Tech / Board View | Antony Jenkins

20 Dec

With a high profile career in banking spanning both traditional financial services and technology, Antony Jenkins is a seasoned entrepreneur, CEO and Chair. Former CEO of Barclays, he founded 10X Banking in 2016, building technology platforms for banks across the world.

Here he shares his insights on being a maverick, expecting the unexpected and supporting founders through growth and uncertainty.

10X now counts some of the world’s largest banks, including JP Morgan, among its clients, and investors such as BlackRock and Canada’s largest pension fund, CPP Investments, among its backers. Antony is also Chair of Currencies Direct, Director of Blockchain.com and recently stepped down from the board of Fannie Mae. He’s a member of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Committee.

What excites you about Chairing a growth company?

My whole professional life has been about having an impact, with a growth company you can have a significant impact. The scale-up journey is very different with growth companies.

Companies in the growth stage are learning all the time and have to make decisions quickly. A hypothesis they may have had six months ago may have been true then, but the latest data may show a new hypothesis emerging and you need to act fast. So the team has to let go of one idea and change direction. I find that very stimulating, it’s also a real leadership challenge: you have to make sure that you can move forward and pivot.

With 10X tech we’ve built an organisation and platform that’s highly scalable from a resource point of view.

What drove you to set up 10X?

The single defining characteristic of an entrepreneur is to see the world in a different way from everyone else - or they wouldn’t do what they do! Founders are always looking for a different angle - FinTech founders are driven by improving how financial systems work. For me, I was so frustrated by running a big bank, that as CEO I didn’t have the tech to give customers what they deserved. That’s what drove me to set up 10x - I’m fascinated by opportunities that are transformational.

How do you know if your model will fly?

With a tech firm, it’s very different: first you have to identify a real problem and second, find a solution that’s significantly better than existing models out there.

In our case with 10X, the problem we were tackling was: how do banks staycontinue to be relevant to their customers and how can they use tech forto do that? You need to identify the problem and find a solution. You’ve got to figure out if you can build it and whether you can sell it - and be paid for it. Then you need to find out if you can make an economic model out of it.

What have you learnt from the corporate world that you’ve applied to your growth companies and vice versa?

Running any sort of business has similar dynamics: it’s about finding customers you can sell to - and getting paid for it. Most importantly, it’s about motivating and leading people to do the best work they can do - and ensuring it’s the right work. When leading a huge global business as CEO, you’re not that involved in day to day operational details, you’re the external face of the business and internal head of leadership. With a start up, you’re much more involved in the day-to-day.

What are the key lessons you’ve learnt that make you a better Chair?

It depends on what the business needs. You need to recognise that with a scale up, things are going to move quickly - you can’t think about it in the same way as you would an established business where you might miss your financial plan by 10% - you might miss it by 300% in a scale-up, but perhaps that’s the right thing to do when new areas come along to focus on.

You have to be able to guide the founders and executives who will often be doing this for the first time. You need to be able to coach them where they need it, in some cases that means putting people around them to round out their skill set.

What’s your advice to other Founders getting through ongoing uncertainty and crisis?

Expect the unexpected! We’ve learned that over the last few years. The number one thing to focus on is that you don’t want to run out of money. When the funding environment allows it, raise as much as you can - on the best terms you can. As the environment shifts, be ready to act quickly and to flex your model upwards or downwards if needed. Founders must be dynamic and accept they can’t control the external environment. Various factors in the economy will continue to shift and create risk (and they have done since the 2008 financial crisis) which means there will continue to be uncertainty, but in that there’s always the opportunity for growth.

Rachel Ingram