Yahoo Finance My first boss: Adam Clarke, CTO of banking consortium Fnality
The people who helped shape business leaders
Adam Clarke is CTO of banking consortium Fnality, which has created a blockchain ethereum-based settlement system for central banks. Fnality is backed by the Bank of England as well as global institutions such as Barclays, HSBC and Santander.
Clarke is also a helicopter pilot and qualified sommelier and in previous roles built Hawkeye ball tracking and an ANPR (automatic number plate recognition system).
It’s amazing when you get someone who invests time to see you grow. A pioneer and innovator, John Cundall shaped the early years of my career as a software developer on Siemens’ two-year graduate programme.
John took me under his wing as a boss and mentor, particularly around leadership and getting the best out of people. At the time he was big enthusiast of Myers–Briggs and was interested in how he could build successful teams.
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John spent a lot of time thinking about team composition; how you go from where you are to a well functioning and communicating, honest team. When something goes wrong, you have to hold your hand up, call it out when things aren’t right, and make sure it’s a robust challenge.
It creates a great environment where people are free from worry: these are all things I have instilled in my teams over the years.
I later worked at Hawkeye as a technical director, gathering data for partners around cricket and tennis. The founder, Paul Hawkins, had also worked at Siemens and asked me to come over. I thought this a great jump even though I didn’t know anything about sport.
It’s been a theme throughout my career. I’ve deliberately moved between sectors over the years; from electrical engineering and sports data, to banking and retail. Every industry works differently: regulations, hierarchies, the amount of money that is available and the traditional and non-traditional sectors.
The more exposure you can get, the more you can use to drive to whatever job you do next.
My role now at Fnality is really interesting. It’s massively regulated, it’s got all of the expectations of being systemically important by the Bank of England and it’s also a start-up with limited resources and capacity. I feel like I can bring all my experience from past sectors into this role.
We use the technology associated with ethereum, a closed private network of blockchain. The challenge we have is that it’s easy for people to assume that because we are using blockchain we are associated in some way with crypto currencies.
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Fnality is none of those things – it's a payment system that happens to use the underlying blockchain technology. We were recognised by the Treasury last year and are aiming for a launch this year for the first UK payment system.
We are quite a flat structured organisation and we rally around particular outcomes. What we want to create is use a system that people want to use.
In the wholesale currency world we are playing with there isn’t anyone else out there close to achieving what we have. We have a first-mover advantage for a period of time.
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I still meet up with John over 20 years later. I think he was quite pleased I moved the way I have in my career, and that I've been given the opportunity now to move into a leadership role.
He was a technologist and we had a lot in common. I love anything mechanical and I always wanted to be a helicopter pilot growing up.
They are such complicated, fascinating and intricate machines. The control mechanisms are so dynamically unstable in a helicopter that it took every ounce of my concentration when I learnt to fly.
You can’t think about anything else and it’s true escapism away from the workplace.
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