LET’s deal with assumptions first. The man behind this month’s hottest tech
stock is not a nerdy boffin. He’s a boyish, former rugby hooker, son of a
farmer, who freely admits that he is probably the least qualified man in his
business.
“Four GCSEs,” smiles Alastair Lukies. “When I went back to talk at my old
school, the headmaster asked me about seven times not to mention that I left
at age 16.”
He laughs. The kicker for 33-year-old Lukies, blond and chunky with one ear
bent from his rugby days, is that he still looks 16, but that hasn’t held
him back. His e-firm, Monitise, which links mobile-phone users with their
bank accounts, has already got experts’ noses twitching. Could it be another
Skype or Carphone Warehouse?
Last week it announced its listing on the Alternative Investment Market,
peeling off from the tech consultancy Morse which had nurtured it.
Monitise’s Monilink system, developed as a joint venture with Link, the UK
clearing banks’ ATM subsidiary, is already used by customers at HSBC, First
Direct and Alliance & Leicester. Other banks are expected to follow.
That puts Lukies, the nonboffin, in the lead across a sector where others have
already tried and failed. It’s the first step in the long-predicted move to
turning our mobile phones into electronic wallets, although Lukies, always
happy to simplify, has another term for it.
“We want to be the remote control to your bank balance,” he says, prowling the
floor in his rented office by London Bridge. That means that, with
Monitise’s software, you can use your mobile to check what’s there and,
eventually, shuttle money in and out, and pay for what you want, just as you
use debit and credit cards today. Each little transaction, of course, will
earn Monitise a fee.
It has been a labour of love for Lukies for five years, since he stumbled on
the idea after conversations with senior figures in the banking and mobile
world. He met them through his work in sports hospitality, and at the
e-business Epolitix.com, which he developed for the publisher of House
magazine, read by Westminster’s politicians. His route to e-stardom is
nothing if not eclectic.
But why him? It seems extraordinary that so vital a service should be
developed and led by someone who has zero experience – “Fred in a shed”, as
Lukies calls himself.
Persistence is the answer. The mobile operators tried with their own scheme
called Sim-pay, which foundered. Banks mistrusted it, as they thought it cut
them out of the loop. Being separate from both camps helped.
“When I first started,” says Lukies, “peo-ple just laughed at me. They said
you’ll never get banks and mobile operators to cooperate, each wants to
disintermediate the other, everyone wants to own the customer, the brands
are too big . . .”
The banks’ greatest fear, explains Lukies, is that we may not need them in
future. And the mobile operators are fiercely competitive. But they all want
something that is user-friendly. So his company worked with Link, whose ATMs
consumers already used and understood, to come up with something acceptable
to all.
The technology was not complicated. His co-founder and chief technical
officer, Steve Atkinson, had worked at Vodafone, and knew the operator side.
Security is vital: Monilink uses encryption and a numeric Pin, like an ATM.
Simple – if you can get everyone to agree.
And Lukies, who retired from professional rugby aged 22 after breaking his leg
in 17 places, says business should be simple. “It’s like a rugby team. If
you’re the captain, you’ve got a plumber, a brickie, a lawyer, a
good-looking guy who is thin and fast, and a big fat bloke, and you’ve got
to make them all work together.”
Then he grins. “Yeah, I take a lot from being a rugby player.” Including a
crunching handshake akin to GBH. “Sorry about that,” he laughs, “I’ve been
told to tone it down.”
Lukies has an earnest, fresh-faced drive that is hard to dislike. At times,
talking to him, it’s like receiving a sixth-form presentation in business
studies, everything exuberantly explained, as if he’s anxious to share the
excitement.
Lukies is also a committed member of the Baptist church – something well
veiled by his earthy rugbyisms – and exudes all-round niceness. The very
fact he has pushed in the door at so many banks and mobile operators,
getting their agreement, shows that his trustworthiness travels.
Former colleagues confirm it. “I think a lot of senior executives see Al as
the son they wished they had,” says Ben Atfield, director of Ellwood and
Atfield headhunters, who worked with Lukies at Epolitix. “He’s passionate,
he has lots of energy, and he has an incisive appreciation of people older
than himself.”
Peter Radcliffe, who sits as a director of Monitise and also as president of
Enterprise 100, at the London Business School’s Centre for Entrepreneurship,
says Lukies is a one-off. “Competitive, straight as they come, a nice guy
but never a pushover commercially. He just asked the simple question: why
can’t a mobile screen look like an ATM?”
That question has now achieved a momentum of its own. Lukies heads a team of
wide experience, including executives drawn from RBS and HSBC. He has even
won endorsement from the World Economic Foundation, interested in what
Monitise could do in nations where access to financial services is scarce.
But it is the potential in the developed world that puts City stock-watchers
on full alert. If the Monilink system takes off in Britain, then it could
become the global standard. Lukies already has a joint venture with the
American payment platform Metavante. And the global players among Britain’s
biggest banks could be his biggest asset. “The banks like to be
standardised,” says Lukies. “They tell us, we love your technology, but if
we can’t scale it globally, there’s no point in us deploying it in the home
market.”
But why do the banks need Monitise? Surely customers could just use
web-enabled phones to log into accounts, just as they do on computers?
Barclays already offers that via its Barclays.mobi link, and looks to be
dragging its feet in offering Monilink.
Lukies retorts that an internet-based proposition is just not as attractive.
It’s only available to internet-banking customers, has more complicated
log-ins and security, and has none of the advantages of a managed service
that sorts out all the issues of operator and handset compatibility for the
bank.
So why has Lukies’ timetable for rolling out Monilink repeatedly slipped? And
wouldn’t the banks just jump ship if a smarter piece of kit came along?
He shakes his head. “We’ve got a lot of embedded infrastructure here, and
we’ve spent a lot of time convincing banks. They don’t dip in and out. They
do things properly. This is robust.”
But there is, he acknowledges, still lots of competition, from direct rivals
such as Fe-Mobile in Britain, to indirect ones such as NTT DoCoMo, whose
Osaifu-Keitai card allows mobile phones in Japan to be used as electronic
money. Too much is undecided to herald Monitise as the next Skype just yet.
There is also the prospect that Monitise might be snapped up by a larger
competitor. This month’s listing, giving Morse shareholders equal shares in
Monitise, includes the issue of new shares to raise £20m of capital. Foreign
banks – not involved in Link – and the leading mobile-phone firms could be
among the investors.
Such backing should make Lukies rich if the firm grows according to plan – he
keeps between 2% and 4% of the company. That would be a turnround in family
fortunes since his farmer father lost everything as a Lloyd’s name. Friends
say that crisis – his father literally lost the farm – and his parents’
subsequent divorce provide the emotional engine for Lukies’ ambition. Until
then, he was, in the words of one, “much like any other public-school rugger
bugger”. Since then, as his elder brother started rebuilding the farm, he
has had a cause to work for.
“It created a T-junction for the family,” nods Lukies. “Then I went and
smashed my foot to pieces playing rugby.” He had already been picked for the
England under21 squad, and had turned professional in Aus-tralia. The
accident ended his rugby career.
Lukies returned to Britain and started in media sales, then moved into sports
hospitality. But his ease with people, developed in the rugby world, has
proved essential for Monitise. “One of the incredible things he has achieved
is building this ‘eco-system’, getting all these people to work together,”
says Radcliffe. “Without him, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Lukies says the business will be about more than just ATM-type services, and
gets excited about the possibilities for helping development in the Third
World.
“Micro-lending and lifelong lending could be global game-changers. You could
have peer-to-peer lending to people in undeveloped parts of the world. So
instead of giving £50 to a charity, your readers could use their mobiles to
loan it to someone in India to set up a company, then track it and have a
dialogue with that person.”
It is, he says, a fantastic opportunity. Then he looks pensive. “But I need to
make my business successful first, so we can invest in that sort of thing.
Sorry, I get really passionate.”
It’s that passion, rather than qualifications, that matters in business.
That’s why so many want him to win.
ALASTAIR LUKIES’ WORKING DAY
THE Monitise chief executive wakes at his home in Furneux Pelham,
Hertfordshire, at 5.30am. “I live in a converted brewery,” says Alastair
Lukies. “If I miss the beer after the rugby, I can always lick the walls.”
He takes the train into London and is at his desk in Monitise’s Monument
office by 7am. He spends a lot of his day out. “If I can’t see the whites of
my customers’ eyes I get very twitchy. You can’t be empathetic if you can’t
see these people.”
He will frequently be late home. Increasingly, he also has to travel. “I have
a major problem with flying – I hate it.”
VITAL STATISTICS
Born:October 26, 1973
Marital status:married, no children
School:Bishop’s Stortford College, Hertfordshire
First job:professional rugby player
Salary package:£150,000
Home:Furneux Pelham, Hertfordshire
Car:blue Mercedes 320 CLK
Favourite book:The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
Favourite music:Simon and Garfunkel
Favourite film:Legends of the Fall, starring Brad Pitt and Sir Anthony
Hopkins
Favourite gadget:Blackberry
Last holiday:Tuscany
DOWNTIME
ALASTAIR LUKIES, since retiring from professional rugby, is an uneasy
spectator of the sport. “I get too het up, many referees have asked me to
leave the sidelines as I am so passionate about it.”
He says he has few hobbies other than work. “My perfect day would be to get
up, do a few conference calls at home, go into the office, take some clients
out to lunch, then come home and watch movies.”
He met his wife, Helen, through the Baptist church in Bishop’s Stortford. “She
is actively involved in the church office. I was brought up CofE. Everyone
in my family has a strong faith.”
