Yahoo Finance My first boss: Nick Ogden, the ‘founding father of fintech’
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Nick Ogden is a serial entrepreneur in banking, payments and fintech. His career began when he pioneered ecommerce in 1994, inventing the first online shop, the Wine Warehouse.
Ogden has founded four businesses including payments giants Worldpay, Cashflows, ClearBank and, most recently, as founder and director of RTGS.global, an interbank liquidity network which operates with central and commercial banks.
I’ve been an entrepreneur too long to have a first boss and have worked for myself for nearly 40 years. I’ve worked for a lot of people and tended to be either the innovator or the idiot, depending which day of the week you talk to me on.
I’ve worked closely with the banking regulators — and given that all my businesses have been regulated you could say that they are my first boss.
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When I spoke with the Bank of England when we were launching Clearbank, I phoned up our supervisor and said, ‘It’s the pest here’. We always used to ask questions we didn’t know and nor did they. It’s that close working relationship where we are all developing something and you end up creating a very unique environment.
I get bugged by things that have an unnecessary component that take time to do a task. When I first saw the mosaic, the first user friendly web browser, it got me interested in online tech. It seemed logical to develop it into a commercial application so people could work more efficiently. At the time, we had Yellow Pages, which was incredibly badly put together and it took ages to find things.
The idea behind an electronic shop was to streamline, make it text searchable and allow a larger marketplace to access what we were selling.
In 1994, I put a lease line from the UK to Jersey to deliver internet into the Channel Islands to become an ISP. It was state of the art then and I realised there was more you could do.
Later that year we built the world's first online shop called the Wine Warehouse, via Barclays as we had provided their interface. The company is still going today.
We confessed that we hacked into Barclays’ systems and the following year we launched the world’s first bank-endorsed e-commerce shopping initiative with them.
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No-one understood the power of the internet back then and we knew that multi-currency payment processing was going to be required. It led to real-time processing and the launch of Worldpay in 1997, which is now a phenomenal success story. Our first customer was the Diana Memorial Fund.
I started to look at voice technologies to make it more usable with interfaces. It morphed into Cashflows, which launched in 2011 as the first non-regulated bank in the UK, ahead of the likes of Monzo and Starling a few years later.
Clearbank started in 2014; the idea was to streamline payment processing with identical capabilities of the big four banks. We were authorised as one in 2016 and are still in existence today — like all my fintechs. That’s either a compliment or a worry.
As we developed it we saw the issues of how money is moved round the world. I went to Australia in 2019 for a presentation with partner Microsoft and explained how I had done a $20 wire transfer to Sydney. It was quicker to carry the money in person on a 24-hour flight and hand it over in person than wait for it to come over the wires.
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I’m certain you could do the same test today. If I phoned up a bank and asked if anyone had asked that day where their money is, the answer would be, ‘Of course someone has’.
I looked at how to streamline this to build a platform and move interbank liquidity.
Today it’s about reducing financial friction costs and the cash flow of the planet, which would have direct economic benefits for consumers, business and governments. That’s the goal of RTGS.global, to address the latency of transaction flow and deliver atomic settlement (secure transactions which travel at the speed of light).
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Nearly 30 years on from the Wine Warehouse, I tend to look now at some of the innovations that have slowed things down since then and added friction to it, such as security and authentication measures before we can purchase goods. Who loses out? The retailer and the consumer.
There are many areas where it can improve and change. We still don’t use voice biometrics to authenticate and identify very easily, a business I first had in 2008. We took it onto the Today programme and impressionist Rory Bremner couldn’t hack the system.
This was technology we had 15 years ago. You can have a great idea but sometimes that time has yet to come. Stickability is one of the key things you have to have to take the route of being an entrepreneur.
You have to accept that the great idea you had will take longer for other people to understand and the market to accept.
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