Home Calling

I have just spent the last two days in Lisbon at the Temenos Community Forum. Basically Temenos’ products are extremely important for my client therefore it made sense for me to be there during the conference. I am now on my way back to Pau via San Sebastien in Spain.

I haven’t been to Portugal for almost 20 years and the last time I was here there was more impromptu football matches, less alcohol and hobnobbing, and definitely a better sun tan at the end of my trip despite it being absolutely roasting today.

Overall it has been a worthwhile trip and on balance I suspect it was a good decision not to stay for the final day. I have managed to spend some quality time with a couple of key clients and also some of our partners with who we work quite closely. It’s good being focused on just one client – you don’t need to spend these events trying to be everything to everyone.

That said possibly the most interesting conversation or set of conversations I had was with the chief operating officer of the Banque Populaire of Rwanda. It was absolutely fascinating to listen to him and his stories of how Rwanda has built itself back up after the end of the genocide in the early 1990s. It was interesting to see the similarities with Singapore where I was last month (Konde even confirmed that Singapore had actually been taken as a model for the new government). Basically a lot of what we hear in the western media about Rwanda doesn’t paint the true picture – apparently it is a very safe and law abiding country and whilst the public health system isn’t completely up to scratch and that one shouldn’t drink the tap water, it seems they have made huge progress over the last 17 years. What was most inspiring was listening to Konde who described how, whilst working in the financial services sector in London, his father told him that his generation had split their blood for the country, now it was Konde’s turn to put his brains to work for the country. He was clearly passionate about his role in the building of the country and the expansion of retail and mobile banking in a place in which literacy rates are only around 15% today. I’ve always been fairly unattached to the idea of the nation state and always questioned the real value that the financial sector in the developed world brings; however listening to Konde was a real eye opener – I was most impressed by the pride he felt whenever he saw a queue of people wishing to use an ATM machine with their new plastic bank cards. It really is a different world and I suspect that it gives you a different reason to get out of bed in the morning.

The other person who left his mark on me during this two days was Anthony Thomson, the co-founder of Metro Bank. It was the last presentation that I attended before heading to the airport. He talked through the challenges of setting up the UK’s first new retail bank for 150 years. The whole philosophy behind the business is that customers (who they like to call fans) will sacrifice a higher interest rate for an improved customer experience and better service. The key metric by which everyone is measured on in the bank is Net Promoter Score. All in all it was a very inspiring story by a very charismatic individual – although that goes without saying because he’s actually from Newcastle. Obvious really.