When he isn’t in his South Bank office with its views of the City across the River Thames, Gavin Michael can often be found on a plane between London and Sydney.
It’s a commute that puts three hours on the M25 well into context. But home is where the heart is, and the genial Australian who is CIO at the UK’s Retail Banking and General Insurance arm of Lloyds TSB, would never see his wife Susan if they weren’t prepared to take it in turns to clock up the air miles.
He wears the mileage lightly, despite a long, lean frame that surely makes extra legroom a necessity. “We will be moving here soon but at the moment it’s the only way,” he says.
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“We have our own VoIP server at home. I’m passionate about the technology, of course. But for Susan, it’s just a way she can call me for free and know that the phone bill won’t hurt. As an Australian, you get so used to having to travel long distances anyway. Fortunately I can sleep easily on the plane, and I’ve just got into a routine over the last two years.”
Michael’s arrival at Lloyds TSB in -October 2006 – initially as CTO – was a kind of homecoming. He was born in London to Australian parents in 1965. So when the call came that persuaded him to leave his job as general manager for strategy and architecture at National Australia Bank and start those regular 13,500-mile commutes, it wasn’t a complete leap into the unknown, and realised Michael’s ambition to develop his career with one of the City of London’s biggest concerns.
“I had a real desire to work in the financial services capital of the world,” he says. “Lloyds TSB is the number one current account-holding bank on the high street. We have 16 million customers and there are only 21 million people in Australia. Put in that context, the scale on which we operate fascinates me. And it was always about wanting to work with the biggest.
“I don’t think there’s that huge a difference between the adoption rates of technology in the two markets. When I look back at the issues and problems, there are a lot of similarities. Things are more aggressive here, which is more about market forces and customer demand; the consumer infrastructure, broadband and high bandwidth speeds, is more developed although Australia is catching up. With a large population, things can move faster.”
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