HOWZAT

But he’s a Brit! He shrugs. It was a great deal. As well as the cricket, Travelex sponsored broadcast coverage of the last football World Cup, and is sponsoring coverage of the rugby World Cup, too. “We call it the Travelex triple,” he giggles. And he’s not even a sports nut.

But he knows his business, and Travelex, a firm most of us recognise only from its airport retail sites, wants to get its name more widely respected by a global corporate audience. Four-fifths of its revenue now comes from its business-service side, sorting out foreign exchange transactions for other firms, even supplying many of the big banks (including Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland) with the currencies they sell.

Dorfman’s genius is to have seen an opportunity where others, frightened by the introduction of the euro, have shrunk back. He is also lucky that the banks, under pressure to concentrate on core activities, have been happy to let him consolidate a fragmented market. But having spotted the opportunity, after many early years of struggling to establish the business, Dorfman has been quick to push on for more.

“When Lloyd wants to do something, his will and energy are relentless,” says one who has worked with him for years. “And he’s always working out new ways of doing things.”

Hence Dorfman has plans for new money-transfer services, cash “passports” (plastic cards you can top up), products aimed at Britons buying houses abroad. The ideas just keep coming.

Yet that agility is tempered with a carefully thought-out approach. “I suppose we’re quite a rare business in three ways,” he concedes, a little smile never far from his plump, featureless face. “First, despite our size and scale, we’re still a private and entrepreneurially spirited business; second, few others have the footprint we do with the same mix of operations on a global basis; and, third, even if you had all the money in the world and wanted to repeat Travelex’s success, it would take a long time.”

Dorfman likes counting out points in twos and threes. It’s how he built up his business: methodically consolidating, searching out fresh areas, but never becoming so bureaucratic that the firm couldn’t make a quick, good decision.

Those who know him well say that, despite the complexity of the business, Dorfman will rarely back a new project unless it can be simplified onto one sheet of paper. “Lloyd has an instinctive feel for which ratios to use. He is as adept as you’d expect, heading a business that runs on fine margins,” says 3i director Tom Sweet-Escott.

And once Dorfman likes an idea, he moves fast. Peter Birch, former chief executive of Abbey National and now on Travelex’s board, remembers the day in 1994 when he rang up Dorfman, walked round to see him and agreed the deal for Travelex to supply Abbey’s 750 branches, all in one working day — unthinkable in most other businesses. And at the same meeting Dorfman agreed Abbey could take a stake, a shareholding now held by 3i.

“Lloyd does it by just being totally focused on the business,” says Birch. “He doesn’t own shares in anything else, he has never really done anything else. Everything is in Travelex.”

Dorfman says his company’s success is due to the team — others cite his long-time finance chief, Clive Khan, with whom, apparently, he does a formidable “good cop/bad cop” routine. But the Travelex founder is far tougher than many suspect. “There were difficult decisions to be made after 9/11,” says one colleague, “and he made them.”

He has also always had the knack of inspiring confidence. He set up his first bureau de change with a £25,000 loan from a family friend. That was a lot of money to lend a 24-year-old in 1976. But Dorfman was convinced that the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 would pack London with tourists, and it was a business he had already learnt from his father, who had run bureaux de change before.