A decade and a half since the financial crisis, the financial services sector still carries a trust deficit. It's a rare industry. It touches almost every life, and yet most of the people it serves doubt it. Customers, colleagues and the public quietly ask the same thing of banks, insurers, asset managers and pension funds: Do these institutions exist for us, or for themselves?

Until that question has a convincing answer, the doubt sticks around. And it's expensive.

It's expensive because finance isn't a sector at the margins of the economy. It's much of the plumbing beneath it. Financial services supports around two million jobs across the UK and contributes a significant share of the nation's tax receipts. It underpins the things most people never think about until they fail. Getting paid. Buying a home. Insuring a car. Saving for retirement. Finding the capital to build a business. When trust in that system erodes, the consequences aren't abstract.

Talented graduates hesitate to say they work in the City. Regulation thickens, layer upon layer, draining productivity in the name of restoring confidence. Customers assume the worst before a conversation has even begun.

A sector that can't show its worth, pays for the suspicion in higher costs, harder hiring, and in a licence to operate that keeps narrowing.

This is why a serious conversation has taken hold across the industry. The Purpose of Finance. Sponsored research projects, think-tank programmes and the City's own initiatives have landed on the same conclusion. Finance has to rediscover what it's actually for, and say it clearly. This is about legitimacy, not marketing. Think about what finance really does. Capital that funds homes, pensions, enterprise and the move to a lower-carbon economy. Risk shared so ordinary people can plan their lives with some certainty. Savings turned into the long-term investment a country runs on. These aren't small things. They're the case for finance, and they're being made far too quietly.

The problem is rarely that finance lacks purpose. Most firms now have a purpose statement, a set of values, real good work going on. The problem is that the purpose goes untold.

Defining what you stand for is the easy part. Making people feel it is the hard part.

And almost no one does it well. You want colleagues to believe it, customers to trust it, investors to reward it. A purpose nobody sees does nothing for trust. A good deed nobody hears about earns no credit. In an industry whose whole product is confidence, that gap isn't cosmetic. It's the difference between being tolerated and being genuinely supported.

So, here's the opportunity. It's simple to describe and hard to pull off. Take the real good that finance already does, and make it impossible to ignore.