Why I’m only too happy to share top job with a woman
Ex-rugby player brings team spirit to Monitise
TWO heads, Alastair Lukies believes, are better than one, which is why the founder of mobile banking company Monitise recently hired a co-chief executive to run the business alongside him, to gasps of surprise from the City.
Not only is it unorthodox for anyone at the top of a company to go in for power-sharing, but it is doubly so for a male boss to concede his sole supremacy to an older woman – in this case, California-based Elizabeth Buse, 53, a veteran of the Visa payment card organisation.
Many see joint chief executives as a recipe for ego-clashes, turf wars and confusion over who is really in charge.
Perhaps Lukies’ past life as a rugby player for Saracens and London Irish, has instilled him with more team spirit than the average boardroom baron, but he is adamant the arrangement will work.
‘Having a joint CEO was 100pc my idea. You have to know what you are good at, and what you are not. I learned humility on the rugby field.
‘I wanted to be the really good-looking guy who scored all the tries, but I was the ugly one on the front row.
‘Elizabeth has a lot more experience than me at running a big company, and we need that.’
Lukies, who has just been awarded a CBE for services to charity and mobile banking, adds: ‘I am not the sharpest tool in the box. People say to me, “Al, don’t be ridiculous, you have built a $2bn company.” But that is because I have surrounded myself with amazing people.’ City analysts reckon Buse ( pictured
below) will give confidence to investors that Monitise can implement its growth plans.
That is important, because the AIMlisted company, which Lukies set up in 2003, is big on ideas for the potential of mobile commerce, but so far remains short on profits. It is likely to remain loss-making until next year or the year after.
‘As a loss-making tech company, we get tons of criticism,’ says Lukies.
‘But do we have assets that are valuable? Yes we do. Do we have revenue that is strong and growing very fast? Absolutely. Do we have partnerships? Yes we do.’
The largest shareholder is a US fund, Omega Partners, with 12pc. Norges, the Norwegian bank, has a stake, along with Visa, MasterCard and UK fund manager Invesco.
Monitise, Lukies says, ‘is in the business of selling picks and shovels to the gold rush’. Its technology enables banks, telecoms providers and stores to offer mobile banking and payments to their customers.
Clients include banks such as HSBC and mobile phone companies such as Vodafone.
He wants to expand in emerging markets, where there are no bank branch networks, and sees opportunities for shoppers to buy goods simply by pointing their phone at them.
Stores could use the technology to ping special offers to a mobile when a customer walks by their shop.
Then there are the marketing possibilities that could be opened up through the huge amount of data companies can glean on people’s spending habits. ‘I don’t know what mobile shopping will be like, just like no one predicted Amazon,’ says Lukies. ‘More than 90pc of 11 year olds have a mobile phone, so if your bank hasn’t got a good mobile banking app, forget it.’ What about security fears? ‘Mobile is inherently much more secure than the internet. We have chip and pin, it is all encrypted, like the Enigma machine.’
I can’t help pointing out perhaps that is not the best analogy, as the boffins of Bletchley Park famously cracked the Enigma code.
‘Well, nothing’s uncrackable. When bank cards first came out people didn’t want to use the ATM. The next generation are not going to think about it.’ Lukies, who talks nineteen to the dozen and bangs the table when he gets carried away with his own enthusiasm, was spurred to become an entrepreneur after injury put an end to his rugby career and his family lost most of their money in the Lloyd’s of London disaster of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Suddenly, the security of a comfortable upbringing on the family farm near Bishop Stortford was snatched away. ‘We used to be pretty well off, and I didn’t have to worry about money. It was very trau- matic. The rug was ripped out from under all of us.’ His idol, he says, is his elder brother Jonathan. ‘He was at agricultural college when it happened. His whole dream was that he wanted to run the farm.
‘He had walked that land all his life, looking at the weather, feeling the soil, he wanted to take it on and pass it to his children.’
One of his money-making schemes was running a House of Commons magazine that he turned into an online research tool for MPs.
That proved to be a fertile source of new contacts, one of whom was Steve Atkinson, head of policy at Vodafone, who awakened him to the possibilities of mobile phones and banking that led to the birth of Monitise.
Now 40, he lives with Helen, his wife of 11 years and their one-year- old son Jacob in Furneaux Pelham, near where he grew up.
‘Dad became a born-again Christian after what happened. I have a very strong Christian faith too and a belief in God’s plan.’
For some investors, going into tech stocks is a triumph of hope over experience.
In the UK, there is more scepticism than in the US, possibly because this country has so far not produced a genuine giant on the scale of Apple or Amazon.
‘If Mark Zuckerberg were British, would Facebook exist? The answer is probably no,’ says Lukies.
‘As a culture we have a fear of failure. In the US people will start a company five times, fail five times and succeed at the sixth attempt.
‘We still haven’t recovered from the first internet boom and bust. I still get fund managers today who tell me they lost their shirt then, but that was 20 years ago.
‘The point is there is more technology in your mobile phone than in the spaceship that first went to the moon.
‘Every business is a tech business, tech is the world.’