Chris Gledhill

Why organisations work with Chris Gledhill

• He has worked both sides of the fintech competitive line: inside Lloyds Banking Group’s disruptive innovation function, then co-founding the UK challenger bank Secco as its CEO. Audiences get an advisor fluent in incumbent constraints and start-up economics.
• His Secco thesis, that customer data and reputation can function as forms of banked value, pushed the UK challenger debate past interface and pricing into a harder conversation about what banks actually sell.
• He is a consistent top-tier voice in credible fintech influencer indices, including Onalytica’s Fintech Top 100, where he has ranked as high as third, and the CityAM Fintech Powerlist.
• He contributed to The FinTech Book (Wiley, edited by Susanne Chishti), the first crowdsourced reference work in the field. His chapter on the future evolution of money beyond cryptocurrency is part of the core literature.

Biography highlights

• Former innovation technologist and lead mobile architect within Lloyds Banking Group’s Digital Innovation and Payments team, part of the bank’s disruptive innovation function
• Co-founder and former CEO of Secco, a pre-licence UK challenger bank built around customer ownership of money, data and reputation
• Contributor to The FinTech Book (Wiley), edited by Susanne Chishti of FINTECH Circle
• Author of “Consumerization: The Enterprise Guide to BYOD”
• Ranked #3 in Onalytica’s Top 100 Fintech Influencers and a recurring feature in CityAM’s Fintech Powerlist
• TEDx speaker and long-running commentator on fintech and digital banking

Biography

Most retail banks are not structured to reinvent themselves. They are built to run their current model efficiently, which is a different problem. The result is a sector that uses the language of transformation while iterating on the same product shelf.

Chris Gledhill has argued the opposite case from both sides of the line. Inside Lloyds Banking Group’s Digital Innovation and Payments team, he worked as a lead mobile architect and innovation technologist within what the bank called its disruptive innovation lab. He then co-founded Secco, a pre-licence UK challenger bank, and became its CEO.

Secco’s proposition went further than most. Where other UK challengers matched the incumbents on product and improved the interface, Secco proposed that a bank could hold data and reputation alongside money, with the customer owning and controlling both. Gledhill set out the fuller argument in The FinTech Book (Wiley), edited by Susanne Chishti. His chapter asks what money becomes once value itself can be both social and programmable.

He is a consistent feature in credible fintech indices, including Onalytica’s Top 100 Fintech Influencers, where he has ranked as high as third, and the CityAM Fintech Powerlist. For boards and strategy teams, that recognition reflects a decade of specific public arguments carried into industry discourse.

Key speaking topics

• Fintech and the future of financial services
• Digital banking and challenger bank strategy
• Emerging technology in banking: AI, blockchain, biometrics
• Digital identity and customer data ownership
• Innovation inside incumbent financial institutions
• Open banking and the API economy

Ideal for

• Banking and financial services leadership teams confronting digital-native competitors
• Heads of digital and innovation inside incumbent financial institutions
• Fintech and payments industry conferences and strategy offsites
• Financial services boards setting strategy through a period of technology-led disintermediation

Audience outcomes

• A sharper strategic map of where digital banking is heading and what that means for incumbent business models
• First-hand perspective on the full-stack challenger bank thesis, including what Secco actually tried to build and why
• Better questions to take back to boards about customer data ownership and digital identity
• Informed judgement on which emerging technologies are genuine strategic levers for banks and which are features chasing problems