I really appreciated following Art Johnson over the past year; he’s the Michigan banker who was chairman of the American Bankers Association, concluding his term at the ABA convention earlier this month.

During his farewell speech in Boston, he talked about how things have changed since he agreed to serve in the ABA’s leadership chairs. It was 2006. “Remember 2006?” he said. “It was a time of record earnings for the banking industry and no bank failures for the second year in a row.

“What could possibly go wrong?” he quipped.

Johnson listed three big events that took place during his tenure:

First, the subprime mortgage bubble burst and the financial crisis that followed was the most traumatic economic event since the Great Depression.

Second, we had the legislative battle leading to the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act.

And third, my friend, ABA President and CEO Ed Yingling, announced that he was going to retire at the end of this year.

 Johnson used much of his speech to summarize the lobbying efforts bankers undertook during the debate of Dodd-Frank. But then he listed other important association accomplishments during his year as chairman, 2009-2010:

We’ve continued the unification of ABA and legacy ACB. That merger made us stronger and more unified at a time when those attributes would be critical.

We fully integrated both the curricula and the cultures of the National School of Banking and Stonier to create a new Stonier Graduate School of Banking. Now we have the best of both to continue educating banking leaders.

We continue to battle – as we have for more than 20 years – the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s march to mark-to-market accounting. And we’ve worked to encourage bank investors and others to join the fight so FASB can better understand why we’re opposed to having banks mark all financial instruments – including loans – at fair value on the balance sheet.

We encouraged Congress to pass a small business lending bill that’s going to help us create jobs in our communities.

We brought a thousand bankers to Washington in March to visit their members of Congress as part of our Grass Roots Summit. There is nothing like a hometown banker talking to members of Congress about what matters to their constituents back home.

And we continued to promote financial literacy because consumer knowledge is still the best consumer protection.

It was a big year for Art Johnson. Best wishes to Art as he transitions out of the ABA leadership. Look for ABA convention coverage in the Nov. 15 edition of NorthWestern Financial Review.

Rusty Cloutier, Louisiana banker and former chairman of the Independent Community Bankers of America, was in Minneapolis yesterday to speak to a group of bankers gathered for the 35th anniversary celebration of United Bankers Bank, the country’s first bankers’ bank. Cloutier is author of “Big Bad Banks: How greed and ego among the big shots in banking and government created the crisis that wrecked our economy,” which was published last year.

Cloutier opened a 45 minute presentation with a news tidbit which shows why Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

“Remember Bank of America when they came out two months and said they were no longer going to charge overdraft fees on ATM and debit card transactions?” Cloutier asked. “Bank of America announced a new product yesterday. The new product is called cash advance. If you go to an ATM for a withdrawal  and you don’t have the money, they give you the cash. If you use a debit card and you don’t have money in the bank, they will advance you the cash. The charge is $35 per occurrence.

“Give me a break. And you wonder why the CFPB came into existence.”

If this is true, I would expect outrage from regulators and consumer groups as news of this becomes known.

William Taylor, an author and the man who founded Fast Company magazine, encouraged bankers to turn the current crisis into an opportunity. He spoke at the opening general session of the ABA convention in Boston this morning.

“Will you emerge with a closer connection to your customers?” Taylor asked. He said as customers become more cynical, they are becoming more selective. He said banks that figure out how to stand out are likely to be selected more often.

How to stand out? Taylor said your bank should care about the customer more than the competitor. He invited bankers to think about ways their institution can demonstrate they care. One example he gave is companies should answer the phone rather than rely on impersonal automated phone answering systems.

He said companies succeed when they figure out how to deliver a more memorable experience than the competition. He said banks need to create an emotional and psychological connection with customers.

“Value accrues to scarcity,” he said. “There is a scarcity of organizations that are excited about serving their customers.”

The question, he said, “is not how to be more efficient, but how to be more human.”

Taylor’s message is resonating throughout the banking industry. Last month, he was the keynote speaker at ABA’s marketing conference conducted in Minneapolis.

Charles Gibson, the former anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, and the long-time host of the network’s Good Morning America program, addressed the ABA convention in Boston yesterday morning with a serious message. He said he is “concerned about America.”

He said Americans don’t seem to trust anymore. Washington, he said, isn’t working. “Politics always takes precedence over policy,” he summarized. “In Congress, almost every lawmaker will tell you they hate the system, but they feel powerless to fix it.”

Gibson said members of Congress are polarized, and they have allowed labels to substitute for thought. “It was President Nixon in 1969 who said ‘we cannot learn from each other until we stop shouting at each other.’ How well that fits today,” he said.

Gibson expressed concern over the $3 billion that is spent on lobbying every year, a somewhat odd message for the ABA, an organization for which lobbying is very important.

Nonetheless, Gibson’s message was largely on point, and informative, especially his comments on media where he said that he expects television to move away from broadcasting and toward what he called “narrow casting.” He said that rather than a television signal being beamed into homes across the nation, he expects everything to move to computer, which will give people the opportunity to choose between thousands of offerings. This format, however, will make it very difficult to reach the mass audiences that television has reached in the past.

Gibson’s understanding of the banking industry, however, was disappointing. He clearly did not understand the distinctions between the industry’s largest players and community banks. He didn’t get the meaning of the shadow industry. He didn’t seem to understand that community bankers have nothing to do with the current fiasco involving improperly documented foreclosures.

His lack of understanding is disappointing because he is probably one of the most informed people out there. He has studied people and industries and events all over the world for decades, and yet he didn’t really get that community banks are not the same as the mortgage brokers; they aren’t the ones who invented CMOs. If he isn’t getting it, then it is difficult to have much hope that the average American is getting it.

The banking industry clearly has a lot more work to do, and it is along the lines that Ed Yingling said: you have to toot your own horn more. Bankers need to do a better job telling their own stories so that the difference between them and the shadow players is crystal clear.

Gibson closed his comments by telling bankers: “You have to win public confidence back, one passbook customer at a time.” That’s good advice and I think the way bankers do that is by continuing to work to educate the public about what they do and how they do it.