling in 2001.

He said: “I always had this entrepreneurial instinct. Handlesbanken had this model that said ‘we need local people like Andy Copsey in Leeds to establish a local branch and to run it with much more decision-making autonomy than you would expect in any large company’.”

This approach of providing leaders with autonomy stood Handlesbanken in good stead.

Other banks gravitated towards a culture of sales rather than service. They moved decision-making from frontline people to head offices.

Then the financial crash happened and regulators, journalists and policymakers sought Mr Copsey’s opinion on how to fix a broken banking system.

Handelsbanken hadn’t completely escaped the crisis of 2008 but it was in a far healthier position than the big players who were left requiring bailouts.

Mr Copsey said: “It was a period when a lot of people, including myself, refreshed ourselves over the fundamentals of banking.

“It really brought us back to the fundamentals of why banks were created in the first place and how they are custodians of other people’s money.”

In total, Mr Copsey spent 20 years at the Swedish bank. Nine of those years were spent as UK chief operating officer and he also had a brief stint as acting UK CEO for Handlesbanken.

He said: “If you think back to where my career started as somebody who had been told that their career would be capped at cashier level, to find yourself as acting CEO of a global bank with 200 branches was a real privilege and of course I learnt a lot.”

Mr Copsey couldn’t be any further away from the image of a buccaneering banker. Instead he sees himself as a public servant.

He’s now looking to bring that approach and all of his years of experience to Cleckheaton-based corporate finance broker ABL Business.

“I wanted to bring my career full circle back to my local community,” he says, “and bring some of my skills back.”

ABL fits Mr Copsey’s criteria in terms of what he looks for in a business. He believes the firm, which has 16 employees, has got “a great proposition” with a focus on providing the best service possible to its customers.

With a lot of banks increasingly becoming remote from their customers, as demonstrated by high street branch closures, Mr Copsey feels there is plenty of scope for ABL to bring rounded advice to their customers and build meaningful relationships with them.

He said: “Their core business is around finding the right finance for the SMEs that they serve but in and amongst all of that they’re helping them to deal with the greenhouse gas emission challenge.

“Many businesses don’t have enough resources to employ an ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) manager to put these plans together that the big companies have got but they are getting asked the questions by their suppliers.

“For me, ABL has got that growth but it comes from a very principled backdrop in a sector that doesn’t necessarily share or invest in those areas.”

One thing that Mr Copsey has become a keen champion of over his career is diversity and inclusion.

He said: “Having worked for an international Scandinavian company really helped to bring me on a journey from a diversity and inclusion perspective.

“The office that I was instrumental in building in Manchester for example was quite possibly the most diverse office of Handlesbanken in the world.”

While diversity has improved in the banking sector, there is still a “journey to go on”, says Mr Copsey, who believes that “all businesses should reflect the communities that they serve”.

Looking back on his own career, the Yorkshire-born banker hopes to have made a positive difference to people’s lives and communities.

For someone whose career was set to be capped at chief cashier, Mr Copsey has achieved a more than fulfilling career. Doing so in a principled manner.

All of those years of experience will bode well for ABL as the world of finance enters an important phase following the pandemic.

Curriculum vitae

Title: Managing director at Andy Copsey Consultancy and non-executive director at ABL Business

Favourite holiday destination: Croatia

Last book read: Harriet Tubman

Favourite film: Dances with Wolves

Favourite song: Hey Ya! by Outkast

Car driven: Volvo XC90

Most proud of: Empowering and leading colleagues to help them reach their career potential and thereby build great businesses

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James Mitchinson