A new chapter

Sunday, September 14, 2008. The New York communications team at Lehman Brothers said to us in London – ‘guys you are on your own’. 

I had given birth to our third child, Jack, a month earlier. Because of what was happening at the bank, there had been no maternity leave. My husband, a long-term Financial Times journalist who had joined Bloomberg for the money, had stuck two fingers up at them and resigned a few months earlier. We had three children under five. On September 15, neither of us had a job. My savings, paid in Lehman stock, had disappeared.

Despite the world collapsing around us, my status was high and within days I had offers to join similar places – we in comms were like a Premier League team suddenly coming onto the market where before we had been impossible to hire. But why would I go to another investment bank? In the days and weeks following the Lehman collapse, it felt like the whole world would go under.

Only two institutions still had triple-A ratings (which I hoped still counted for something). The Dutch bank Rabobank, and Bank of New York. The best boss I have ever had in the world, Kevin Heine, hired me at BNY Mellon, I joined in November 2008. Kevin was in New York and, within reason, let me do what I needed to do in London. He was completely unflappable, decent, savvy, and knew how to handle me. He engendered a loyalty which I have never felt before or since to a superior. If I ever come close to being as good a person as Kevin, I will die happy. 

BNY was all about the underpinnings of finance. Working there started me on a path to understand what actually makes markets work – regulation, market structure, credit, the buy side. In investment banking back in the late 2000’s prior to the rise of big trading firms, we operated in a bubble of principle trading, advisory, quant analysis - fuelled by an unbelievably favourable monetary global context. I have a yellow Lamborghini, I attended the Polytechnique and I spend winter weekends in Verbier. Some of this still matters, but if you don’t understand technology, how digital assets will change finance, and how to effect innovation in large financial institutions – why would you be in capital markets now?

So much has happened since then. The beating heart of finance has moved from the banks to trading firms to an incredibly exciting new way of thinking about how we serve both individuals and the financial system with crypto and blockchain. I’m a conservative – I believe we should have proper regulations and rails but also recognize that some of the vested interests and infrastructure don’t always make sense. I saw in the 90s and 2000’s in my country of origin, Turkey, how not having legacy banking systems (albeit driven by a high inflation economic context) meant you could leapfrog what didn’t make sense and create smart technology that really served individual customers. In the UK, we still used cheques to pay for utility bills. In Istanbul you could buy government T-Bills on an ATM and swap FX across your Turkish Lira and Dollar accounts. To be frank, I didn’t really know how to do this, but I saw others doing it and it seemed to work.

And so, this curiosity naturally led me to fintech, and the fabulously entrepreneurial environment, which was Lord Michael Spencer’s ICAP plc, which became NEX, before its sale to CME Group. Combining straightforward approach of ‘how to make money’ with a wonderful innovation agenda, it also gave me the most fruitful network of people whom I am still in touch with. Many became clients. I am utterly grateful to this amazing group of fantastic entrepreneurs who have allowed me to thrive as a business owner in my last few years in consultancy. I have lived and breathed their successes and challenges, and I am proud to call some of them personal friends. 

Quite a few of them went on the journey of evolving from institutional trading and technology into digital assets. I firmly believe that this, and sustainable finance and environmental markets are the most exciting future of financial services. As a strategic communications and sustainability consultancy, we can be part of an incredible agenda to support the future of finance. We will always be old heads and understand the pitfalls of reputational issues that arise from the difficulties of trying the change what have been a status quo ante. We are adults - we won’t take unnecessary risks. But we are here to embrace the intellectual and practical challenge of this new era of finance. It’s exciting, and executed properly, it will be good for everyone.