Alastair Lukies is a serial entrepreneur. Having co-founded a groundbreaking intranet news service, the former rugby hooker has turned his attention to the mobile banking world
Alastair Lukies has performed the seemingly impossible by getting most of the UK’s major banks and all of its major mobile operators to work together and play nicely. His mission? An application for mobile banking which runs no matter what network you’re on or who you bank with… and with MONILINK he’s almost there. Following three years under the wing of Morse Plc, the tech giant that incubated Monitise, Lukies fled the nest in August last year.
He’s since been taking mobile banking worldwide through joint ventures and licensing, striking deals left, right and centre, reaching out to the non-banking population and gaining recognition from the World Economic Forum. His board comprises a number of banking, technology and telecoms heavyweights and, until his appointment as a minister, Lord Digby Jones sat alongside them. All this from a 108-person, AIM-listed firm in the City of London with a 34-year-old CEO.
THE BEGINNING
How did you get into business?
I’m one of a good chunk of entrepreneurs who learnt because they had no other choice. I left school at 16 to be a rugby player. When my father, a Lloyd’s of London name, lost our farm and quite a serious injury ended my rugby career [he broke 17 bones in one leg], I joined a local publishing firm where the chief exec really threw me at everything. I think publishing is about as good a bedrock as you can get if you can understand what an audience wants and a business model to keep that sustainable – that constant battle between editorial integrity and advertising revenues. There’s that dark side and force in every business. The way my father recovered from adversity was also a real inspiration to me.
What happened next?
After that I went to ICM and set up their Commonwealth Games hospitality division in Malaysia. We grew the business 300% in a nine-month period at a time of economic downturn. A few years later I was approached to join the start-up team on ePolitix, the intranet news service in Westminster built off the back of House magazine. Someone said to me afterwards, what are you going to do now that will be as challenging as getting 659 MPs online and convincing 380 organisations to move their lobbying online? So I set up this company, which is about as tough as it gets. I like a challenge.
How did Monitise come about?
I met Steve [Atkinson, co-founder and chief architect of Vodafone] in 2002 when Vodafone was lobbying a lot over 3G licence laws. He could see this emerging market of the mobile being used for much more than voice and text, and I was able to use my contacts from ePolitix to pick people’s brains and ask: “If mobile was going to become a new channel for banking and payments, how might that happen?”
The great thing about ePolitix was that, in all cases, the person that does the communication to government is the CEO or the chairman of the company. So I built up a reasonably extensive list of high-level contacts. If you look at my advisory board and my non-exec board, for a company of our size, we would be the envy of most FTSE 100s. One thing I’ve learned from them is you’ll only retain your contact list if you use them sparingly and effectively.
How achievable did it seem to you?
Our technology’s not revolutionary, it’s really simple. We test it on my mum. In terms of how do-able it was, all we’ve done is take an existing infrastructure – LINK, the ATM network (now VocaLink) – and mobilised it. We get revenue from the bank when a customer uses the service and commission from the mobile network when someone tops up a phone.
What would happen if someone nicked your mobile phone?
Unless you’ve written your pin on the back of it, no one can access MONILINK. Steve’s a technical genius, he’s built lots of telecoms platforms and he’s an expert in security, which is inherently important in what we do. It’s a secure, dedicated application which has encryption layers and uses a GPRS communication mechanism.
THE CHALLENGES
What challenges have you faced?
The biggest challenges have been political ones. All our key partners – banks and operators – no matter what the logic of a shared platform, the economies of scale, the fact a consumer can access the service no matter which bank they’re with, which operator they’re on or what handset they have, everyone wants to differentiate. Every bank asks the question: “Shouldn’t we just do this ourselves?” So it’s been a real challenge explaining to people, just as you get with the ATM network, that it makes more sense that a consumer can walk to any ATM and get cash out. We’ve had to hold our nerve a lot.
How did you manage to convince the banks and the operators to go for a collaborative approach?
Without being too self-indulgent about it, I think that’s what we should be most recognised for; our tenacity and our commitment to logic. We are great believers in what we’re trying to do. We’re very passionate about it. I think we’ve also been pretty smart at not trying to over-hype or over-sell.
Why did you decide to go along the corporate venturing path and why did you choose Morse?
