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Alongside his role at i10, Matthew Bullock is also group chief executive of Norwich and Peterborough Building Society (N&P), and chairman of a technology company called The Automation Partnership, which makes robotic systems for drug discovery in bio-tech.
Before starting at the N&P, Matthew worked as an economist for four years at the CBI, before joining Barclays as a trainee. He held various positions at Barclays, as he explained. “I was an assistant bank manager and a bank manager, and then went on to other jobs including running Barclays hi-tech team for about five years, before I ended up as a senior director at the bank and a managing director of BZW. I left there in 1998, and have been chief executive of Norwich and Peterborough for six years.”
It was while he worked for Barclays that Matthew became a leading financier involved in the hi-tech ‘Cambridge phenomenon’ of start-ups. Matthew took up the story: “I was assistant bank manager in Cambridge in the 70s when I was involved in financing the first technology companies in the area.
“Scientists from Cambridge formed the companies, rather than people moving in from outside the area and now there are an unusually high number of technology companies that all have their foundations in the town.
“What is unusual is that these companies have grown pretty successfully, but it is a community that is generating activity internally. It is also unusual because in the past most of those communities tended to get stuck in one technology or sector, and in the early days this was electronic hardware and software. But the Cambridge community has very successfully hitched itself across sectors towards telephony and wireless and now into the totally different business of bio-tech. These involve very different business models and the examples of innovative communities moving across technologies like this is very rare. Cambridge is one of the few successful areas to have done that.”
Matthew explained that the pool of talented people already located in Cambridge is one of the main drivers behind the success of these businesses. “I think that Cambridge is enormously deep-rooted in technologies that have turned out to be important. Also some policies that Cambridge University had were different from other universities and allowed individuals to start their own businesses rather than manage them from the University, this has also proved to be a very important factor.”
With Cambridge University’s history of interacting a little more with businesses and noting the benefits that both parties can draw from such a relationship, the city was an ideal place in which to base the i10 project. i10 was formed with the aim to get businesses and university academics working more closely together, offering support on technology problems, giving access to uni labs, and hiring out staff and graduates to tackle business issues.
Matthew explained: “i10 is a joint venture organisation created by the ten universities in the East of England. I think what was recognised was that a lot of shared learning could be done between the universities as some universities were much more experienced in commercialisation of research. The others could learn from them.”
i10 enables businesses to plug into the combined power of the network in a number of ways. At the heart of the project is Ask i10. This free service allows organisations to submit queries relating to any of their business needs - whether it is technological challenges, development issues, expert advice or the hire of specialist equipment and facilities - and providing a single point of access. Requests are channelled through i10 members to the right teams, and a response is guaranteed within two weeks.
Matthew added: “It can also help you in areas such as IPR licensing and consultancy, all of which was sensibly organised in the first days of the project, to make them easily available to companies. The website also features some clever tools, which enable companies to rate how innovative they are against their peers, and then actually get assistance directed at the areas where they appear to be weaker in their innovative capabilities. This is an advanced way of making sure that companies can access the people that are best able to help them.”
Described by Sir Richard Lambert in a report as one of the country’s leading exemplars of this kind of co-operation, i10 is in some ways unique. “i10 has different ways of approaching industry: it is working closely with about seven or eight sectoral groups because there are certain concentrations of industry and research that go together really well. In the East of England we have worked quite closely with the bio-tech ICT, energy, multi-media, health and precision engineering sectors,” said Matthew.
Although offering a range of benefits, forming a partnership with a University is not a guarantee of success. “The two sides tend to have different metabolic rates, and you have to work at getting these synchronised. In other words, businesses want things very quickly and directly, and universities tend to work on a longer wavelength. So you have to work out how you adjust one to the other,” explained Matthew.
“This can be done in a variety of ways, such as technology liaison officers at universities, or individual academics creating their own companies and selling consultancy services. My experience shows me that the consultancy route is actually more successful but it is not the only route.
“Companies that get high quality consultancy inputs from people who have technical expertise can solve difficult problems or create unusual opportunities. That is good for companies and given that you aren’t going to win in a cost driven environment against China, you may as well start using the brains that are around.”
One of the main issues that Matthew has to deal with at i10 is getting the businesses in the area to notice and take advantage of the opportunities that are around them. “A number of the universities are keen to go out and talk to companies in a more proactive way, rather than simply advertising and waiting to respond. So there is a move to engage in some more proactive marketing. Another issue is trying to work out what the medium term future is for i10. Originally it was put together as a project but it is now getting more serious and we are talking about bigger money. To date we have been supported by government funding, but we need to know the basis of how we go forward into the future, and this is under discussion at the moment with the universities.”
Embracing Technology
Moving onto Matthew’s other role as CEO of Norwich and Peterborough Building Society, I asked him what attracted him to the position. “It was based in East Anglia and I liked the opportunities it presented,” he said. Soon after joining the Society Matthew implemented changes and embraced technology. “I like building modern businesses in challenging sectors based around great systems and excellent customer service. Our branches have the most modern systems, and this is a great thing to build,” he said.
Norwich and Peterborough embraced internet technology very early on and has won prizes for its web site. Matthew explained that the company was quick to see the advantages customers would reap from the web, and was the second internet bank in the UK. “It is important because of the way people want to be multi-channel,” he explained. “We decided not to make it a separate channel like Cahoot. We took the view that customers would want to deal with their finances in a variety of ways, so for example they might want to go in and talk about something important face to face, but they might prefer to do a transfer or pay a bill on the web. It is important to offer choices as part of an integrated service.”
Providing superlative customer service is a top priority at the Society, with customer satisfaction scores coming in at 98 out of 100, where a recent high street bank was quoted recently as saying it was struggling to get marks in the region of the 60s. “Service and that side is what we focus on and we are really loved by our customers,” confirmed Matthew. “We uphold this by having regular feedback sessions with them – so for instance I go to Norwich to spend three hours talking to customers and this is done on a regular basis. When you consider that we are owned by our customers, in the same way as a CEO of a PLC would go and talk to his major shareholders on a regular basis, then I go and talk to our members.
“My advice to anyone, would be always know who your customer is. An old adage I came across says ‘if you don’t know the first name of the person who is going to make the decision about your purchase, you don’t know your customer’ and I hold true to that.
“N&P is currently having the best year’s trading it has for sometime, despite a 35 per cent drop in mortgage volumes at the start of the year. This has been a very long housing cycle: most cycles are seven years but this one has been 12. When mortgage regulation came in last year, the market cooled off and this will have been a bit of a challenge to some people. But we had foreseen it and made investments over the past few years to diversify our income,” said Matthew.
Regulation and red tape is something that Matthew sees as an issue that holds back business. “This government in particular has gaily moved on with all sorts of concepts to encourage competition which isn’t a bad thing, but at the same time it is weighing down people with rules and regulations. Our current system demands that you prove that you were not doing something wrong and that is a new and negative way of dealing with business. This means businesses are always on the back foot and this really slows them down. I think that in business, the sheer amount of work it takes to put together the evidence needed to prove that you are abiding by the regulations, means that you have people working on systems which serve no benefit other than covering your back side.
“If I could change anything in this industry, it is easy to say regulation. But I also think that there is a problem in finance because the subject is complex, and people are not well educated about it. It is a problem selling complicated products to ordinary people, and this means there is always an opportunity for the ‘cheapskates’ to take advantage of people who don’t understand things. So education is again important.”
VTR
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