Perspectives on building a bank transformation business

In this podcast with Matthew Gwyther as part of a Jericho Conversations series, 10x Founder & Executive Chairman Antony Jenkins discusses the motivations that led him to create 10x Future Technologies, hiring technology talent amid a pandemic and how financial services innovation can lead to a more inclusive society.

Early in the podcast discussion when talking about banks using decades-old software, Matthew asks about 10x’s business model and its drive to help large institutions and specifically banks move into the digital world:

Antony:

If you are going to start a business, use your own experience. My own experience is working in very large banks all around the world.

I was always intrigued by two questions really. The first question was: why doesn’t technology create transformation in financial services, why doesn’t it make things radically better as we have seen in other areas of our lives?

Secondly, of course, why don’t banks work better for their customers? These were all issues I was grappling with over a 20 year period. It came to me really that the technology hadn’t yet reached a point of capability that would allow the transformation of a complex vertical like financial services.

When I was running Barclays I was looking for that technology, I couldn’t find it out there, it wasn’t being delivered by the big tech companies but I believed it could be built.

“So we have developed the world’s first cloud-native banking platform that is targeted at large banks to allow them to radically modernise their technology estate, which in turn will allow them to deliver much better customer experiences at lower cost and really compete with both the neo-banks on the one hand but also big tech companies on the other.”

The podcast, supported by the investment bank Stifel and its European President Eithne O’Leary, was part of a series of COVID & Brexit discussions with observers of the UK scene to discuss their feelings about the last year and what now lies ahead for Britain as it faces an uncertain future.

Others featuring in the podcast series alongside Antony and Eithne included:

• ‍Vicky Pryce, an economist who has worked in the private and public sector and who served as Joint Head of the UK Government Economic Service from 2007 to 2010
• ‍Claer Barrett, the Consumer Editor at the Financial Times and author of a weekly Money Clinic podcast
• ‍Professor John Van Reenan, the Ronald Coase School Professor at the London School of Economics and the Gordon Y. Billiard Professor of Management and Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

To read and listen further to the full podcast series, click here.