The Pioneer interview with... Tracy Abraham

Early in her career, Tracy was part of the pioneering Channel 4 phenomenon that introduced Ali G and Sex and the City to UK living rooms. Later, she returned to the broadcaster, where she led the bold launch of Channel 4’s own digital platform, 4oD, when placing content on someone else’s platform would have been a safer bet.   

Moving to challenger bank Monzo, she helped translate the vision of a group of customer-obsessed engineers into a brand that could get people excited about a pre-pay debit card. 

Now at Tesco Bank, she’s exploring a whole set of new opportunities to grow worthwhile financial relationships under new Barclays Bank Group ownership.  

Tracy has a long history of innovating, provoking, making trouble and inspiring change to give customers what they want, even if they didn’t know it was what they wanted.  

Q. Tell me a little about your background – what led you to where you are now?    

 Well, I have quite an unusual background because the first half of my career was in media and the second half has been in financial services, which isn't an obvious trajectory for most people! 

I wanted to work in TV. That was my passion. I swore I was never going to work in an office. I ended up getting a job with the Edinburgh TV Festival and then moved to Channel 4. There I realised that actually the business of television was really interesting, so I kind of got sucked in through that route. I started in PR and then moved into marketing. 

I could take you through a tedious story of all the different moves I made, but what's common through them all is being open minded about different things coming along and taking me in a different direction. And that often happened. I enjoy being in companies that are going through big changes and all that comes with it – and it’s served me well.  

Q. You’ve worked with organisations that were trying to do things differently. What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you and where has your love of it come from? 

Because of the timing of my career, digital transformation has been a huge part of what I’ve experienced. I’ve been part of it from the earliest days, from when Napster launched in 1999 and disrupted the music industry with big implications for where I was working in TV. 

Banking was much slower to change because they didn't need to. They had a monopoly, there wasn't a disruptor. But eventually, that has changed too.  

What’s pivotal is the realisation that we can't just carry on the way we always have. 

To me, that creates enormous opportunity. I believe in the idea of better. Some organisations have carried on with the status quo for a long time because they can. But you see a gradual erosion over time. You could just carry on like that, and nothing terrible would happen. Or you can come in and really disrupt, be the grit in the oyster and say good enough is no longer good enough because you're going to become steadily less relevant and slowly decline. Instead, you could reinvent what you do right now and surprise people. 

Q. If we look at some of those organisations which have been disruptive - Channel4, for example, was pushing the boundaries of what we see on TV and the launch of 4oD was way ahead of the game, how did this idea come about?  

 I had a number of different roles at Channel 4. It was so formative for me. They had this amazing set of values, which were honestly the best I've ever come across anywhere – to do it first, make trouble and inspire change. I can’t think of anything more inspiring than that – being given a licence to disrupt. 

It was the ethos of everyone at the channel, and I really do mean everybody, not just the commissioning editors, but people like the lawyers too. It was the whole mindset of the place, which is fantastically exciting and creative.  

I started off doing PR for some amazing programmes which really were big boundary-breaking shows, and this allowed us to innovate with our marketing and communications.  

When it came to video on demand, there was a pressing need. The music industry had just imploded. They hadn't addressed the emergence of Napster. Instead, they’d remained very much in a narrow mindset of labels competing against each other. They weren’t prepared to work together and didn’t understand how people wanted to consume music… and it went really badly wrong.  

So there was this burning platform. Channel 4 had to do something. This was coupled with technology coming to the point where broadband speeds were just about fast enough to allow streaming. But there were many different ways of delivering a streaming service, so there was quite a lot of debate about how Channel 4 was going to address it. Do you put your content on a third-party platform, or do you create your own? I was young and quite opinionated and believed that if you only put your content on other platforms, there was a very big long-term risk.  Channel 4 doesn’t actually own their content. By giving other platforms access to the best content, you would make them famous and there would be no long-term need for Channel 4 as an ‘editor of choice’.   

This proved to be true. We can now see the see the power of Netflix. They used to show only content they acquired from third parties, but they built an incredibly strong brand off the back of that.  So now they commission their own, they don't need a Channel 4 to do it for them.  

But of course, there was a big risk in building a technology platform. Who was Channel 4 to do that? It was a huge investment, and we didn’t have the experience or the core expertise. 

In fact, what happened was that we took a multi-pronged approach, putting some content on other channels over here, building a proprietary platform over there and building the brand. And this ultimately worked – 4oD has become a valuable property allowing Channel 4 to reach its audiences in ways it can control. 

Q. Channel 4 was set up with an innovative mindset, a set of unusual shared beliefs, which ran throughout the organisation, from finance to marketing to the commissioning editors. Do you think it helped that the organisation had this approach? 

Massively. It is something innate to Channel 4. It's a very unusual beast. Baked into it is this idea of providing an alternative, doing something different, challenging the status quo. So yes, I do think that the DNA of the organisation was that we have to innovate, to challenge, to do things differently. It was an organisation that attracted a certain type of person and this definitely helped the vision to come to life. 

Q. With Monzo, you helped change how the organisation built its offer, its experience and win customers as a result. How did this happen?  

The opportunity to do this was what attracted me. Monzo, or Mondo as it was at the time, was tiny. It was a company of 10-12 people who had just broken away from Starling and were rebuilding from the ground up.  

When I came across it, it felt like the most audacious thing. Lots of industries had been disrupted, but not banks. The idea that a start-up could conceive of disrupting the establishment, something so big, so regulated, and that touched so many people just felt like the most extraordinary ambition, almost like arrogance. The idea that a bunch of technologists could take that on felt incredible.  

What you had, and I still think this is a very rare thing today, was an organisation driven by engineers. Not by bankers or marketers.  

So many companies talk about being digital-first, and they have a digital team, whereas this isn't a digital team – it’s literally the nuts and bolts of the organisation. And they were very opinionated, extraordinarily creative technologists who had a vision for how things could be better.  

I was looking at the ideas the engineers had developed and asking ‘What's the killer experience or the killer moment? What's that thing that just will really click with customers?’  At the time, it was the Freeze Card. Nobody had done this before. It was visually such a powerful image.  

The founder, Tom, was leading how the company grew. He was very clear and was happy to be super niche in the beginning, to focus narrowly and make just this group deliriously excited and happy. He believed that they would bring other people in. It would flow from there. And that was indeed the case.  

We were inviting developers into the office, opening up the hood, running hackathons, getting them to come along and pick up their debit card, getting it trending on Twitter. Our crowdfunding raise wasn't about raising money. It was about creating fans who were really invested in our success. 
 
I didn't agree with everything they were doing and I was often proved wrong. If you take their brand at that time, from a design point of view you had this weird animated character, the logo was blue and red, the card was ‘hot coral’… but it was like when you look at Red Bull and you think these elements just don't add up together, but somehow it worked. It was about breaking the rules and it made for a kind of magical experience. 

Q. You mentioned the role that super fans played. How did having these genuine brand champions help? 

They 100% helped. From day one, long before the card even existed, we had people, customers, coming in every single day talking to us about their banking experience. Anyone and everyone within the organisation would sit down in half-hour slots every single day, to listen.  

I brought in a dedicated manager who was instrumental in creating that community. It was the most grassroots ground-up effort. The community and the whole trending on Twitter is really what drove the excitement around the brand.  

So yes, it was having advocates early on and knowing exactly what this audience is interested and engaged in. Ultimately, what they were excited about was the transparency and openness of an organisation in an industry that typically isn't transparent and open. This proved to be the way to unlock excitement and to widen our reach. 

Q. You’re now at Tesco Bank which was very recently acquired by Barclays. How will you bring your pioneering spirit and champion for customers within this set up? 

I think the opportunity for Barclays lies in a fantastically strong consumer brand that is very customer-focused. They're excited about our incredibly high NPS scores and want to understand the Tesco mindset around customers. This is the magic of what they've bought. It's not just a back book of products, it's Clubcard. It's what that means. So, I think there’s an opportunity over the longer term for Tesco Bank to be a disruptive engine within a larger organisation. 

Barclays wants to learn from Tesco Bank so there is a real opportunity for a group of us who've been in a medium-sized organisation with a certain ethos to use this power. We've been ahead of the curve in some areas, so we bring useful experiences. But we’re open and ready to learn too. 

Something that always stuck with me from my Monzo days was that when everyone was getting excited about the Freeze Card, Tom, the founder, said to us, make no mistake, it's not that people at the big banks haven't thought of this. There’s lots of incredibly bright people who work in those places who want to do great stuff, but their systems are preventing them from doing it quickly. We can't launch something exciting and then be static with it. We need to keep coming up with new things to stay ahead and build a following.  

He's right. There's no question that there are many incredibly smart people in large organisations who want to see change happen, but for whatever reason it is much harder.  

One of the biggest ways to achieve things in an environment like that is to have a single-mindedness. If you take COVID, everybody who's been in an organisation during that period looks back and says, gosh, wasn't that amazing? We all came together and pulled off something that nobody said was possible. Within a day everyone was working from home. This was because there genuinely was a single, burning, objective. 

I've seen this with the sale of Tesco Bank. There was this one thing to do with a specific deadline that we had to get over the line, and people have done an extraordinary amount to get us to this point. When the goal is clear, no matter the size of the organisation, you can make things happen. You just need to keep ruthlessly focused on a single objective. 

Q. Why do you think other organisations find it so hard to be customer-led? 

I've been in so many places where the strategy department says there's this area of business that's worth X million pounds, and if we get Y percent of it, we could be really successful, so we should be in that line of business. Then they tell people in the customer area to go away and justify the fact that customers want it. That is not customer-led.  

I have had to fight, sometimes really hard, to explain why some of these ideas are way off-brand, or not what customers actually want, and you're leading the witness in the way you're running customer listening. 

I think it's easy for organisations to start with a commercial mindset. Now, don't get me wrong, I have also been at organisations where the customer team says we're obsessed with the customer, and none of you commercial people understand what customer-centricity is. And the commercial people say well, none of you guys get that we've got to make money out of this. 

When I arrived at the bank, my team claimed to be customer obsessed but we had to evidence every day how commercial we were if we wanted the commercial teams to be equally customer-led. I don't think that being customer-focused means the money will automatically follow. That's too narrow minded. But if you start with a customer and their needs, you have a far better chance of selling something, launching something, creating something that people actually want. 

You have to listen to customers and understand what they’re saying. If you're not listening to them and just saying people trust this brand so surely we can stretch to this product, it won’t work.  

Q. Are there any organisations or examples that you really admire for being customer-led or that are pioneering within their sector?  

There is an organisation that has been absolutely amazing – Tony's Chocolonely. My husband's Dutch, so I've been familiar with Tony's for a long time, before they came to the UK. I'm absolutely obsessed with them, what they do, and the way they work.   

It was started by a TV producer who was making documentaries about forced labour involved in the production of cocoa. And he just felt he wasn't getting enough traction. So, he launched a chocolate brand.  

I mean, that’s incredible in itself. And he didn't just stick a Fair Trade stamp on it; he put that mission at the heart of the company. Perhaps most importantly he didn't create a super-worthy brand, he created an incredibly fun, dynamic brand that is quirky and alternative and that doesn't play by the rules. They're constantly innovating and doing unusual stuff, but at the same time there’s an underlying vision to change the world.  

I think that’s brilliant. It reminds me of a podcast from the guys who started Method cleaning products. They said that their starting point was environmentally friendly, organic and natural, but it wasn't enough just to do that because no one wants cleaning products that are just worthy. They have to be the most incredible cleaning products that also happen to be the best ones for the planet.  

This is what I feel about Tony's – it's great chocolate, it’s playful and there are so many brand triggers that support their mission – the design of their packaging, the design of the chocolate. As soon as you look into why the chocolate isn’t in neat squares – it represents inequality in the chocolate industry – the more you get into it, and the deeper the brand connects with you.  

I think they're a brilliant example of incredibly pioneering, thinking differently kind of organisation.