The Pioneer interview with... Chris Pitt

Chris Pitt is CEO of first direct, a bank that upended the traditional banking model when it launched 35 years ago, is now enjoying a return to form as a pioneer for service for the next generation.  

From a graduate trainee role with TSB in the 1980s, Chris’ career has all been in financial services, covering product development and marketing with M&S Money, Tesco Bank and HSBC.  

He has always been guided by a fascination with understanding what matters to people, as customers or colleagues, building brands, propositions and organisations they value. 

At first direct, Chris is on a mission to challenge the norms and behaviours of the banking industry, to solve a whole set of problems customers now have with money in new and better ways. 

What attracted you to this role and what were your burning challenges when you first joined first direct (fd)? 

I’ve always been powered in my career by a desire to learn new stuff. I like to be faced by challenges I need to surmount. Being chief executive has that sense of totality – you're managing the service delivery, the commerciality, risk, but then you can actually do things like define the purpose and instil values that are attributable to the organisation and to the customers you serve.  

The burning challenge was one of growth. Really, first direct has been a brilliant customer service business ever since its inception. Famously launched at a minute past midnight on Sunday 1 October 1989, in a period when everybody banked in a branch and queued up at lunchtime to put a cheque in while getting a little bit of paper stamped. first direct broke the mould. 

It did it through customer service with 24/7/365 human-to-human UK-based call centres, setting new customer expectations and delivering on them, all of the time. It needed to be super brilliant because this was banking in a completely different way. You weren’t talking to someone behind a screen personally cashing your cheque, you’re talking to a, potentially uninterested, voice on the phone. So the customer service needed to be brilliant for the business to succeed and thrive. 

While fd lived up to its ground-breaking customer promise, it hadn’t delivered at the scale that its founding fathers and mothers set out to achieve.  

The challenge when I joined in September 2020 was to maintain the fantastic customer service but drive the growth. 2023 was the most successful commercial year fd has ever had – the highest number of customers recruited, and we maintained our position as the number one customer service brand in the UK, in any sector. We’ve also been recognised by Forrester Research as the best bank in Europe for customer service. 

And we’ve done all this without growing our costs. 

What did you do that unlocked these great results? 

The digitization of our processes and our front end has been the most material change – fd was the first internet bank and we were one of the first banks with a mobile app. This digitization has allowed us to grow at scale, meet the needs of the new customers we recruited as well as servicing our existing customer base. 

You can now open a current account with fd and have your card in your wallet within 8 minutes without having to phone the bank at all. New customers don’t engage over the phone, not because we don’t want them to, but because they don’t need to. And while 98% of all transactions are digital, we are still there for people when they need us – be that in a catastrophe or crisis or confusion. But to grow at scale, we disconnected the need for new customers to phone up. 

There has been a shift at fd towards a younger demographic. How did you manage this change and build belief that it was a good change to make? 

This role has allowed me to put purpose at the heart of fd. We’ve done a lot of research into what matters to younger customers. We recognise that this generation will be the first in the modern era to be poorer than their parents – implicitly unfair. 

We recognise that the housing market – a young person’s ability to get on the housing ladder, to have their own space – is much more compromised relative to previous generations. We have therefore put a challenge against this unfairness at the heart of what fd is about. It runs through our advertising, product design, charity partners, our connections, and the way we communicate and deliver our services.  

Now, nearly 50% of customers we recruit are under 35 years old. 

fd has also done a lot to help women in banking and has done some powerful work related to domestic violence. What has that entailed? 

All banks have a duty of care from a financial vulnerability perspective, and to be there when people’s circumstances change through illness, unemployment or for health reasons. But being part of a brilliant customer service organisation means you go above and beyond to support people. We have about 90 people in our customer care team, who support our more vulnerable customers every day. On top of this, we trained 40 Money Coaches to help people manage their money more effectively and provide support to those who need it.   

There are horrific stories of domestic violence and the influence of perpetrators on bank accounts. The ability to manage your own money is so important to your independence and to enabling you to escape. We had an example where one of our reps challenged existing processing procedure to help a woman who had been the victim of domestic violence for over 50 years. Our procedures allowed flexibility to a degree that allowed her to escape. This is what we want fd to be about. It shows that providing a financial service is not an end in itself – we’re there to support people’s lives.  

It’s not about loans, credit cards and mortgages, it’s about what the person needs and wants that allows them to live their life. 

What are the challenges that remain and what are the next steps for first direct? 

This is a great company with some great people, which has allowed us to unlock its potential. The challenges are always the three C’s: Commerciality, Customer and Control. 

No one will bank with you if their money isn’t safe in their current account. The rise in fraud is a massive issue. This is the modern version of safety. We need to continue to grow our customer base and we’re doing it by growing our support for our customers, earning their loyalty to an increasing degree. We launched free use of debit cards abroad, giving up some revenue to reward the loyalty of our existing customers, as well as engaging new customers. 

From a customer perspective, our industry has been massively challenged – in a good way – by the fintechs. We need to continue to meet the rising expectations of people, to allow them to do the things they now want to do when it comes to managing their banking. 

We need the journey and the products to be simpler and more intuitive. Someone opening an account in 8 minutes is encouraging. They don’t want to spend time form filling and repeating information. When they go through the journey, we need them to be able to self-serve, with data and information provided at the right time so it’s useful for that individual. And this needs to be done in a positive way, not in a way that feels scary or like Big Brother. 

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you and why do you think organisations find it so hard? 

Some companies find it hard because they get lost in themselves. They get lost in their own supply-side issues, hindered by metrics and divorced from what matters to the customers they’re serving. 

You need to talk to your customers, listen to what they’re saying, stay very, very connected. Every Monday night, I spend time calling customers who have had cause to complain or given first direct a low NPS score in a survey. It’s important to me to stay in touch with what is happening on the ground; and to hear directly from our customers what they think we can do better. Exposing yourself to your areas of weakness keeps you on your toes, it makes sure you get better all the time. 

One of our values is to make it better, not perfect. 

Are there any customer pioneer organisations that you particularly admire? 

I admire businesses that maintain their values. Patagonia is held up for calling out the environmental crisis back when it wasn’t trendy or ‘important’. It’s that consistency of values that runs through the organisation that appeals. 

I would answer it in terms of companies, or people, who get ahead of the question their customer has – the ones that have brought you a cup of tea before you asked, or picked up a napkin before it’s dropped. That is the sign of a fantastic business. I think it is a challenge to us all to make sure that we continue to think beyond ourselves, to deliver what matters to the people we are trying to serve.