Welcoming the Kalifa Fintech Review

Thank you Charlotte Crosswell for the opportunity to have led the #skills and #talent chapter of the #kalifareview. It was a pleasure to revisit these #scaleup issues, which have been a lifelong passion of mine and a privilege to work with Seema Farazi and her team at EY, members of my panel, the other chapter leads and last but not least, Ron Kalifa, OBE

This review is important: if its recommendations are implemented, the competitive advantage of the UK will be protected and this sector will lead our economic recovery. I urge you to read the whole review, (not just the skills & talent chapter from page 41-55) ;-)

Download the report --> https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-kalifa-review-of-uk-fintech

For years, business organisations like the CBI and Scaleup Institute have been warning that the skills gap in Britain was the number one cause for concern when it came to the competitive advantage of this nation and the ability to drive our economic growth.  In 2020, the fintech industry is faced with a perfect storm of epic proportions due to the added stresses imposed on leaders of these companies by the pandemic and Brexit.  The fact that these stresses are now heaped on top of a global war for talent is an incredible threat to the UK because the leaders of these firms and their investors face alternatives and are more than aware that they can choose to hire people and locate their operations elsewhere with fewer barriers or indeed, with incentives given to them by other governments.

I’ve worked in the financial services industry since 1987 and in education since 2000.  In 1987, my first job as a newly minted undergraduate was at Accenture, as a software developer working in their financial services division. Since my first ‘job’ as a supplier of consulting services to the financial services industry, I have started up several fintech firms, invested directly in more than 70 startups and indirectly in hundreds more via investments in 5 VC funds and served on FTSE 100 firms, including the London Stock Exchange and the world’s largest education company – Pearson plc.

In 2014, I was asked by the UK Government to write the UK scaleup report on UK economic growth, which showed that the gross GDP benefit of focusing policy on growing firms would be 1.4 Trillion over ten years on a gross basis taking into consideration productivity benefits and assuming the gross impact of moving more businesses into High Growth Mode.

In 2014, Access to skills and leadership development were the number 1 and number two barriers to UK economic growth, but the fintech industry was not recognised as one of our ‘break-out industries’ at that time.  Access to skills, talent and leadership development have remained at the top of the business agenda and the scaleup agenda since 2014, but the fintech industry is recognised as one of the UK’s potential break-out industries.

In 2020, I was asked by Ron Kalifa if I would lead the skills and talent chapter of the Fintech Review.  In light of six years that have passed since my Scaleup Report into driving UK economic growth, the pandemic and Brexit, and the availability of new data sets that did not exist previously, I was curious to learn more to see if I could make a contribution.  I was also excited to work with the team from EY, who had vast domain expertise in the financial services industry because of their past work with Innovate Finance and the City of London.

In order to approach this review, I followed a similar methodology involving secondary and primary research: 6 roundtables, 28 expert interviews a review of 28 initiatives and commissioning three new data sets specifically on FinTech companies that had been growing at more than 20% for the past three years:  

The Fintech Industry has been identified as strategically important for the UK’s economic growth.  Its 2,183 firms are forecast to increase to 3,300 in number by 2030, and they currently employ 76,500 adults, although this number is forecast to rise by 30,000 to 105,500 adults in the next 10 years.  46% of these firms report having changed their behaviour because of Brexit and of these, 86% are considering re-locating outside of the UK in order to access the talent they needed for their businesses.[i]

The recommendations in the skills and talent chapter I led are intended to provide the UK FinTech ecosystem with improved access to domestic skills and talent so that the proportion of Fintechs that scaleup increase as a proportion of fintech businesses and they become less reliant on immigration at the same time. 

This will allow them to make a major contribution to driving the UK economic recovery. It has been a privilege to revisit skills and talent in such depth over the past year and to become deeply re-acquainted with the fintech industry, which is what launched my career as an angel investor... I want to thank in particular the following people for your contributions in the round-tables and in reading and re-reading earlier versions are very much appreciated.

• Prof Alice Gast, President, Imperial College London
• Claire Tunley CEO, Financial Services Skills Commission
• Claudia Harris CEO, Makers (formerly CEO Careers Enterprise Company)
• Diana Avila, Transferwise
• Doug Monro Co-Founder and CEO, Adzuna
• Eric Mouilleron CEO, Bankable
• Gary Stewart CEO & Founder, The Nest
• Farzana Choudhary Associate Director People Operations, OakNorth
• Henry Whorwood Head of Research & Consultancy, Beauhurst
• Irene Graham, CEO of the Scaleup Institute
• Isabel Naidoo from FIS Global
• Jeff Lynn Founder, Seedrs
• Jeni Mundy MD UK & Ireland, Visa
• Lord Jim Knight Chief Education Officer, TES
• John Fallon CEO, Pearson
• Joysy John, NESTA
• Justin Fitzpatrick CEO, DueDil
• Kirstie Mackey MD Citizenship & Consumer Affairs, Barclays
• Marcus Scott COO, The City UK
• Mollie Pearse Head of Marketing EMEA, Facebook
• Nathan Bostock UK CEO, Santander
• Pat Saini UK Immigration Lawyer, Penningtons
• Philip Colligan CEO, Raspberry Pi
• Rosaleen Blair, Alexander Mann Solutions
• Remus Brett General Partner, LocalGlobe
• Sarah Mason Chief People Officer, Foxtons
• Shackar Bialick CEO, Curve
• Simon Nelson CEO, FutureLearn
• Simon Peyton Jones Computer Scientist, Microsoft Research
• Tera Allas Director Research and Economics, McKinsey
• Prof Tarun Ramadorai Professor of Financial Economics, Imperial College Business School
• Tim Campbell Founder, Bright Ideas Trust

Sherry Coutu CBE