Rugby star turned super-unicorn hopeful: Monitise boss Alastair Lukies

Flipping out an iPhone, Lukies demonstrates what Monitise has done for mobile

banking apps: you can check your bank balance, transfer cash payments, even

request a code to withdraw cash from an ATM without a card. But banking is

only part of the emerging mobile commerce sector that is estimated to be

worth $1 trillion.

With a wink at his PR minder, Lukies can’t resist scrolling on his phone to

show off the next phase of Monitise’s technology, due next year. “We raised

$100m just before Christmas – this is what we built,” he says. It’s a mobile

“marketplace” that will allow consumers to shop through their banking app.

It is designed to be intuitive and only show items and offers of particular

interest. “If I’ve just bought a flight to Spain, I might be offered sun

cream,” says Lukies. “But I’m not going to get spammed by every offer from

Groupon.”

The idea is clever but not unique. The race to get ahead in mobile commerce is

already well advanced. Google and Amazon have already built mobile wallets

which allow consumers to shift cash from their bank accounts into an app and

shop from there. The trend is a threat to the banks, which are in danger of

being reduced to highly-regulated utilities – holders of cash that have no

data on shopping or spending habits.

But Lukies, who has spent nine years developing the technology for the banks,

denies that Monitise could be out of date already. He argues the big

advantage banks have over non-financial creators of mobile wallets is,

ironically, trust.

“Despite everything we’ve been through in the past few years, people still

trust their high street bank above almost anything else,” he says. “And

mobile banking is helping to strengthen that trust.”

Customers click on to their mobile banking apps on average 27 times a month.

“When before in the banking paradigm has anyone had 27 interactions with

their bank in a month?” says Lukies. “The banking app is already ‘front of

screen’, one of the apps people use most frequently.” It’s an easy hop to

mobile shopping, he says. “The banking app already has all your security

details,” he says. “You can shop or buy tickets securely, without spreading

your bank details across the internet.”

After a couple of hours with Lukies, you feel you’ve either been shown the

future – or the start of yet another tech bubble. He balks at such talk. “In

the early 2000s, everyone was talking about 3G licences and how we were

going to do all this new stuff on our mobile phones,” he says. “But back

then, the tech wasn’t ready, the consumers weren’t ready, and the

infrastructure wasn’t there. That’s all changed and we are going to see an

enormous, enormous boom in mobile over the next few years.”

Lukies is an unlikely tech pioneer. From the age of seven, his first career

choice was rugby. “Dad’s got two big loves in life: rugby and farming,” he

says. “I was a rugby player and my brother’s the farmer. My sister’s a

nurse, so she just cares for both of us.”

The trio were brought up on a big farm in Essex. But the comfortable set-up

ended brutally when Lloyd’s of London imploded in the mid-1990s and Lukies’

father, a Lloyd’s “Name”, was forced to sell up.

Lukies, who had played for Saracens and London Irish, was dealt another

devastating blow when he broke his leg in 17 places. “Pretty much everything

was lost and I was left without a contingency plan,” he says.

When a friend asked him to join him in sports marketing in Singapore, Lukies

leapt at the chance. A few years later, in 1999, Lukies switched paths again

when another friend asked him to help to develop an online version of

Parliament’s internal magazine, House.

“House had a tiny readership of 659 MPs, but it had become an important

lobbying tool for big companies,” he says. Lukies turned it into an online

Parliamentary research tool called e-Politix, which was funded by targeted

lobbying messages from corporates.

Through the business, Lukies met Steve Atkinson, head of policy at Vodafone,

who had written a paper on the potential of mobile phones to coincide with

the development of Britain’s 3G network. Atkinson first told Lukies that

mobile phones outnumbered bank accounts by about three to one. “It was a

light-bulb moment,” says Lukies.

Another came via a different Lukies client, Link, which provides technology

that allows universal use of cash machines. “Only 12 years ago, a Lloyds

customer could use only a Lloyds ATM,” says Lukies. “Link developed a black

box that all the banks could plug into to make their ATMs compatible for all

users.” Lukies’ idea was to build another black box to sit alongside Link

that would enable all the banks to offer mobile banking services securely.

Monitise was born in 2003. The embryonic idea was incubated and developed for

its first four years by Morse, a corporate venturing business chaired by

Richard Lapthorne, the former boss of Cable Wireless. In June 2007, it

was spun out on to the Aim junior exchange. The timing could not have been

worse and it was almost overwhelmed by the tsunami of the financial crisis.

But Lukies hung on.

“The crisis turned out to be an advantage, because the banks didn’t really

have the time or money to develop and innovate themselves,” he says.

Lukies also cracked on with international expansion, creating partnerships in

America, Asia and Africa as soon as he could. In the West, Monitise was

helping banks innovate, but in emerging markets it was giving banking

services to millions for the first time. “There are vast areas where banking

infrastructure only extends to the main cities. But mobiles have gone far

further, so there’s a great chance to offer financial services via your

phone.”

After years of being shunned as a banking stock, investors are cottoning on.

Shares in Monitise have soared more than 80pc in 12 months and it is now

worth nearly £900m. It’s still small fry compared to the American

“super-unicorns” (tech companies worth more than $100bn), the biggest of

which is Facebook.

But Lukies is serious about catching up. “We acquired our biggest competitor

in Silicon Valley last year. It really opened people’s eyes to what our

aspirations and ambitions are. Here’s a company reversing the trend, going

to Silicon Valley and saying not ‘Will you guys buy us?’ but ‘We’re going to

buy you’. We are a unicorn now, but we’re going far further.”

Alastair Lukies CV

Age 40

Family Married, one child

Home Herts

Education Bishop’s Stortford College

First job Delivering magazines in Essex

Current job CEO Monitise

Salary £300,000

Hobbies Rugby, swimming, skiing, the Baptist Church

Article source: http://www.fanatix.com/news/new-zealand-v-france-rugby-union-match-preview-and-live-streaming/123234/

Rugby star turned super-unicorn hopeful: Monitise boss Alastair Lukies