The end of the beginning

I started the IconicShift mentoring programme in early 2012. Since then I've worked in depth with about 30 companies , ranging from the earliest stage start-ups to businesses already worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

The photos shows some of them at a party to celebrate the conclusion of the programme in June 2016.

People at the party had founded game changing companies in micro-finance, cloud based solutions for small business,the transformation of small living and working spaces, Digital PR, culture change in large business, robo-advice, pension and investment fund advisory services, alternative investments, branding and design ,hospitailty, food, health care, fashion, customer insight, new media, legal services, property, and primary and secondary education.

I've worked with them in groups and one to one and it has been the most rewarding period of my career. In the next few weeks I will use this website to showcase their stories.

They and I are moving on. Most of us have become close friends but to grow their businesses they don't need me any more and I've finally been tempted back into making a major play in the the FinTech scene.

I suppose it's natural given Firstdirect and Egg that I should have been offered many opportunities in FinTech and I've been happy to take some FinTech companies onto the mentoring programme but I've not been tempted to invest time and money in a FinTech play of my own. I hadn't until recently seen enough opportunity for a major Game Changing play.

Now I have and I am in action on turning that opportunity into a reality and I'm throwing the whole weight of IconicShift behind it. All of the intellectual property I have incorporated in it over the last 30 years and all of the skill in delivering it and using it as a coaching framework that I and the team that supports me have developed over the last 5 years - all now dedicated to this major FinTech play.

I have enhanced IconicShift with insights from Nicholas Taleb's work on antifragility and Black Swans and insights from traditional financial wisdom that have survived intact for centuries but can be lost in our rush to new technological solutions.

There was already a large degree of alignment between these three bodies of work and synthesising them has given me and my newly expanded team a solution to an enduring problem in FInancial Services - banks can either be robust or can grow and support growth in the societies they operate in. It seems we can't have both - high growth leads inevitably to economic crisis whereas high robustness as we have now means sluggish economic growth .

New improved IconicShift offers a solution which we are calling Sustainable Finance or SusFIn for short. SusFin offers the ability to move towards growth and robustness at the same time and thus a more sustainable global economic system.

Watch this space.