Memorable piece of advice'Dictum meum pactum' – ‘My word is my bond’. That was the motto on a business card that a broker drew Kevin’s attention to during a lunch at the end of his first week at the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The broker told him that if he took nothing else away from the lunch, he should remember that motto. Kevin recalls: “He said: ‘If you always try to live up to that you’ll have a long and successful career in financial markets. If you don’t, you’ll have a spectacularly successful one, but it’ll be quite short!’”
Big break
After early jobs in the financial technology sector, Kevin joined the LSE in time for the Big Bang in 1986. He was part of the services marketing team, whose role was essentially “to make sure that, when they flicked the switch, everything worked!”
String of successes
After five enjoyable years, Kevin decided to move to a more commercial environment. So he joined Extel to help run its financial systems business and prepare it for sale – a task he achieved after restructuring the company. A series of successful posts followed before his world came full circle in 2010, when he was invited to rejoin the LSE. He worked on the executive committee, running post-trade businesses in the UK and Italy until June 2012.
Valid reason
In the wake of the financial crisis, Kevin was encouraged to see the concepts of decency and integrity returning to the markets. That was one of the attractions of working with Rate Validation Services (RVS), a small Australian-based company with a smart system that enabled benchmarks to be automatically created and validated using trade information. He joined the board to help the business to focus on London. RVS’s new LIBOR administrator service, provided to the Intercontinental Exchange, went live on 1 February this year and Kevin stepped down as Chief Executive a month later, as planned.
Family man
Since then, he has been enjoying a rare opportunity to spend time with his family while he decides on his next move. In the meantime, there is his advisory work for large private equity firms, which he has run for the past ten years as Due Diligence Reports. Whatever he decides to do next, you can be sure it won’t be dull.
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This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in the June 2014 print edition of the Review.