Mike Harris
Most organisations build new propositions inside structures designed to keep existing businesses running. Then they wonder why their innovation programmes produce decks and pilots, but very few new customers. The mismatch is rarely diagnosed at the level where it can be fixed.
Mike Harris is the founding CEO of First Direct and Egg, and helps leadership teams build category-defining businesses inside large incumbent organisations.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mike Harris
- He has done the actual job, twice. First Direct (1989) and Egg (1998) were both built from scratch into category-defining UK consumer brands while sitting inside or alongside incumbent institutions, Midland Bank and Prudential. That kind of new-business creation inside a large organisation is rare among innovation speakers.
- He took Egg from concept to a £1bn flotation in under two years. When he talks about pace of execution, it is from a CEO who delivered it under public-market scrutiny.
- As Chairman of Group Innovation at RBS (2005-2009), he has worked both sides of the innovation problem: building the new business, and governing the innovation portfolio at scale inside a major bank.
- His operating framework comes directly from First Direct: customer-led, and built around how distinct segments actually want to be served. It is set out in Find Your Lightbulb (Wiley, 2008) and applied through the IconicShift programme across companies in FinTech, pharmaceuticals and consumer health.
- As co-founder of Monument Partners and a non-executive chairman at FinTech ventures including Monolith, he is still active at the investor and founder edge of financial services. The material is current.
Biography highlights
- Founding CEO of First Direct (1989), the world’s first major 24/7 telephone bank, launched as a subsidiary of Midland Bank
- Founding CEO of Egg (1998); floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 at a £1.3bn valuation
- Chief Executive of Mercury Communications (1991-1995), the first major competitor to BT in UK telecoms
- Chairman of Group Innovation at Royal Bank of Scotland, 2005 to 2009
- Co-founder and Chairman of Garlik, sold to Experian in 2011; Tim Berners-Lee on its advisory board
- Author of Find Your Lightbulb (Wiley/Capstone, 2008); winner of the BT Flagship Award for Innovation, 2008
- Co-founder of Monument Partners (2012), a FinTech-focused advisory firm; regular speaker at the MIT Sloan School mid-career MBA programme between 1996 and 2008
Biography
First Direct launched in 1989 as a 24/7 telephone bank, owned by Midland but kept far enough away from it to behave differently. The result was a brand that has spent decades at or near the top of UK customer service rankings across every industry. The CEO who built it was Mike Harris.
He left Midland to run Mercury Communications, the first major competitor to BT in UK telecoms, where turnover grew from £1bn to £1.6bn during his tenure. In 1995 he founded Prudential Banking, which became Egg in 1998. Egg floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 at a £1.3bn valuation, less than two years from launch.
After leaving Egg, he turned to innovation governance. As Chairman of Group Innovation at Royal Bank of Scotland from 2005 to 2009, he built a group-wide innovation programme inside an institution then under acute strategic pressure. His book Find Your Lightbulb (Wiley, 2008) set out the operating principles. The IconicShift mentoring programme has since applied them across companies in FinTech, pharmaceuticals, food, fashion, law and consumer health.
Most innovation speakers have either built a new business or governed innovation portfolios. Harris has done both, and continues to do both. He is co-founder of FinTech advisory firm Monument Partners, and a non-executive chairman at FinTech ventures including Monolith.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation strategy and execution
- Customer-led growth
- Building new businesses inside large organisations
- Brand and proposition design
- FinTech and financial services innovation
- Entrepreneurship and scale-up leadership
- Digital identity and consumer trust
Ideal for
- CEOs and group strategy leads in financial services and telecoms wrestling with category disruption
- Chief Innovation Officers and heads of new ventures who need to sponsor breakthrough propositions inside legacy structures
- Boards and ExCos of established consumer-facing organisations under pressure to reinvent the customer relationship
- FinTech founders and corporate venture investors looking for current operating perspective
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of why most innovation programmes produce activity instead of new customers, and what to do about it
- Operating principles for taking a new proposition from concept to revenue at speed, drawn from First Direct, Egg and Garlik
- A diagnostic for whether the current organisation can house the new business it is trying to build, and what to change if it cannot
- How chairmen and CEOs can use innovation governance to back the right bets without smothering them
Talks
How almost any company can grow faster by combining systematic customer insight and segmentation with disciplined innovation in business model, proposition and service, drawn from Harris’s own companies and many others.
Key takeaways:
- A working definition of what counts as innovation inside a mature business
- Why customer segmentation, more than customer feedback, drives proposition design
- How to build an innovation pipeline whose output is measured in customers and revenue
The lessons that translate from successful start-ups to incumbent organisations seeking to reinvent themselves, drawn from five start-ups Harris led and his reinvention work at Mercury Communications and inside RBS.
Key takeaways:
- The behaviours that distinguish start-ups from incumbents, and which of those can travel into a large organisation
- How to set the conditions for breakthrough results inside structures built for predictability
- Lessons from leading reinvention at Mercury Communications, and inside the RBS group innovation programme
A personal account of building innovative new businesses, framed around the place a leader has to stand for innovation to keep moving forward when the surrounding system is trying to pull it off course.
Key takeaways:
- Where the leader of an innovation effort needs to position themselves, and what they have to ignore
- How to keep momentum when governance and competitors are working against the new proposition
- The behaviours that distinguish innovation leadership from general leadership
How established industries can adapt their customer approach as new technology threatens existing business models, with examples from financial services and the converging strategies of the major internet platforms.
Key takeaways:
- How to read which technology shifts genuinely threaten a customer relationship and which do not
- The multi-channel decisions financial services and consumer-facing businesses need to get right
- A view from the founder side of how challenger propositions actually win share