We may not yet have got to the bottom of the many barrels which the banking sector scraped in its wilderness years.
But, as further scandal looms on the horizon, the irrefutable fact is Britain’s once-proud banking industry has become an industry tarnished.
From the moment the run on Northern Rock began in 2007, consumer confidence in the sector began to crumble.
Little which has gone on since think payment protection insurance, Libor rate rigging and astronomical and unjustified bonus payments has done much to restore the collective faith.
And banking without faith simply does not work.
Only the select few are ever party to the world of markets, trading floors and high finance.
Fewer still will ever be exposed to the behind-the-scenes goings on in the corridors of power and boardrooms of the world’s major banks.
What happens within those walls is certainly not an irrelevance but it may as well be for the vast majority of ordinary account holders who just want to be secure in the knowledge that their hard-earned cash is safe where it rests.
When even the merest seed of doubt creeps into that customer-bank relationship, then there is a problem.
The global financial crisis, of which Northern Rock was but the first UK symptom, saw that seed of doubt within the public psyche grow to become a yawning chasm.
Over the past six years much work has been done to tackle the root causes of the banking industry’s problems, including a major overhaul of how the financial services industries are regulated.
That most definitely remains a work in progress, but rehabilitating the image of the banks in the public consciousness is likely to be a much longer process still.
Last summer the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards the Westminster group charged with getting to the bottom of what went wrong within the sector indicated it would welcome the creation of a new organisation to help raise standards of competence and behaviour among bankers operating in the UK.
Former CBI chief Sir Richard Lambert who once edited the august organ that is the Financial Times was the man tasked by the respective chairmen of Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander, Standard Chartered and Nationwide to deliver a plan to restore that vital faith to the sector.
On Monday, Sir Richard laid out his blueprint for the new independent body and the role it may eventually play.
The document, which has now been put out to consultation among key stakeholders, proposed a new system of industry-wide reporting standards relating to the conduct of workers in their professional lives and certain wider issues such as interactions with the public and overall training and qualification levels.
Sir Richard has previously described the need for change following the “excesses and shocks of recent years”, and is determined the new organisation will have the backbone to drive up standards.
“The intention is that the new organisation will act as an independent champion for better banking standards in the UK,” he said as he published the consultation paper.
I and I suspect millions of others who count on the banks day in and day out sincerely hope that mission statement turns out to be more than just words, and Sir Richard has the will to drive through the change he has outlined.
The body that emerges has to have real teeth to make the banks truly accountable to the people whose money they are entrusted with.
That is vital if faith is ever to be restored, and banking returned to the high esteem in which it was once held by the general public.