Mike Harris

Mike Harris has led companies that consistently stand out from the competition. As founding Chief Executive of First Direct, Harris built a bank with unprecedented levels of customer loyalty.

At Mercury Communications, Mike Harris took over as CEO of a company running out of growth opportunities and desperately needing reinvention. By creating an exciting, fast growing consumer brand he doubled profits to over £200m pa in less than three years. Whilst at Mercury he also supervised (as Chairman) the launch of the mould breaking mobile operator Mercury One to One.

As founding Chief Executive of Egg Plc. Britain’s first internet bank and for a number of years the biggest in the world, Mike Harris built a financial services organization that broke all growth records and moved into profit right on schedule.

Now, as Executive Chairman and Co-founder of Garlik Ltd which has raised over $18m of venture funding – Mike Harris is rapidly building a successful web based business which lets individuals manage and protect their identities, reputations and privacy

Harris is also an advisor on innovation to the Royal Bank of Scotland and serves as Chairman of the Group Innovation Board.

Keynote Speaker

As a leading authority on approaches to strategy, leadership, innovation and culture. Mike Harris is a sought after speaker and advisor for organizations and associations internationally. He speaks regularly on innovation at mid career MBA courses at MIT and has served on Government Committees on the transformation of public services

Mike’s approach to business is to challenge accepted beliefs and limitations and seek new ways of meeting customer needs. He has developed (and applied in many situations ) approaches to strategy, leadership, innovation and culture designed  to produce what many considered, at the time, impossible breakthrough results.

Harris can speak on topics related to innovation, strategy, leadership, culture, technology and financial services and usually designs a tailored speech to meet the needs of a particular company or conference.

Speaking topics include:

Building an Innovation Habit:

With examples from his own companies and many others Harris illustrates how almost any company can power up growth by an approach to business model, proposition, product and service innovation based around systematic customer insight and segmentation.

Leading Breakthrough Strategies:

Almost all start ups are constantly faced with producing results that are beyond the predictable. The lessons learned from successful start-ups can be applied to any organisation seeking to reinvent itself and produce breakthrough results.

Harris is uniquely qualified to speak on this topic: given five successful start-ups, his leadership of organisational reinvention at Mercury Communications and his advisory roles to public sector bodies and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The Challenge of New Technology:

New technology is constantly challenging many industries to reinvent their approach to dealing with customers. From the demand for multi-channel strategies in Financial Services to the threats posed by the apparently converging strategies of the Internet giants (Google, Yahoo, EBay, Amazon) around a Search/Find/Obtain model nothing stands still for long.

With his experience of adopting new technologies to transform industries and his current role at Garlik, on the leading edge of deployment of new internet technologies based on the semantic web model (with Tim Berners-Lee on his advisory board), Harris can give a wide perspective  on current challenges and ways of dealing with them

Identity and Privacy in the Digital Age – the shocking truth:

Based on his experiences at Garlik and supported by work undertaken at Privacy International and by leading criminologists, Harris explains how a surprising amount of personal and sensitive information is easily available on the internet to anyone who wants to check us out or steal our identities.

Precautions most people take such as buying a shredder or installing firewalls and virus checkers are valuable in their own right but don’t help with this problem. With case studies ranging from financial fraud and people being turned down for jobs, to people being arrested for offences committed by someone who had stolen their identity Harris illustrates the problem and explains the practical steps and legal remedies available to us.

Innovating on the Edge of Reason:

A personal story of Harris’s experiences of building innovative new businesses and services. Peopled by a fascinating cast of characters including Princes, Prime Ministers and Shakespearean actors, and containing numerous sanity challenging episodes this is a light hearted exploration of how to stay on track and keep the innovations rolling through whilst all around you seem determined to distract you.

At its heart this presentation contains a serious message about the place a leader has to stand to make innovation happen.