Did you enjoy school?
I think to tell the truth I was mostly slightly bored, although it always got a little exciting at exam time!
What qualifications do you have?
An LLB (Hons), Bar Finals and an MSc from London Business School.
Has your career path been a smooth transition, a rocky road or a combination of both?
I think it could rather be described as a zigzag with consistent themes! Having decided against a career in the bar, I landed, quite by chance, at Coopers & Lybrand, where I learnt from some exceptional minds in both the UK and overseas (Hong Kong, Africa, Pakistan) about organisations, management, strategy. After a brief stint in an energy company, I accidentally landed up in technology, and had a thrilling ride in Atos and then CGI, running business units, learning enterprise technology, bringing products and solutions to market, taking risks, managing people.
I then left to run the Charity Commission, where I learnt public policy and regulation. After that, the Student Loans Company, which is one of the public sector’s biggest financial transactions operations – a medium-sized retail bank with a large, complex IT estate.
I’m now very much still being kept on my toes running the brilliant OneID – a digital identity start-up that uses the data that banks hold on 50 million individuals in the UK to securely verify identities online. I believe OneID will fill the missing piece in the UK’s digital infrastructure.
What is the best career advice you can give to others?
Never give up!
If you had to pick one mentor, that had the biggest influence on you, who would it be?
There of course several who have been hugely influential, but if I had to pick just one, it would probably be Bernard Bourigeaud, an extraordinary force in the European technology sector and a man with an acute understanding of good leadership.
From where do you draw inspiration?
First, from the teams I work with. Second, from taking the long view on the way in which markets, economies and technologies ebb and flow – that’s probably the London Business School training!
What is the biggest challenge you have faced to date?
Most of my roles over the last 15 years! But you can quickly get work challenges into perspective through a quick visit to the battle scenes in the British Museum or in comparison to the high drama of Italian opera!
What qualities do you feel makes a good leader?
Resilience, knowing your inherent value-add as part of the team, and vision.
From a work viewpoint what has the last 12 months been like?
An intense focus on switching the UK market onto the criticality of verifying identity online. The internet genie is out of the bottle and digital identity verification is a critical mitigation against online scams, payment fraud and online harms. The UK is lagging behind many European countries, where it’s part of a citizen’s day-to-day online activities , protecting them in everything they do.
But I think we can catch up; I’m optimistic that the work that the Department of Science and Technology are doing to ‘regulate’ the identity market and that OfCom are leading through their implementation of the Online Safety Act will be instrumental in enabling us to catch up.
What would you say are the biggest tech-based challenges we face today?
I think we underestimate the challenge of legacy estates and the data ‘guddles’ attached to them. Many organisations have now been using software to transact with large numbers of consumers and citizens for 50 years – that plate of spaghetti applications needs time and resource to sort out.
And of course, we need to get a handle on ‘good’ AI – where do we use it, where is it economically real or where is it a Dutch tulip bubble…. And on ‘bad’ AI – I don’t think you can outrun deep fakes, so in my industry, I don’t think that scanning a government ID will ever be as safe as using your bank login to prove who you say you are online.
What can be done to encourage more women into the industry?
A tricky one. The technology industry is fascinating – and although you need to respect technology, you don’t necessarily need to be technical. At OneID, women are in all roles – developers, product management, business management, marketing.
Give us a fact about you that most other people wouldn’t know.
More Italian than any other nationality.
