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...This wasn't Sandy Crombie's description of himself or of Standard Life, the Edinburgh-based finance house of which he is chief executive.

But he sounds comfortable enough to live with that description, offered by someone else, as he puts out his year end message that at least one of Scotland's big financial players is doing pretty well, despite everything.

He was on the Today programme on Tuesday morning, saying the company isn't actually dull, but "it's good to be reassuring... the market has seen us as rock solid".

Standard Life faced down some quite serious problems over past years, steering its way through demutualisation better than many had expected, and used the resilience in the market to take the pain and bounce back.

"What was evident in 2003 was that this business was running more risks than it had the capital to cope with," the chief executive said.

"Companies can take risks so long as they have a large store of money they can call on in difficult times."

Edinburgh's more thrill-seeking big banks provided bumper profits, but Crombie doesn't leave much doubt that he doesn't rate their methods for doing so.

Black box

He said: "What has gone wrong in these unusual times is that those who have taken the more esoteric risks and tried to do the undoable have found that their business models have just collapsed.

"That causes an enormous loss of confidence.

"Simple, transparent, straightforward and understandable is what people will want in the future."

But hasn't the bank bust and the Madoff hedge fund scandal only undermined the whole sector?

"There's an aura around about some of the providers," Crombie said.

"Nobody knows quite how they do it. It's a bit of a black box.

"You don't know what happens inside it, but you like what comes out of the other side of it - for a while."

Shock waves

He added: "Because you don't know how it's done, you don't know how it could go wrong.

"That's a style of business, a proposition that we want to steer well clear of."

The Sage of Lothian Road isn't sure about the markets next year.

He said he had recently been using the analogy of a tsunami.

"The shock waves occurred 15 months ago now, and it's still not clear if the waters are still arriving or if the waters are receding," he said.

"In some respects, it feels as if the waters are still coming, and we may have to find higher ground.

"I may be excessively gloomy and we may be closer to the tidy up stage than I imagine."

Constrast that with the revelations in Panorama last night, making it clear that October saw the Royal Bank only a few hours from being unable to open its doors for business.

The Bank of England, we now know, had to go to creditors in Japan and the US to plead with them to keep faith with RBS.

On Robert Peston's blog, you can read a full transcript of the interviews, going a long way past the edited, broadcast version, and you can also (in the UK) still see Panorama on iplayer.