Simon Rogerson, co-founder and chief executive officer at Octopus Group, talks to Jayna Rana about the three ingredients needed to earn a customer's trust, how smaller companies are in most demand and why he is supporting his staff to start up their own businesses.
He adds: "The technical rules have changed over the years but government support for smaller companies, entrepreneurship and job creation has not and that has been a cross-party thing.
"In terms of framework and the environment for little companies to grow quickly that has been created, the government has done something exceptional. The AIM market is the most successful growth stockmarket in the world behind the Nasdaq."
Other industry-wide developments the group has noted and focused on include the onus on greater financial education and better diversity.
Octopus Giving, the group's foundation that was formed in 2014, has raised money for a number of charities, one of them being MyBank, which aims to encourage financial literacy in schools.
Meanwhile, the firm publishes an annual gender pay gap report showing its ongoing commitment towards diversity and equality.
The 2017 report showed the median gender pay gap to be 40%, which it attributed to the uneven distribution of women across each quartile of the business.
"Put simply, we want more women in senior and more highly-paid positions," says Rogerson.
In response, Octopus has been implementing several things to encourage this including holding unconscious bias training, incorporating gender analysis tools into its pay process and encouraging more staff to join its diversity initiative.
"We do not set quotas nor do we aim to tick any boxes but we know that diversity makes us stronger," Rogerson adds. "Closing the gender pay gap is important to us. And having a range of talent from across the globe is important to us.
"We have 850 people across the group and many of those are EU nationals. I do not know what will happen with the Brexit deal but we must be able to compete and that means having the best talent, which is desperately needed by ventures businesses, and which is not always found in the UK.
"If the outcome means it is harder to retain that talent, that will be a problem, especially for UK start-ups, and a backward step given everything the government has done so far to support the sector."
