Entrepreneur
I’ve been involved in financial services marketing for over thirty years. My first job in the industry was in direct marketing for Sun Life of Canada, in London.
In 1987 I co-founded a financial services marketing agency in London, City Financial Marketing which, over the next ten years or so became the largest agency of its kind in Europe. It was bought by Publicis in 1998.
I then co-founded The Financial Services Forum with two colleagues, Keith Carby and John Seilis. Shortly thereafter we were joined by Richard Nolan, who worked with us as Operations Director for almost 20 years. The Forum was created with a belief that good marketing should be good for the consumer. You should also be able to prove it works. I was CEO from 1998 to 2007. In 2007 I became chairman. The FS Forum was bought by Incisive Media in 2019. Keith, John Rich and I remain great friends.
In 2007 I wanted to put my marketing belief into practice and saw the opportunity to create a new bank. In 2008 a partner and I co-founded Metro Bank the first new High Street Bank in the UK for over 150 years. I served as the founding chairman.
In December 2012 I stepped down from the board to create atom bank, Europe’s first bank designed for mobile devices. Atom bank launched in 2014 and I served as founder and chairman until December 2018.
In 2018 was invited to join an incredible team in Australia who were planning to launch a new bank. My wife and I moved to Sydney in January 2019 where became chairman and co-founder of 86 400, Australia’s first smart bank. In 2023 I led the sale of the bank to National Australia Bank.
In 2019 I co-founded and chair archie, with a group of serial business scalers to help early-stage fintechs scale. archie provides experience, expertise and playbooks to help businesses super scale. www.archiegrowth.com
Other roles
I am an independent director of Wio Bank, the UAE's leading business and retail bank
I'm an independent director of Humm Group, a leading international and commercial lending business based in Sydney.
I've been on the advisory board of ila the leading digital bank operating in Bahrain and Jordan, owned by the Arab banking Corporation, since 2016.
I served as Non-Executive Director of agiliti, the UK-based banking software-as-a-service (SaaS) of Fiserv from 2013 – 2018. Fiserv is an essential provider to financial institutions and businesses around the world.