Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia is widely regarded as one of Britain’s most successful bankers, helping Sir Richard Branson set up Virgin Money and, as CEO, steering the company through takeovers, a stock market float and eventual sale. But she tells Gabby why a career in finance wasn’t always the plan, plus why her mum took charge of the family finances growing up, and why she’s always tried to make a positive difference when making big decisions at work.
Join Gabby Logan every week as she speaks to some familiar faces about their relationship with money, the financial lessons they've learned on the road to professional success, and how they're investing for their family's future.
Visit ii.co.uk for more investing ideas and information.
Gabby Logan: Hi, I'm Gabby Logan, and this is the ii Family Money Show. In each episode, I speak to a familiar face about the role money has played in their family life and professional success. And this time I'm joined by the formidable Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia, widely regarded as one of Britain's most successful bankers. Dame Jayne-Anne helped Sir Richard Branson set up Virgin Money, and a CEO steered the company through takeovers, a stock market float, and eventual sale. She currently Chairs the HMRC Board, and in 2020 launched Snoop, a money management app designed to help people become savvier with their spending and saving.
Until last year, she was the government's Women in Finance champion, and was made Dame in the 2019 Honours list. She met her husband, Ashok, during Freshers week at university, and the couple have a 20 year old daughter together.
In our interview, Dame Jayne-Anne tells me how she didn't plan to have a career in finance when she was starting out, why she's always trying to make a positive difference whenever she's made big decisions in her working life, and why her mum took charge of her family's money when she was a child.
Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia, it is really lovely to meet you, and I’m so looking forward to chatting with you, but what do I call you? Are we going to be formal? Is it Dame? Or can I call you Jayne-Anne?
Jayne-Anne Gadhia: Jayne-Anne, please. Please –
Gabby: Jayne-Anne.
Jayne-Anne: – Jayne. Absolutely.
Gabby: I'm sure there are occasions where it's more appropriate to use Dame, and I hope you do use that where possible.
Jayne-Anne: It's more in writing than in words, if you see what I mean. So, yeah, I’ve got business cards that say Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia on it, but I still have to look at them twice to make sure that it's really me. So, I’m definitely Jayne-Anne, thank you.
Gabby: Well, Jayne-Anne, it is lovely to meet you and to chat on the Family Money Show. And the title obviously is really what it's all about. We want to know where your education in terms of money came from, what your family examples were like. So, let's go back to when you were a child and how money was talked about in the home, and were you aware of things like bills and mortgages? And did your parents take out pensions? Was there a conversation about money?
Jayne-Anne: Yeah, I mean, money was always short. So, as you asked me to go back there, I can always remember my mum worrying about money. I don't remember my dad talking about it, interestingly, always my mum. And as I just say that, even today, all around the world, you hear that women are often the keepers of the household purse, if you like. That was definitely the case in my childhood. And she was always concerned about money, both because of her own childhood which had been quite poor, and also because of wanting to live a good life, or at least to live a life without debt is what my parents were always very keen to do as I was growing up.
And I remember being quite young, and we were going on holiday, and we used to go to a caravan down in South Wales. And for the year before, I'd always be saving up my pocket money, which I had, I can't remember how much, but a few pence a week. And do you remember those, there were whiskey bottles and they had dimples in them with a net around them? You're probably not old enough to remember those.
Gabby: No, I do. Yeah.
Jayne-Anne: And I remember my dad giving me one of those, I used to push pennies in, and I remember having £8 to go to spend on holiday and feeling that I was absolutely rich counting it out. So, yeah, so money was tight, and I was very well aware of the worth of it.
Gabby: They sound like they were good though at making you realise the value of things –
Jayne-Anne: Absolutely.
Gabby: – and how important it was to save and to make sure you've got money to pay the bills, so they're all good lessons aren't they? Did they have investments? Did they talk about that? Or was there not enough to invest?
Jayne-Anne: There was definitely not enough to invest. Sadly, both my mum and dad died back in 2016 within a few weeks of each other, and I remember my mum died first, and my dad was very poorly, and he was looking at the life insurance that they'd had, and it paid out – I can't remember how much, it wasn't a very large amount, for my mum when she died, and he said, “Oh look, that was a sensible thing to have done,” that life insurance for all those years, because it did actually pay about when mum died.
And I was quite surprised, that that was one of the things that he'd looked at that particular point in time. So, they had a small amount of savings. I mean they left £20,000 in total after a long life, so it wasn't enough to invest, but certainly something that they were aware of and that they were looking after all the time.
What you do remind me of, which is very much a generational thing, is I remember as I was growing up my mum saying to me, “Goodness me, you spend, or you want to spend, more money than I ever do,” or “You want nicer things that I did. You'll have to marry somebody that's wealthy enough for you to be able to do that.”
And as I was thinking about this show, I remembered those words, and I definitely remember, even as a child thinking, “No, I'm going to do that for myself.” And you see that generational change that perhaps was more impactful on me than I'd realised.
Gabby: Yeah. Well, I suppose she was only going on the examples that she'd had before.
Jayne-Anne: Exactly.
Gabby: And you were certainly not somebody that was going to sit around and wait for somebody else to provide for you, obviously. You did a history degree –
Jayne-Anne: Yeah.
Gabby: – and then went into accountancy, so you obviously were wanting to better yourself, go to university, make a life for yourself, but you didn't go down the root of doing any financial degree, or economics, or something like that, which perhaps when I was looking into what you'd done in life, I thought maybe you'd have gone down that route. So, were you following a passion when it came to history?
Jayne-Anne: Yeah.
Gabby: Or were you thinking about a career afterwards?
Jayne-Anne: No, I mean, again, if I think about my background, nobody in my family had ever been to university, and I think my parents were –
Gabby: I’m the same, Jayne-Anne, they call us pioneers, because I used –
Jayne-Anne: Is that right?
Gabby: – the Chancellor of Leeds Trinity University which has a very high percentage of pioneers. Ninety-four percent of its intake at one point was pioneers.
Jayne-Anne: Amazing. That’s great.
Gabby: Yeah.
Jayne-Anne: That is great, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know if it was the same for you then, but I realise now that of course we didn't really know what that future was like then. My parents really struggled for me to have a good education, and at the end of that good education, university was the thing that was held up as a good thing to do. But I don't remember talking to my parents about a career or what to do next, do you know what I mean? There wasn’t a plan.
I've always liked stories, and history was part of that I suppose. I did English, History, and French A-Levels, and I mainly liked the stories in all of them. And I think that you I just followed that particular passion with no idea where it would lead. And then for me, having left London University with a History degree, I was about to marry an Indian man who is still my husband, I should point out, and we needed money. And so, I was on the university milk round, interested in how I might actually earn some money, and accountancy was just one of those things that I fell into by accident, and didn’t enjoy it particularly. So, I didn't ever have any ambition to either make money or have a financial career, it happened to me.
Gabby: It was a secure place though, I guess, accountancy, wasn't it? It’s a Steady Eddie in that respect. You go into something that you almost guaranteed that have some career, but you didn't just stay on that treadmill, if you like. You then decided banking was the way forwards for you, and obviously we know the incredible things you've done in banking. So, tell me how that move happened and what drew you into a different financial sector?
Jayne-Anne: Well, I mean, when I tell these stories, I have to apologise to everybody that it is all a collection and connection of accidents along the way.
Gabby: As so many great careers are.
Jayne-Anne: Well, and I think sometimes if you open yourself up to life and let things happen, good things perhaps do happen. If I knew everything I know now, and started out again, would I do the same thing, who knows? But anyway, I started off, as you say, in accountancy, because it was a good place to start. It paid, I remember ever so clearly, £4,250 a year when I started, which does make me seem like a relic, but it was back in the Eighties.
I was introduced to a world that I had never seen before, which was the business world, because I joined what was then Ernst and Whinney, now EY, as an auditor, which meant I went to see all sorts of other businesses. And the thing that I discovered, and I think this is partly to do with liking stories, was that I didn't really like the numbers, but I liked the people, and I'd spend an awful lot of time with what we now call networking, although I didn't realise that's what I was doing at the time. Just chatting to people about their lives and their work, and I really enjoyed that. And thinking in the end, how did numbers help to tell a story, I think, is something that I've always been really interested in.
How did I become a banker? Well, I followed the accident of my career continually throughout those years. I qualified as an accountant, went to what is now called Aviva, which was a big client of EYs at the time, joined there as an accountant, was discovered to be quite a good project manager, which if I'm good at anything, that's the thing that would define me, I think. I can take a complicated box of problems and sort them out into some order.
And as a consequence, Norwich Union asked me to do that, it was quite successful, and then they said to me, “Right, we would like you now to decide what it is you'd like to do next. You can be really creative and tell us where you think you would like to take business next.” And I had no idea. And by complete accident, I met someone who had just the week before met Richard Branson, and we were chatting about how exciting it would be to work for Richard Branson, and he came up with the idea of launching a financial services business with what was then Norwich Union, and that became the investment business actually rather than a bank called Virgin Direct, and it was a super exciting time.
Again, for me, the excitement wasn't really about the numbers, it was about the people, and the adventure that we could have in setting up the business, and how we could help customers to have things that they'd never had before.
Gabby: And how involved was Richard Branson at that time? And how involved were you with him?
Jayne-Anne: Well, he was very much involved in the creative thought, if that's the right way of putting it, but not in running the business day-to-day.
Gabby: So, was he the big picture? Did he have –
Jayne-Anne: Definitely the big picture.
Gabby: – very good strategy, and [unintelligible 00:10:32]?
Jayne-Anne: And very much the customer conscience. So, I remember ever so clearly, as we were thinking about it, we launched a product which was really a precursor of what is today known as an ISA, it was called a Personal Equity Plan then, or a PEP, and what that did was it enabled people with much smaller amounts of money available for investment to invest, and over the telephone rather than having to go in to see an advisor, and do it in a straightforward and simple manner. And it's hard to remember that that hadn't happened before. It was quite ground-breaking to enable people to invest in that way.
Gabby: Just to put it into a historical context, had things changed in the law? What was the climate of investment like? Or what was happening politically that was allowing this shift in the way people were investing to happen?
Jayne-Anne: Well, two things, I think, perhaps three things that I would say. So, it's a really good point that I haven't thought of for years. I think first of all, the government were wanting to encourage people, more broadly, to save, and so they were thinking of tax advantageous schemes in order to help that. So, like with a nicer today, if you were to invest in a personal equities plan, you could do that with your gains being, and your income being tax free. And that was something that was really appealing to people, and I couldn't tell you it was brand new, but it was certainly heightened, and the government were supporting that sort of advertisement really of it being a good way to save.
So, that was the first thing. The second thing was that Direct Line had launched their telephone car insurance, and that had been to great fanfare, and it was hugely innovative. I mean, don't forget this was pre-internet, which again makes me feel older than I feel like I should be, and we felt at Virgin that this is something that we could really build on, that investment didn't have to be difficult, and if you could make it simple enough to do over the telephone, then that would be something that everybody would feel comfortable with. And so that was, I think, a socioeconomic change at the time that we were able to take advantage of.
And then the third thing was that the person that I'd met in meeting Richard Branson, someone called Rowan Gormley, who subsequently went on to run Virgin Wines and Majestic Wines, was undoubtedly the most creative person I'd ever met. And he and I set up this business together, and he’s a South African and would always challenge the status quo, and say “Why on earth do we do things like this?” And because of my background, probably, I’d never properly realised in a personal way that individuals can change the way things are, and so those three things came together, I think; us wanting to do things differently, the fact that you could use the telephone, and Direct Line had proved that, to access a broader group of people than financial services businesses had before, and the government were encouraging these savings. And so that was where Virgin Direct came from.
And I think Rowan was undoubtedly more of a creative influence than Richard Branson, but once Richard really understood that benefit, he got right behind it. And I remember in particular, his interventions were always about pricing, “Let's do this as cheaply, really, as we can for the customer. Let’s give the customer a really great deal.” And so, it was a very – from a business point of view, a very deep change to find [unintelligible 00:13:58].
Gabby: A massive shift.
Jayne-Anne: Yeah, a really big shift.
Gabby: And you are at the vanguard of that, which now, especially for an audience listening to this, a younger audience, it's so easy, as you say there, to forget that that's not the way things have always been. We are talking now on a platform that is Interactive Investor –
Jayne-Anne: Yeah.
Gabby: – that is – you know, you can go on an app and make investments, and sort your financial future out, or your planning for your financial future through that medium. You don’t even have to speak to anybody if you don’t want to. But obviously, in those days, people had to make appointments, go down to the High Street.
Jayne-Anne: Yes.
Gabby: It was quite a laborious process. Form filling, these days, feels like an anathema, doesn't it, compared to …
Jayne-Anne: It really does. We're talking 1995 here, so not essentially –
Gabby: No, not that long ago, yeah.
Jayne-Anne: It’s amazing how quickly things have moved on in some ways.
Gabby: And our expectations.
Jayne-Anne: Yeah, for sure. And just to build on that, if I can Gabby, just a little bit. That business, that part of the business, was quite successful, and then we launched a partnership which enabled us to offer mortgages to people, and the mortgage that we offered was called the Virgin One account. And I think if I look back over my career, that the biggest change we made, actually, probably wasn't the one we've just described. We looked at the Virgin One account, we looked at the mortgage market, and at that time mortgage interest was calculated on a monthly basis, not on a daily basis.
So, you'd have your outstanding mortgage balance for a month, let's say it was £100,000. You’d pay interest on £100,000 for each of 30 days, if you see what I mean. And you weren't allowed to reduce the balance largely during that month. And we said, we thought that that was unfair for customers, and that we would only calculate mortgage interest on a daily basis. So, if customers started to pay off their mortgage, they'd get correspondingly a lesser interest [unintelligible 00:15:43].
Gabby: The benefit would be immediate.
Jayne-Anne: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And now it's unheard of for any mortgage not to be paid on a day basis. And I think –
Gabby: Revolutionary.
Jayne-Anne: Well, the thing I'm really pleased about with that, and I mean, we probably didn't anticipate it at the time, but it must have saved mortgage payers in the UK hundreds of millions of pounds since we've launched the Virgin One account, so I feel quite good about that. Brilliant. That’s what moved me into banking really, it’s the excitement of those changes that move things forward, I think, rather than banking in itself.
Gabby: Yeah, and that’s interesting, because actually I was going to ask you then about you went to a more traditional setup, I guess, at RBS, and in a more traditional environment, and I mean we would consider a banking environment. Because what Richard Branson was doing, as he does with all of his businesses, is try to rip up the model, reinvent the wheel in the industry, and see if it can be done a different way. What was that experience like then going into something that was a lot more traditional?
Jayne-Anne: Well, I mean, so the reason that I went to RBS wasn't that I chose to join the bank, if you like, it was that they bought the Virgin One account. They’d been the initial partners in it, they owned 51 percent, I think, of the business, and then they bought the rest from Richard Branson, and so I and all of my team became a Virgin branded company, 100 percent owned by RBS. I moved to Scotland and became, for six years, ingrained in that RBS team. Left in October 2006 and had, as I say about – I think it was about six years there.
And for me, in terms of the stage of my life, I guess, it worked extremely well, because I had a baby at that point and it was a more settled environment than the huge entrepreneurial excitement of the Virgin Group, if you like. But I learnt a lot. It was equally exciting, much more difficult, the challenges were real. I mean, I’ve told this story before, but the one that comes to mind as we are thinking about it is I was running some of the loan, personal loan businesses, for RBS, and it was very clear to us that we could only make money from selling loans if – what do you call it, Personal Protection Insurance – PPI was attached to that loan.
And I remember going to see somebody extremely senior at the bank and saying, “This can't be right. This isn't sustainable.” I mean, genuinely, I promise you, I absolutely did it before the crisis happened. And this person saying to me, “Well, we all know this it's wrong, but we can't be the first bank to pull away from it because it'll affect our share price.”
And it was a real dawning for me that the way in which products and the consumer were thought about in some of these listed businesses wasn’t driven by customer benefit, it was definitely driven by what was perceived to be a shareholder benefit. Of course it turned out to be a disaster for shareholders in the end. And I think it was that that made me realise, “Goodness, we've got to do something that means that we can make a positive difference to the world, not just look at the share price.” And that's always been very important for me.
Gabby: Before we move on to you going back into the slightly more entrepreneurial world of Virgin, you mentioned there you had a baby. And you’ve got one daughter, haven’t you?
Jayne-Anne: That’s right, yeah.
Gabby: Yeah. Yeah. How did becoming a mum change your working mindset, because you left it a little bit later, didn’t you, to start your family?
Jayne-Anne: Too late.
Gabby: You said you wish in a way you’d got on with it a bit sooner.
Jayne-Anne: Yeah. And it’s probably easier for me to answer the question now that my daughter’s nearly 20 than it would have been when she was 12 if you know what I mean. And she groans every time I say this, as well a number of your listeners, but I definitely make the point to her that for me, when I look back over my life, the most important thing is undoubtedly family. I’ve had a wonderful work-life, but it has been at the cost of family in some ways.
Because we’re doing some renovations in our house, I opened a box over the weekend which had some of my parents old papers in them, and one of them was a press cutting of the notification that they'd put in a local paper of the birth of my daughter. And it said, “First grandchild of Gwen and Jeff.” And it made me cry at the weekend, because of course she became their only grandchild. She was their only grandchild. And that was really a sacrifice that came because of my commitment to work.
And I think that it's really important that as human beings, men and women, we try and get at what we've always referred to as work life balance really right. And so, I do say to my daughter, “As you move forward, it’s great that you’re having this education. You’ve got all the world ahead of you, and you’ve got a much more equal opportunity that lies ahead of you, but don’t sacrifice the really brilliant things in life,” which in my mind are having a family and looking after a family.
Gabby: And I’m guessing, Jayne-Anne, that at that point, when you were working out when was the right time to have a family, a lot of your male colleagues of a similar age were probably popping children out left, right, and centre?
Jayne-Anne: Oh, for sure. Yes. Absolutely right. Of course. And so, we didn’t start even trying to have a family until I was 35, and our daughter arrived when I was 41, after nine miscarriages, six bouts of IVF. I had six bouts of IVF after she arrived, and still no other child. And you do, I think, put yourself through a lot of challenges as a woman at work unless you get your priorities …
Gabby: Is it better, do you think, the environment that you see now? Is it better?
Jayne-Anne: I hope it’s better. I mean I think – it’s interesting now, I talk to some of my daughter’s friends who are 20, and they talk about “Well maybe we should freeze our eggs,” and this isn't a conversation that I've encouraged. I think it's really good that young women today have got that opportunity, and they're thinking about that sort of thing, to while they're young and fertile, having the opportunity to think about their futures perhaps in a way that certainly would never have occurred to me.
I mean, I think that the reason that it's slightly better is that we have the conversation, we've got the role models, we've got the experience, and I think both male and female bosses at work are much more immediately open to being supportive of maternity leave and all that that involves. I'm not sure that the emotional journey, are you, of being a mum and being at work will ever change.
Gabby: No. No.
Jayne-Anne: The way in which being a mum in the end really changed my life, my work life, was that I'd assumed at 41 that I knew what I was doing, that a baby would arrive, that I'd attach her to my hip, and carry on with work, and everything as I'd intended. My husband gave up work, and I was going to carry on because I was the main breadwinner, and then of course the day she was born, I realised I didn't want to go back to work, and I did want to be a mum.
And because we’d made all of those commitments which made that impossible, and I remember when I did go back to work after a ridiculously short period of time of 10 weeks or something, I remember doing a stand-up at work, at Virgin, and saying – I was obviously still full of hormones and emotions as I repeat this story, I can tell you, and saying to people, “Do you know, I don’t want to come back to work just to make profit for somebody else, or just to get processes right. If I’m going to have to give time with my child up, I really want to try and make a difference.”
And when I’d finished speaking and I looked up, because I’d obviously internalised all of this even as I think about it, there were people in the room all in tears, and I thought, “Do you know what, this isn’t just me.”
Gabby: No.
Jayne-Anne: This is how everyone feels about having to juggle work and family, and I think it’s – so I think the practical side of things are definitely better, and I think it’s still an emotional challenge for us all, probably. Some people do it better than I did.
Gabby: So just going back to you leaving RBS and going back into the Virgin family, I guess culture was really important in terms of your decision making at that point.
Jayne-Anne: Oh yes.
Gabby: And I presume you could have gone to many different places to work, you could have done lots of different things, and people were wanting you. So, when you are faced with choices like that, what was the driver, the main motivator?
Jayne-Anne: Well, I don't know whether people wanted me or not, but the good thing was Richard Branson did.
Gabby: Well, he’s the driver then, he’s the motivator. There’s something about him that lured you back.
Jayne-Anne: Well, so what had happened was, when RBS had bought the Virgin One account, this mortgage business, Richard had written to me. I can’t find the letter, because it would have been a really good one to have kept, but a handwritten letter, and he said, “I'm quite worried about selling you and the team to RBS. If ever you decide you don't like corporate life, give me a ring, because we'd love to have you back,” right. And that was literally when we were celebrating the fact that we'd sold the business to a big corporate.
And I thought, “That's really nice Richard, but I'm sure that won't ever be necessary.” Turned out that he had a crystal ball. And by 2000 – so this was six years later, and I’d kept vaguely in touch with the Virgin guys and Richard, but not tightly in touch, but definitely culture was changing at RBS. It had been super successful, it had acquired the NatWest Bank, and there were all sorts of businesses cases. Harvard did a review of RBS saying that it was the best bank in the world. In fact, at one point I think it was the biggest bank in the world. And all of that success created an environment that was hubristic at best, probably, and probably just a little bit gung-ho at worst.
And two members of my team who'd been with me at Virgin, and funnily enough are still with me at Snoop, but nevertheless, the two of them, Dave and Paul, walked into my room at RBS one Thursday morning and said, “Haven't you had enough of this because we all have. You remember Richard wrote that letter saying, “come back if you don’t like corporate life,” why don’t you give him a ring?” And I rang him on the Thursday afternoon, and he'd asked me to go to London to see some of the team on the Tuesday, and by the end of the following week it was agreed that – you know, we'd have to manage the legals and everything, but let's go back.
And so, there wasn't that choice in a sense, it was simply following up on a promise that had been made several years earlier, and it just felt so right.
Gabby: What I love about your story though, as you said right at the very beginning, there wasn't really a plan –
Jayne-Anne: No.
Gabby: – to head-up a revolutionary bank, or to be part of one of the biggest banks in the world. It was about people, it was about understanding relationships, and being conscious of what the customer wanted, and putting that to the forefront of your thinking. But also, it seems, aligning yourself, or not being afraid to say “This person's brilliant, he's creative. I really want to be around and be in his environment. And the things that I can offer them, perhaps they haven't got in skillset,” which you clearly complimented each other very well.
What is it about Richard Branson? If you could distil it down to anybody listening who's not met him, doesn't know him as well as you do, what is it about him that has allowed him to do this from the very beginning of his life really, first of all with the record industry, and through whether it's travel, planes, trains, space travel, what is it about him?
Jayne-Anne: Well, I think what he would say is he wrote a book and the title of it was Screw It, Let’s Do It, I don’t know if you’ve come across that. And in the Virgin Group we actually had notepads with that written on it. And I don’t know whether he would actually say that's his mantra for business life, but it certainly felt like it to us, you know, “Let's just do it.” So, he’s definitely a risk taker, and you saw that, particularly when he was younger, in his personal life, obviously.
And I think that what I've found as I've got older is taking appropriate risk, particularly in a bank, but taking business risk is really important. You can really push the boundaries to do new things, to be creative to offer customers better things, but you’ve always got the establishment detractors, and I think that that is the limitation of business. You know, as an entrepreneur I think you’re pushing against established ways of thinking. I think as a woman, I’m afraid, in particular, I used not to like to think this was trye, but in hindsight I think it is and continues to be, I think it’s even harder to stand against the norm. People put you down a lot, I’ve found that.
And I think that because Richard has been so successful, what people have found – you know that he gets criticised, actually, himself for all of this, but his success speaks for itself, and his ability to front that success in a dramatic, extrovert, PR sensitive way has helped him enormously. Very few people have that, I think, and so from my perspective I think I learned to be a similar character in terms of pushing the boundaries.
Gabby: Did you become more risky? Were you ever more risk averse? And did he release that in you?
Jayne-Anne: Yeah. Oh definitely. I mean, I think if I look at my time at Virgin Money as a banker, I'd say the thing I regret most is that I don't think I took enough risk in the bank. So, I think I was very mindful of it being a very safe bank, we bought Northern Rock and so – and I'd been at RBS, so both of those things tend to affect the way in which you think about things. So, the bank itself is always very low risk, but what I mean by risk is take on different people and try different things, and don't be afraid to fail, and make audacious takeover bids if you can afford to do it, and tell your story with excitement and pride and confidence. All of those things are actually not that normal when you go to an established corporate that's listed on the FTSE 100.
Gabby: And what about your personal investments over the years? If I looked at those, would they look quite risky or are they quite safe?
Jayne-Anne: They're quite safe too, although I don’t think about that very much.
Gabby: Who does it? Is it you or your husband?
Jayne-Anne: My husband, really.
Gabby: Right.
Jayne-Anne: I mean we’ve done much better than I would've imagined when I started off saving my £8 in a whisky dimple bottle, but not to an extent where I consider ourselves high-flying investors by any means. And so, we have a small investment portfolio that is managed by our bank, and we look at it, I don't know, twice a year perhaps, and see how that's gone. We always have ISAs. But the most significant and, if you like, risky investment, I suppose, that we've done is to set up my business, Snoop. To start your own business and put your own money into that is – oh, yeah, however confident you are about success and it’s doing really well, obviously that’s quite a significant risk to take.
Gabby: I want to learn more about Snoop, but just going back on the investments, it's really interesting that you – and I imagine it's a practical thing and to do with time, because you mentioned that your husband left work to help run the family when you were the main breadwinner, most of the male guests on this podcast have absolutely no idea what’s going on with personal family investments, and their wives look after things, and so I was sure that you were going to tell me that you were the one that did it.
Jayne-Anne: No.
Gabby: And I think it must just be a practical thing, the person that is the busiest obviously passes that job on to the person that’s perhaps got a bit more time. Is that how it was, really?
Jayne-Anne: Yeah, I think that’s right.
Gabby: Yeah.
Jayne-Anne: So, broadly, for me and my husband when our daughter came along, he did the home admin, if you like, and I did the work admin if that’s the right way of looking at it, and I think that’s just carried on and he happens to be very good at it. And the thing that I always find he’s so much better at than me is that if I say “Oh, [unintelligible 00:32:03], do you remember that …” well, you know, something from an investment point of view or from an admin point of view “… we did five years ago” or something, he can always bring up the email, or the piece of paper or whatever, and I’m not that organised, I’m sorry.
Gabby: But you obviously have, along the way. Right from the beginning, from the EY days, were you making sure that you took out pensions, and that you had ISAs even in the early days?
Jayne-Anne: Yes. And I think, so shockingly, we’d turned 60 at the end of last – I’d turned 60 at the end of last year, and my husband the year before, and I started to get letters from pension companies. I mean I couldn’t believe I was getting the letters.
Gabby: Yeah, “Who are they sending these to?”
Jayne-Anne: “Well why me?” It’s six months before your 60th birthday, these pension companies write to you and go “You need to decide what you’re going to do in six months’ time.” And even though I’ve done everything that I’ve done in financial services, many years ago when we were setting up Virgin, I remember we were actually building the process for this personal equity plan, ISA thing, and I’d go into the office and really think about it from a banking or financial services point of view, and then I remember going home one weekend, and some stuff – literally stuff – arrived in the post from Barclays, and my husband and I were sat at the kitchen table, and I opened the envelope, and it was about a similar sort of investment product.
And I realised I’d consumed it so much differently as a normal person sat at home at the kitchen table than I was as a CEO of a financial services company trying to design the process, if you see what I mean?
Gabby: Yeah.
Jayne-Anne: We always said we must do the kitchen table test. We must make sure it works for normal people in a home environment, not just as finance bankers, if you like, sat in the office. And pensions feels exactly the same to me, that you can talk – I think people in financial services can talk about pensions until they’re blue in the face, but until you’re at home, and you’re nearing retirement age, and you’re thinking, “Thank god I actually did invest in that,” do you realise properly how important it is.
And so, if I could give any message to anyone that’s listening to this that’s much younger than me, it’s I think in your twenties and thirties you think “Why on earth should I bother with a pension, I’ve got so much to spend my money on, and that’s years and years away.” And the fact I’m starting to sound like an old duffer is that those years go so fast that you’re very pleased that you managed to find some pounds or pence, or whatever it is, to put away in your pension in the end because it’s always worth it. And so, if I had any investment advice to anybody, it would be definitely make sure you put as much as you can in your pension.
Gabby: I’m fairly sure, Jayne-Anne, that that will be cut out and used as the advert for the whole series –
Jayne-Anne: Oh right.
Gabby: – never mind this episode, especially coming from you. I think it’s got a huge weight, carries an enormous weight. So, tell us a little bit about Snoop then, and where that idea came from, and what Snoop, you hope, will become, and do for people’s lives.
Jayne-Anne: So particularly in these times of when consumer spending is so difficult and the cost of living is so high, what we hope Snoop will do is to help people to manage their money, to save every penny, and to take advantage of everything that they can to live a sound financial life. It was April 17th, 2020, that we went live.
Gabby: At the beginning of a global pandemic, why not?
Jayne-Anne: Yes, absolutely, well, and we did it because of customer feedback actually. So, we’d gone live in beta in January 2020 and got 5,000 customers, and they'd said, when the pandemic started, you've got to get this out there because it's going to be really helpful for people through these difficult times. And since then, we've had well over three-quarters of a million downloads. People are using us, the data says, more than online banking customers use First Direct, which is fantastic. And we aim to save people around £1500 a year, and that's really important in these very difficult times of course. So, yeah, it's grown; we've got about 50 people now, and it's a business we're very proud of.
Gabby: You mentioned getting those letters telling you that you’re turning 60, and your pension, how it’s performing, and what do you want to do with it. Do you see this as your final big project, or can you ever see a time when you would slow down and stop turning your ideas into reality? And there’s no reason why you should ever stop.
Jayne-Anne: No, I mean I can’t see that. I don't think that's an age thing, I think it's an ideas thing if you see what I mean. And the wonderful thing about Snoop is when I run Virgin Money, one of the problems of running a bank is it's limited by what it is, if you see what I mean. So, a bank offers savings, and mortgages, and credit cards, and current accounts, broadly, and it's hard to innovate beyond that. Really, really difficult for banks to innovate.
And there’s been some innovation brought in, as you know, from the likes of [Kleiner? 00:37:03] with Buy Now, Pay Later, and the banks are trying to emulate that. But, nevertheless, in the end it’s about people borrowing and saving money, I think, in banking. The thing about Snoop is that the opportunity to develop it and extend it seems to be endless. There’s endless ways of helping people in all sorts of different financial categories and beyond, really, with helping people to improve their lives if that’s what they want to do. And so, I can see really developing Snoop being something that gets all-consuming over time.
But within that, there are also other opportunities to develop new businesses off – not necessarily off the back of it, alongside it, and I think while those opportunities are there then I’ll be there too, I hope.
Gabby: And finally, you've talked about your daughter and the environment she's growing up in, very different to the one – and she's got different opportunities to those that you had. Have you given her, do you think, at 20 years old, enough financial education that she'll be able to make good decisions about her own financial planning, or future? Or is she not that interested at the moment? And are you ready to jump in?
Jayne-Anne: She's definitely interested. I mean like all late teenagers, probably, she went through a phase of if I’d have said “Let’s do this,” or that, it would have definitely not been the right thing to do, and she’s more interested now than she was before.
So, two things that she’s – first of all she’s interested in ISAs. Apparently people in her age group are talking about ISAs being good, because they're tax effective. I was surprised about that, and encouraged her to put some savings in there. But it was really interesting, yesterday – I think I said earlier that I found something from my parents, and I'd opened a box that I hadn't opened since they died.
Gabby: This sounds like a marvellous box of memories this box.
Jayne-Anne: Well, it was, yes, absolutely. And in the box, and I shall wave it to you here, was my dad’s wallet. And in the wallet was £70 in Scottish notes, because we lived in Edinburgh at the time that they died. And so, I gave it to Amy, and I said, “Spend it wisely, darling, because this is like an Easter present, by surprise, from granddad.” And she said, “I'm going to put it in my …” to be honest, “… my Nationwide savings account.”
And it did just strike me as I think if £70 had come my way when I was 19, by surprise, I think I'd have thought about going to the pub or something.
Gabby: Yeah.
Jayne-Anne: I didn't say it to her at the time, but I was quite impressed that she said, “I'm going to put it in my savings account.” Maybe if I'd have given her £20 or something, she'd have gone down the pub. But I think because it came from granddad she wants to keep it for a longer time.
Gabby: Thanks for listening. If you've got time, please like and follow the ii Family Money Show, and leave as a review or rating in your podcast app. You can find loads of ideas on how to plan for you and your family's financial future @ii.co.uk. I'll see you next time.