Ethical Factors Affecting the Financial Market: A Study from Bangladesh Perspectives

Surajit Sarbabidya and Trina Saha

The global economic affairs have brought both opportunities and challenges for the commercial arenas in which financial market is also not an exception. But some employees in the financial market put their efforts to achieve their target in ethical manner while the other group aims to fulfill their materialistic gains in any manner even if that is unethical. Such behavior often leads to competitive advantages or ethical crises or challenges in a wide range of financial institutions, which, in turn, reflects the success or failure of an economic and social model based on certain ethical assumptions. With this end in view, this paper aims to review the ethical factors of the banking, insurance and investment industries representing the financial market. The present study found various ethical factors which influence the performance of the financial institutions. Such factors include commitment or their lacking to high ethical standards, authentic as well as false financing schemes or rumors for selfish gain, appropriate or overestimation of projected revenue, evil nexus of employees with customers, punctuality or delay in sanctioning loans, compliance or ignoring financial guidelines, informative as well as untrue advertisements, half-truths and nondisclosure of material information regarding what the policy covers, credibility of the agents and brokers, etc. This study concludes with recommendations of effective solution to enhance ethical reputation of the respective financial entities in one hand and counter the bad impact of the unethical factors on the other hand.