If you own stock in the company and this causes the stock to go up (even if the rise is artificially inflated) you can still make plenty of money.

Yeah but what about fake accounts would make the stock go up? Wouldn't it actually make the revenue per account go down which would seem to me to be negative indicator. But again, I don't know the banking industry.

Their stock price was heavily based on their high cross-selling metrics.

It's a short term bonus ploy, and the idea is it doesn't get found out while they're at the company Also a lot of head-in-the-sand doublethink too. Michael Lewis' book, and other in-depth reports about bankers' behaviour in the market / housing crash explains it nicely. Short term incentives for executives and moving jobs means that they aren't there when the chips are down.

Growth metrics

> The people who stand to benefit most are the individual employees.

And their managers, and their managers' managers, whose income depends on showing good numbers to the nth-managers.