Linguistic Trust-Building Strategies in Swiss Banks’ Public Discourse: : A Diachronic Study of Annual Reports and Corporate Responsibility Reports from UBS and Credit Suisse

Abstract: To be perceived as trustworthy in the eyes of the stakeholders is one of the main assets of any successful firm, for a positive image will reflect positively on business. This study focuses on the analysis of trust-building strategies in Annual Reports (ARs) and Corporate Responsibility Reports (CRRs) of two Swiss banks, UBS and Credit Suisse. The analysis aims to identify the linguistic means used to project a trustworthy image, as well as to point out any changes in their use which might have occurred after the financial crisis of 2008. For this purpose, a corpus of ARs and CRRs from the years 2007, 2012 and 2017 has been compiled. The corpus was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to identify the frequency and distribution of lexical expressions indexing competence, benevolence, and integrity. The results, though tentative, provide insights into the use of trust-building linguistic means and their diachronic development.