Back to the future.

I was watching TV the other day and stumbled over a teaser for Lil Nas X’s upcoming release.  No, I hadn’t heard of him either.  Now this will come as a shock, but it wasn’t the prospect of his Christmas role as a time travelling Santa that caught my eye.  It was a cameo appearance from Michael J Fox reprising surely the most famous time traveller of them all,  Back To The Future hero Marty McFly as he warned with a wry smile: “Whatever you do Nas, don’t go to 2020”.  For a year that started with such optimism, what a car-crash it’s been, one a DeLorean couldn’t swerve, even if it did boast a flux capacitor.  If Marty had hailed from 2020, he could have been forgiven for staying put back in good old 1955.

So why am I sharing this with you?  Well I’ll let you into a secret.  I’ve seen the future.  I saw it some 20 years ago now, and what I saw feels as revelatory today as it did back then.  Now my millennial colleagues (and children) seem to find this particularly amusing, but yes, it’s true.  I was there when the internet was ‘new’ at the forefront of one of the early digital innovators.  While the thought of a world wide web brought some out in a flush of arachnophobia, in a pre-broadband world of dial-up, AOL, Lycos & WAP, a group of us were starting the digital revolution, and what we were doing back then feels very relevant in this covid-accelerated world of uncertainty & financial strain we’re navigating together.  So if you’re old enough to remember, indulge me as I reminisce.  If you were part of the revolution I’m describing, I hope I do us justice.  And if you’re too young to remember, read on.  I think you might find it interesting.  

I was part of a happy band who launched and rapidly incubated a brand called Egg in the financial services sector.  Egg?  Yep, the name didn’t research that well against some of the alternatives, but we had a feeling about it, and focus groups rarely lead you to the leaps in life.  We were a digital bank at our heart, although we actually started our life on the phone when we launched our first product, a savings account that quickly multiplied into an almost full set of the services banks offer, with a few bells and whistles on top.  Our mission?  To simplify money for people, to take away the toxicity, to put them in control.  And to have a little fun along the way.  Fun?  Financial services?  Yeah, why not.  Even super-brain Stephen Hawking wanted a slice of the action.

While there’s no doubt we saw the funny side of life, there was a serious intent behind our work.  When we spoke to people, we discovered money and all that banking ‘stuff’ was largely invisible in their homes, hidden away in boxes, draws and piles of discarded paper for fear of what lay inside.  It was all so confusing, and a little scary at times and that suited the high street banks just fine.  It bred a sense of apathy, and in that apathy lay inertia and profit.  Most banks showed you money in the way they understood it; in a tabular, spreadsheet form, an avalanche of credits & debits, technical jargon and reams of small print hiding the bad news.  When we spent time with those on the receiving end, we noticed they didn’t see it that way.  Most people thought of their money in pots or jars; little pockets of cash for food, the car, a mortgage and so on, and if they were lucky, a fund for a rainy day or to fuel a bucket list.  Banks also made it hard to access your money online, with passwords set by them that were impossible to remember, different logins for different accounts and so on, making it almost impossible to see your money in one place.

I launched a number of digital innovations in my time at Egg, but the one I look back on with most pride is Egg Money Manager, a service that enabled you to see all your money in one place, even the accounts you held with other banks, all through our simple login process, one where you set the details so you didn’t forget them.  We’d been trialling the idea for a while, and decided to re-design, scale and launch the service with a concerted marketing push to drive downloads & usage.  The technology was actually quite simple; a piece of aggregation software that safely stored all your passwords on your PC, securely feeding them in when required to log you into each account, with the results brought back to your screen.  All your accounts in one place, accessed in a matter of seconds.  Numerous potential tech-partners tried to sell us their version of the technology that underpinned the service, including one I recall declaring to us during a conference call that their software was “unhackable", just as one of our security team announced that yes, he’d hacked it that morning!  The proof?  He’d left them a message in the code, like some kind of modern day Milk Tray man.  The prolonged silence on the call, punctuated by a flurry of keystrokes and then confirmation that “Errrr yep, he’s hacked us” was toe-curling (and also hilarious).

From a customer point of view, Money Manager felt almost magical, all their balances appearing on the screen along with the links you needed to delve deeper.  For us, beyond the joy of solving another customer problem, it gave us all the traffic we lacked without a current account.  We’d taken a serious look at launching one, but with consumers more likely to burn their money than switch the current account that housed it, we’d concluded even we’d struggle to unseat people.  As the saying goes, "when the world zigs, zag."  We simply found a customer focused way to fill the gap.  People genuinely enjoyed the Hogwarts-esque wizardry of the experience.  I remember in early focus groups showing everyone how it worked.  They’d sit with a slightly puzzled look of admiration on their face, impressed and yet not quite believing what they’d just seen.  Our brand was all about creating enjoyable experiences.  We also told our story in entertaining, un-bank-like ways.  No black horses striding across a desolate beach for us.  Nope - we plumped for guinea pigs.

We weren’t always quite so upbeat with our messaging, later developing more provocative advertising to remind people of the risks of poor money management, posing the question “If you don’t look after your money, who will?”  One such piece took the viewer to a pyramid selling scheme where unsuspecting investors were being defrauded from their money by a con-artist who had the hallmarks and assuring words of a trustworthy advisor, but none of the morals.  Our solution: ”With Egg Money Manager, you’re in control.  See all your online accounts in one place, even if they’re not with Egg.”  It worked well, the service steadily growing registered users and scooping a number of innovation gongs along the way.

Much of our work at Egg focused on simplifying the customer experience.  I spent a particularly enjoyable segment of my time there identifying touchpoints high on the emotion scale and re-engineering them to work in a simpler, more customer focused way.  A prime example was the experience when your wallet was lost or stolen, a moment that induces blind panic in people.  Routing calls to an expert group whose first question was are you ok (not what’s your card number), enabling customers to get cash without their missing card and fast-tracking the process for a new card arriving were all innovations we delivered to simplify the experience.  We also designed a joining experience for new customers, including a faster application for our Egg Card.  Aptly named ‘slimfast’, the new application was built around the needs of the customer, with the key questions at the front so we didn’t waste people’s time and less pages meaning less downloading, essential in a world where people ‘called’ the internet via a modem.  If you’ve tripped over a cable trailing from your phone socket to your PC, you’ll know what I’m talking about!  And when we improved our experience, those customers became more engaged, more active and more profitable.  Yes, looking after customers really does make you more money.  The experience-design expertise I developed at Egg has underpinned much of what followed in my career and I still use many of the methods we perfected to this day.

We had a lot of success at Egg, but it wasn’t all perfect and we made plenty of mis-steps along the way, a hallmark of any innovative, creative businesses and part of the route to success.  For my part, I spent a good amount of time developing Egg TV, an interactive service on Sky’s Open platform (later Sky Active).  We learned a lot from the experience and developed some pretty cool stuff along the way, but we were kind of missing the point.  Your TV is for entertainment, not banking.  Yes, it has a nice HD screen, but that’s for blockbusters, not balances.  Sometimes the technology blinds you into trying to create a need for it.  Lesson learned.  But in a rapidly evolving digital world, we were betting on multiple options and seeing how the landscape evolved, so I think it was an inevitable and necessary part of our journey.

There was so much more to Egg than the products & services we developed, and at the heart of the business was a clear purpose, a vibrant culture housed in our open-plan Pride Park office and a belief that progress was achieved through unleashing the power of the diverse group of people that worked there.  We even had our very own ‘Back To The Future’ programme, created around 5 years into our life and designed to re-connect everyone to our purpose and the big plays we would make the achieve our goals.  Every leader in the business went through several rounds of training in performance art led by our internal experts and a chap called David Pearl, learning how to use the skills of theatre, acting and performance to inspire an audience and drive action.  I still use many of the techniques we learned and look back with particular fondness on my time with Chris Reade & Sharon Reeves leading the first set of pilot groups with colleagues.  After a few rounds, Sharon got rightly irritated that I seemed to have all the fun roles to play in the groups, branding me ‘Fun Bobby’ (of Friends fame) for my efforts.

Sadly, despite all our great work, Egg fell by the wayside, a failed foray into France, protracted sale process from Prudential and the credit crunch seeing our beloved creation eventually sold into the very banks we’d been challenging, and then conveniently removed from the landscape.  In many ways we were ahead of the technology available to us, and so much of what we wanted to deliver is only now achievable through the range and speed of the technology we all have at our disposal.  I see a very Egg-shaped hole in the market today - one the likes of Monzo and Starling are seeking to fill - and understand Egg researches well with consumers to this day.

I opened with talk of DeLorean’s, time travel and with a bold declaration; that I’d seen the future.  It wasn’t an angle to catch attention or plug a favourite film of mine.  I said it because when I look back from where we are today, I recognise so much of what Egg was all about – its purpose and the culture that underpinned it - is what consumers, and the brands that serve them, need today.  In a narrow sense, that’s a reflection on what people will need from their bank as we recover from the annus-truly-horribilis that was 2020.  Covid’s epicentre inflicted immense damage, its long tail will extend for years to come and debts will have to be repaid.  At some stage, each and every one of us will face uncertainty over our job, our health and our finances.  We’ll need simple ways to understand our money along with transparent help, support & assurance from people and brands we can trust.  Do I trust my bank?  Honestly?  No.  Why?  Because their behaviour doesn’t match their promise.  The advertising is full of assurances, the reality anything but.  I think deep down, I know from experience that when it suits them they’ll turn on me, and in that mistrust lies a gap for a brand that instinctively puts the consumer first, head and heart.

But I also make the observation from a broader, cultural perspective.  Some businesses will see the uncertainty as a signal to shrink within themselves, to protect their P&L by repeatedly cutting costs rather than investing for the future, to play it safe.  Safety has been the maxim of the year, after all.  Reflecting on the story of Egg reminds me of the importance of ‘zagging’, of innovating, of keeping your eye on the horizon, being courageous, inventing into the vacuum, making decisions with conviction when the path ahead is unclear, and of failing and learning fast.  It also reminds me of the power of a culture founded on a belief in people, their ability to create the unimaginable and to deliver beyond what they thought was possible when their talent is unleashed.  Beyond our quirky name, products and whizzy features, Egg was a collective of people from many backgrounds united by a common purpose.  Did it fail?  Well, the brand doesn’t exit any more so in a business and commercial sense you have to conclude it did.  But our view of the consumer, the problems we sought to solve, many of the innovations we developed and the culture it was all housed within remain as relevant today as they did when we embarked on our journey together.  Perhaps it’s a step too far to claim we saw the future – I think only Bill Gates can claim that one – but we certainly saw what it will take to flourish in the future.  

On a personal level, I loved my time at Egg.  It remains the single most enjoyable part of my career.  I learned how to turn even the most basic of tasks into an experience, got my first deep download of digital expertise and worked with some truly inspiring people.  The alumni from Egg all went on to do fascinating things and there is nothing quite so unifying as a group of people with a clear cause and sense of purpose at the heart of their business.  Companies looking for greater diversity would do well to look on Egg as a case study.  I’m regularly greeted with ‘Hey, I had one of your funky green Egg cards’ when people discover I used to work there.  While the brand has gone it remains etched into the memory of many who consumed it.  If you were around to remember, or you’re a little younger and simply intrigued, I hope you enjoyed the ride.  Now, where’s that plutonium for the return trip?