Antony Jenkins ran one of the world’s biggest banks. He knows how to solve those legacy tech nightmares (and launched a start-up to prove it)

“Putting the customer at the heart of everything we do” is the boilerplate response of choice for new chief executives.

Antony Jenkins said almost precisely those words when he became the CEO of Barclays in 2012, just four years after the financial crisis blew a hole in the global economy.

Saying something and doing something are very different.

Few businesses die through the lack of good ideas.

They fail through the lack of execution.

And that is often down to technology.

Jenkins had a 30-year career in what might now be described as “legacy banking.” He left Barclays in 2015.

And if he had learned one thing, it is that there was a major problem lurking at the heart of nearly all large-scale, long-history businesses.

It is the “spaghetti systems” issue—computer refits and technological upgrades that have been built haphazardly over time, one on top of the other.

“Much of it had been created in the 70s and 80s,” Jenkins told me of the computer systems that underpinned much of banking then.

“Some of it even went back to the 60s.

“I was worried that as technology made lots of things possible, we as incumbents would fall further and further behind.

And you could see that manifest itself as banks responded firstly to having to deliver services over the internet and then over mobile—which they did, but they did it in a very expensive, slow, and costly way.

And I lived through all of those experiences in my first career in the banking industry.