James Alexander

…who, having been inspired to think differently and boldly from his time as Strategy Director at innovative customer pioneering bank Egg, went on to become a co-founder of Zopa, the world’s first peer-to-peer lender. Zopa was born from technology making it possible to answer some very familiar customer problems in new and better ways. Customers want loans they can trust at the lowest possible rates, and they also want savings that are safe, accessible and that get the highest possible rates. The Zopa team saw that banks and building societies met these needs well enough, but now digital technology and social media-style thinking could provide a better way to match people wanting to save, to deposit cash, with people wanting to borrow. This required much less of the banking infrastructure and retained capital than before and so reduced costs, enabling savers to earn more and borrowers to borrow more cheaply. Risk was managed by grouping savers and lenders together, not matching one-to-one. James steered Zopa through the early stages of what became a very impressive decade of growth, and he also has views about how the sector Zopa led went on to lose its way, as inside-out growth ambitions out-muscled a more outside-in purposeful approach.