Nigel Morris

Some are really good.

um i was with nigel morris who's at capital one and now he's gone on um to to form an amazing company in america looking after fintechs and he's a really inspiring uh inspiring private equity guy um and i had guy hands on the podcast he was quite a character and private equity but then there are some ruthless uh rapacious private equity companies what's the difference for you how do you how do you know whether they're a good private equity company or or they're quite toxic and just out for 10xing everything and getting out

yeah it is a it is a it's a really good question as you can imagine a lot of time talking and thinking about this and There are a lot of very, very sharp, intelligent people who work in private equity who can drive a business forward, and I'm a great admirer of them.

The challenge that anyone going down that

yeah It's marvellous that you've protected culture because, you know, that old legendary one from when I did my MBA, I think it was Porter, was it? Culture, each strategy for breakfast.

And culture is so important.

And one of the things I'm very grateful to Nigel Morris and his P background is he realises, yes, you can put a CEO in or replace the CEO, replace the CFO.

It's not working.

Diversity doesn't just mean gender and race, but it also means ability and neurodiversity and age.

So, you know, I've had someone as young as you know in their early 20s again forbes 30 under 30 founder to the likes of maxine she's definitely not the oldest you know she's about to be 60 years old but i've also had like nigel morris i think he's 67 so you know i want to make sure that there is that breadth and that diversity of guests on there but i mean yeah you know that's a great example like maxine laceby she started the business from her kitchen literally she remortgaged her house she had kids she was divorced and so going back to that risk tolerance right it's like you you know that saying of like oh go the extra mile it's never crowded there actually there's there's a parallel here with like the risk like the more risk you take the less crowded it's going to be because Not everyone can escape that comfort zone.

So the fact that she was ballsy enough to remortgage her house, I'm not saying everyone should do that.

And I'm also not saying that it's definitely going to work out if you do that.

My listeners are also, they're so diverse too.

So one might resonate more with Maxine, one might resonate more with Maya Raitura or Simon Franks or Simon Squibb or whoever.

So there's that, but there's also... who I am as a person as well, like I'm so interested, I have such a voracious appetite for hearing these different stories from different walks of life and I think that if you have that mental ability to take certain pieces of advice and insights from different people, like of course, you know, Nigel Morris's story, he's a white guy born in the 60s, like I'm not going to completely relate to his journey, but I'm going to, I'm like open-minded and flexible enough to pick certain elements of what he's done and what he's learned and apply that to myself.

So I hope that my listeners can do that as well.

Who was your, uh, mentor, just out of interest?

My first mentor was Nigel Morris.

And he helped me to crack America when I'd got a great chief exec over there, but we weren't quite doing the right things.

And, um, he said, "Hire an American chief exec," which we did, and, uh, moved to the right part of America, which was an hour north of New York.

You could capture and use more data, build better credit models, segment customers by their credit risk and price accordingly, start narrowly with one product and earn the right to expand from there.

Nigel Morris, Capital One's co-founder, would eventually become a new bank investor.

Another inspiration was Tinkoff Bank, now TBank, the first digital-only bank in the world.

It was founded in Russia in 2006 by Oleg Tinkoff, who also studied Capital One and began with credit cards.

Yeah.

We interviewed the co-founder of, perhaps you ran into a co-founder of Capital One, Nigel Morris.

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