Jackie Leiper has flown down from Edinburgh on the morning we meet at Embark’s offices on Cannon Street.
This is not unusual for the firm’s chief executive, who tries to visit London about once a week. But I feel my half an hour on the Tube from Putney rather pales in comparison.
“It’s fine, as long as the flights are on time,” she says, light-heartedly.
As is the case for many people in financial services, Leiper did not plan on a career in the sector.
We get advisers to feed back regularly on what they’d like us to develop
“I’m helping my daughter with her future career; she’s just graduated from uni. She asked me: ‘Why did you pick what you’re doing?’ I said: ‘It was a sort of opportunistic thing.’”
Leiper worked for Scottish Amicable in the summer of 1989, just before she was due to go to university. The experience made her rethink her plan for higher education.
“I joined the pensions team. It was a great place to work,” she says.
“At that time, Scottish Amicable used to recruit about 200 young people annually as part of what we would recognise as a modern apprenticeship. I ended up on that with all these other people my age. And that’s how I got into financial services.”
Subsequently, Scottish Amicable was acquired by Prudential in 1997.
A huge part of Leiper’s career has been in customer service. She started out answering the phone — dealing with enquiries and complaints. As she gained experience, she began training colleagues.
We were determined to have a silent migration, where nobody’s even noticed you’ve done it
Before she left what was now Prudential, Leiper had worked her way up to run the firm’s entire contact centre, managing 2,000 people across four sites.
“It’s that whole part of my background that is quite important to how I run the business today,” she says.
“Growing up at the sharp end of customer enquiries, across all the products that Scottish Amicable Prudential had at that time, was massively helpful in terms of building up knowledge on the product side, but also on customer behaviour and what one should do to be great at customer experience.”
Time for a change
In 2010, Leiper joined Lloyds Banking Group as head of operations. She then decided to switch to the distribution side as head of employer relationships for Scottish Widows, which had become part of Lloyds in 2000.
“That was quite a big change, coming out of operations and customer service,” she remembers. “But by that point I’d probably done all the senior roles one could do.
“I wasn’t unhappy there but I wanted to do something a bit different.”
At the time of her move, the sector was going through the shift to automatic enrolment.
Getting everyone on one platform really allows us to start developing new propositions
“Having someone with a customer service and operational understanding of processes was a good thing for the distribution teams, which were out managing clients, advisers and so on,” she says.
“I was managing the workplace pensions distribution team, but that role expanded to look after our business development team for all the products that Scottish Widows sold.”
A proud moment
Leiper found the auto-enrolment process both demanding and rewarding.
“It was massively challenging,” she says. “It was challenging for us as a business, challenging for the whole industry.
“We came out of it pretty much number one in the market, which felt like a bit of a pipe dream.
You look at what things might go wrong. How will we deal with that? What’s our contingency?
“That was a really proud moment for me. I remember when the market-share figures came out — because I get quite obsessed about market-share figures — I was like: ‘We’ve done it.’
“But it was a long journey. It wasn’t an overnight thing.”
Following her success in leading the firm’s auto-enrolment switch, Leiper was given new responsibilities, running the profit and loss for workplace pensions.
“Then, in the past three years, I’ve been adding the individual businesses to my portfolio of responsibility; so, individual pensions, the Halifax share-dealing business and Embark.”
Lloyds acquired the Embark retirement savings platform for £390m in February 2022, having announced the deal the previous July. Lloyds said at the time that the acquisition would enable Scottish Widows to “enhance” its long-term savings proposition for advisers.
We realised, if we were going to launch new propositions, we would have to make sure there were enough people to support them
“The business has an ambition to do what we’ve always done in workplace, but across the individual side,” explains Leiper.
She continues: “If you think about the heritage of our business — Scottish Widows and also being part of Lloyds Banking Group — it’s quite a unique situation.”
New challenges
Scottish Widows was founded in 1815 and Lloyds Bank is even older, first established in 1765, although the wider group’s heritage extends over 320 years. It dates from the founding of the Bank of Scotland by the Parliament of Scotland in 1695.
“We’re still the only financial services company in the UK where there are both of those types of firm [life insurance and banking] under one parent group,” says Leiper.
We did a lot of preparation; a lot of dress-rehearsal events, where you simulate the whole thing
“We wanted to get into the investment platform market. We were quite late into it and we recognised that.”
So Lloyds undertook a big exercise to work out how it would do this.
“We said, ‘If that’s our ambition, we’ll need to get a platform. Do we build from scratch? Do we partner with somebody? Do we actually acquire a business?’
“That was the process we went through, to evaluate each of those three things. They all came with different price tags, different risks, different challenges.”
She elaborates: “We ruled out the build from scratch as it just takes too long. We didn’t have any of the skills and expertise in house and, even if you hire in, that’s quite a long, challenging journey.
It was quite a big change, coming out of operations and customer service
“So we were thinking, ‘Should we partner with somebody? Should we buy?’ They had different pros and cons. Embark was one of the firms we were speaking to that offered the partner option at that time.”
But Lloyds thought it would be better to buy the business outright.
“That way we would have full control of that business, and we would therefore not be competing with other white-label partners. We would be the owner and be able to drive that business.”
The platform was Lloyds’ main target, to help it enter that market and grow its market share, particularly on the intermediary side.
“But there’s a whole lot more to that business,” says Leiper. “It has given us access to parts of the market that we just didn’t have access to.”
We had planned on four times our normal call traffic and how we would resource for that
Since the acquisition, the size of the team has more than doubled.
“I’ve got about 200 people in Dundee. It’s quite a big team. And a big part of that is recognising the growth ambition we’ve got.
“We have been launching some new propositions. We launched the direct-to-consumer [D2C] one for the bank, which was the ready-made investments proposition.
“Also, we are onboarding a lot of new advisers. We realised, if we were going to [launch new propositions], we would have to make sure there were enough people to support them.”
As well as being CEO of Embark, Leiper is Lloyds’ managing director of pensions and stockbroking, and distribution director. She says running these businesses in parallel, although a lot of work, has been hugely helpful.
The business has an ambition to do what we’ve always done in workplace, but across the individual side
“It’s been quite interesting. We are moving away from traditional boundaries to really think about how you run the business in the best way possible.”
Responding to criticism
In April last year, a few months after Lloyds’ purchase of Embark had completed, Money Marketing reported that advisers had been moving millions of pounds off the platform because of increasingly poor service and “misleading” communication to clients. Since then, Embark has undertaken a huge project to transfer everything onto one platform.
Earlier this year, the business announced that Advance — Embark’s adviser platform — would rebrand as Scottish Widows Platform. It emphasised that the rebrand was a change of trading name and branding only, with the platform provider, Embark Investment Services Limited, remaining.
“Our main thing has been getting everything onto one platform,” says Leiper. “We’ve just completed the advisory element, which was a fairly major project. It has all gone amazingly, as much as these things can. We were determined to have a silent migration, where nobody’s even noticed you’ve done it.”
In fact, she says, advisers and customers have seen many improvements. But it took a great deal of meticulous planning.
We would not be competing with other white-label partners. We would be the owner and be able to drive the business
“We did a lot of preparation; a lot of dress-rehearsal events, where you simulate the whole thing.
“The other thing we did was what I would call a playback. This is where my operational experience comes to the fore. You look at what things might go wrong. How will we deal with that? What’s our contingency?
“For example, one of the things we had planned was if we saw a surge in call demand, because you’ve got advisers on a platform that looks different. We did a whole lot of training and communication. There are inevitably going to be people who just can’t do what they’re trying to do. We had planned on four times our normal call traffic and how we would resource for that.”
Embark has about 400 advisers who are regular active users. So what now?
“Getting everyone on one platform really allows us to start developing new propositions,” says Leiper.
Growing up at the sharp end of customer enquiries, across all the products that Scottish Amicable Prudential had at that time, was massively helpful
The platform will launch a set of investment propositions in the early part of next year, including the addition of model portfolios. It will also add the Scottish Widows insured pension portfolios and make them available to advisers.
“Some [enhancements] are quite small because we’re running a process with advisers where we get them to feed back regularly on what they’d like to see us develop. We then carry out a rapid release on a continuous improvement basis. Hopefully, advisers will see changes happen quickly.”
D2C launches
Embark is launching some D2C products in addition to its existing ready-made investments, such as a ready-made pension.
“We’re also rejigging and redesigning our share-dealing offering to create a more modern, digital journey, and also the self-invested part of that journey,” says Leiper.
In May, LV= launched an investment platform with Embark as part of its plan to “broaden access” to its range of smoothed managed fund investments.
The options came with different price tags, different risks, different challenges
“The white-label proposition is something that came with Embark and we see a huge opportunity to develop that further,” says Leiper.
As well as LV=, Embark has white-label partnerships with several D2C platforms, including NatWest, Nutmeg and Tilney BestInvest. And Leiper hints at some white-label tie-ups with advice firms, which are in the pipeline.
“Growing and maturing the business is a big part of the plan for next year.”
Snapshot
2022: CEO, Embark.
2010: Joined Scottish Widows in operations and held various roles. Moved to distribution in 2014. Promoted to distribution director in 2018 and joined Scottish Widows executive team.
1989: Joined Scottish Amicable from school as summer student. Stayed on in a ‘modern apprenticeship’, working in various roles in customer service. Through the acquisition by Prudential, ended up head of contact centres for all of Pru.
Family: Married, three children, two grandchildren. Big extended family.
Hobbies: Reading. Visiting new restaurants or experimenting with food.
Best book: Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt.
Favourite film: Home Alone — “a tradition every Christmas Eve in the Leiper household with a bottle of fizz and PJs on….”
Desert island meal: Shellfish
This article featured in the Dec 2023/Jan 2024 edition of MM.
If you would like to subscribe to the monthly magazine, please click here.
P.S. Pedant – should have been ‘was amongst’ not ‘were’ ..apologies.