Working with standards—post‐crisis positioning of bank advisors

Taking recent developments in the financial sector as its point of departure, this article examines how bank advisors are positioned. Increased complexity in banking products and the risk orientation that has followed the financial crisis make demands on the quality of advice. Drawing on qualitative interview studies in two D anish banks, the article questions whether the dominant understanding of bank advisors as primarily sales persons comprises their current positioning. Contradictory demands on bank advisors emerge in the simultaneous emphasis on advisory aspects of the work and in the imposition of new standard procedures; while one points to a positioning as professional advisors, the other tends to undermine it and makes the positioning ambiguous.