Antony Jenkins on Leaving Barclays, AI & the Future of Banking

So you had six years there and then moved to City and then back to Barclays later on, where eventually you became CEO of the entire group.

Before that, you were CEO of the retail and business banking and before that, CEO of Barclaycard.

So during that period of time, that was as cloud kind of technology and infrastructure was very much kind of in its early days through to booming and through to becoming standard now.

I remember when I used to sell into banks kind of 10 years ago, I would spend 70% of my time educating people about the cloud, whereas now that conversation doesn't even come up anymore.

So how did, in that period when you were leading Barclays, how did you approach technology and its influence about actually what was happening in banking that's been around for hundreds of years?

Yeah, in fact, my fascination with the intersection of banking and technology goes back quite a long way further than that.

Because when I was at Citigroup in 1993, I had the opportunity to go and work in New York.

And it was initially a sort of two-year assignment that turned into a sort of 13-year stay there.

But I was there in the mid-'90s, the late-'90s, and early 2000s.

And that was really when you started to see the real kickoff of the internet.

And this was when a whole bunch of businesses were being founded, massive amounts of venture capital pouring into startups, the first dot-com boom.

And interestingly, your point on cloud, a lot of that money in those days was going because people had to buy their own servers.

Now, of course, when you got around to a decade or so ago, people didn't have to do that because the cloud already existed.

But I

became fascinated by, firstly, how technology was changing our lives, not just in financial services, but across how we communicated with each other, how we consume content, how we shopped, how we bought travel, those types of things.

And it seemed to me that people adopted new technologies where it made their lives a lot better, not a little bit better.

And if you look at the sort of failures in the whole dot-com boom, the ones that succeeded were the ones that made things a lot better, not just a bit better.

Hence, we call my company 10X because we want to make things 10 times better.

And so that really started to pique my interest, if you like, on how technology could change financial services.

Now, financial services is a very complex industry.

vertical with lots of inherent risks to it you're looking after people's money you're making payments there's a huge potential for fraud you're lending money there's the ability to lose money so as the technology became more sophisticated and more powerful it became obvious to me that the ability to transform financial services was increasing And of course, cloud was one of a series of technological kind of revolutions, starting with the internet, then mobile, then cloud, and of course now AI, which have sort of stacked on top of each other, which creates a set of opportunities for these transformations.

If you think about it, you're...

Viewers will not remember this because most of them weren't born.

But back in the mid-90s, there was no internet banking.

If you wanted to do your banking, you had to phone somebody up or go into a branch.

So you had six years there and then moved to City and then back to Barclays later on, where eventually you became CEO of the entire group.

Before that, you were CEO of the retail and business banking and before that, CEO of Barclaycard.

So during that period of time, that was as cloud kind of technology and infrastructure was very much kind of in its early days through to booming and through to becoming standard now.

I remember when I used to sell into banks kind of 10 years ago, I would spend 70% of my time educating people about the cloud, whereas now that conversation doesn't even come up anymore.

So how did, in that period when you were leading Barclays, how did you approach technology and its influence about actually what was happening in banking that's been around for hundreds of years?

Yeah, in fact, my fascination with the intersection of banking and technology goes back quite a long way further than that.

Because when I was at Citigroup in 1993, I had the opportunity to go and work in New York.

And it was initially a sort of two-year assignment that turned into a sort of 13-year stay there.

But I was there in the mid-'90s, the late-'90s, and early 2000s.

And that was really when you started to see the real kickoff of the internet.

And this was when a whole bunch of businesses were being founded, massive amounts of venture capital pouring into startups, the first dot-com boom.

And interestingly, your point on cloud, a lot of that money in those days was going because people had to buy their own servers.

Now, of course, when you got around to a decade or so ago, people didn't have to do that because the cloud already existed.

But I

became fascinated by, firstly, how technology was changing our lives, not just in financial services, but across how we communicated with each other, how we consume content, how we shopped, how we bought travel, those types of things.

And it seemed to me that people adopted new technologies where it made their lives a lot better, not a little bit better.

And if you look at the sort of failures in the whole dot-com boom, the ones that succeeded were the ones that made things a lot better, not just a bit better.

Hence, we call my company 10X because we want to make things 10 times better.

And so that really started to pique my interest, if you like, on how technology could change financial services.

Now, financial services is a very complex industry.

vertical with lots of inherent risks to it you're looking after people's money you're making payments there's a huge potential for fraud you're lending money there's the ability to lose money so as the technology became more sophisticated and more powerful it became obvious to me that the ability to transform financial services was increasing And of course, cloud was one of a series of technological kind of revolutions, starting with the internet, then mobile, then cloud, and of course now AI, which have sort of stacked on top of each other, which creates a set of opportunities for these transformations.

If you think about it, you're...

Viewers will not remember this because most of them weren't born.

But back in the mid-90s, there was no internet banking.

If you wanted to do your banking, you had to phone somebody up or go into a branch.