London Briefing:  The UK financial services industry, often referred to as "The City", is the country's single biggest export earner, is one of the largest employers and is able to exert enormous influence on every other business.

Its political clout should also never be under-estimated. Given all of this it is surprising to observe that, outside the City, and sometimes within it, few people have a clue what it does.

Of course, there are many different businesses within financial services, many of which seem to bear little resemblance to each other. I have often been struck by the dialogue of the deaf that always takes place between a money broker and a stock broker on the few occasions that their paths cross.

Even after many hours of questioning, neither broker is any the wiser about each other's daily activities.

They both speak different languages, with very strong dialects. That they both perform the same function - charging a small fee for acting as an intermediary between buyers and sellers - always seems to be obscured by a fog of jargon.

Of course, the whole industry currently has a very bad name. Thanks to various scandals, on both sides of the Atlantic, many people now doubt whether there is any integrity left in the City. From pensions to mortgages there have been several mis-selling outrages - the wrong people were sold the wrong products at too high a price.

In investment banking, the serial wrong-doing exposed on Wall Street has resonated here in London. We now see headlines such as "Is there an honest man left on Wall Street?" But the point to note here is that the scandals have been exposed and something is being done about them.

The City used to be a place where the upper-middle classes used to send their defective sons, the ones who stood no chance of making it in the traditional professions - law, medicine, accountancy, etc - or even as a politician. The cosy cartels that existed in many parts of the industry meant that you could make lots of money merely by turning up.

If people struggle today with understanding what the City does, it was even worse in those days. Part of the trick of forming an employment cartel is that you never let on just how easy your job actually is (that goes for many of the traditional professions as well).

Much of this changed following deregulation in the mid- 1980s. The City is now much more of a meritocracy, where rewards bear some resemblance to effort and talent. But the old ways still exist in some quarters.

I have an acquaintance who has been fired for incompetence several times but has finally found his niche at a firm that has an unwritten rule: never, under any circumstances, is an old Etonian to be made redundant. These sorts of practices are increasingly rare but they still exist. There are still far too many idiots and sociopaths with cut-glass accents pretending to have an expertise that will always be well beyond them.

One of the best-kept secrets of the City is the fact that most of its jobs are terribly dull. This is why, for example, virtually every attempt to turn City life into high drama has failed. Law, medicine, politics and even the civil service always makes good television; not so the city. Oliver Stone made a half decent fist of it with his film Wall Street, but nothing else has worked. Few producers and directors even bother to try once they realise how boring most financial types are .

If nepotism among boring people is the worst we can say about the City we hardly have made a damning indictment. Yes there are still corrupt and incompetent individuals, but the City's global success suggests to me that there is less to the scandals than meets the eye. There are corrupt and incompetent practices present in every organisation; the real questions revolve around their extent and what is being done about them.

Yet again, for example, the malfeasance that is the EU budgetary process has been exposed and, yet again, nothing is being done about it. At least something is being done to tighten up UK financial sector regulation. People are found out and do end up in court.

The City is by no means perfect. But it is one of our few world-beating industries. Whatever we do there we do it better and on a larger scale than anyone else.

I suspect that one of the reasons for that is that levels of corruption, relatively speaking at least, are in fact much lower than anywhere else.