On a sunny afternoon in Portugal in June 2012, Antony Jenkins was preparing himself for bad news. From Barclays’ offices in Lisbon, where he had flown for a meeting, the then retail banking boss was waiting for regulators to announce that Barclays would be fined £290m for manipulating the Libor interest rate, in what was becoming one of the largest banking scandals of the decade.
Turning to one of the compliance officers, Jenkins asked for the harsh truth: how bad would the Libor scandal be for Barclays? “I remember looking out of the office and having this conversation, and I could feel my heart sinking,” he tells the Observer.
In an attempt to quell public anger, the Barclays board moved swiftly, sacking chief executive Bob Diamond within days and appointing a successor untainted by the vilified image of risky investment banking. Jenkins, who came from the safer retail side of the business, was installed in August and charged with repairing the bank’s reputation, which was in tatters not only due to the Libor controversy, but the payment protection insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal. Lingering resentment over the 2008 financial crisis only compounded matters.
“We literally had our staff being assaulted in the street, we had people being assaulted at charity dinners. We were in a bad place. And we had to do a lot to re-establish the reputation of the company,” Jenkins says. With morale at an all-time low, he did his best to raise staff spirits.
“I had been literally going through Canary Wharf, floor by floor, taking a chair and standing on it and just talking to people and saying: ‘Look, I know this feels horrible. I know the way we’ve being characterised is very negative in the media. But we know that the soul of this company has the right intentions … we will come out of this stronger’,” he says.
Those sermons, alongside his attempts to bring restraint back into the banking sector – waiving millions of pounds of his own bonuses in the process – would help earn him the nickname “Saint Antony”. But Jenkins’s dreams of restoring the bank’s fortunes within his term were dashed in 2015, when he was effectively fired by the board, who were unhappy with the pace of change and his plans to slash the size of Barclays’ investment bank.
The Oxford-educated banker bounced back quickly, though, and within a year had used £1m of his own cash to launch the banking tech company 10x Future Technologies, (now known as 10x Banking) which now counts some of the world’s largest banks, including JP Morgan, among its clients, and investors such as BlackRock and Canada’s largest pension fund, CPP Investments, among its backers.
But nearly seven years later, as he sits in 10x’s conference room near Westminster in London, it is clear the pain is still raw. Jenkins has rarely spoken about his departure from Barclays and makes it clear that he does not want to go into detail in his first newspaper profile since he left. He does, however, want to make one point clear: “For me, at least, my departure from Barclays was very unexpected. The conditions of it were surprising to me because everything we were executing was pretty much going to plan, and that was difficult to deal with.”
Jenkins admits that moving forward was not easy. “It takes a lot of energy and I had a lot of support from people. Interestingly, when you go through something like that, people can be absolutely wonderful and many were. And some people just drop you entirely.” But when asked whether he would change his strategy in hindsight, he is unwavering: “Absolutely not. I would have to make a choice between compromising what I believed was right for the company, and I wasn’t prepared to do that.”
That resilience and steadfastness is easily traced back to Jenkins’s childhood. He grew up in the north-west of England in the 1960s, moving from Blackburn to Manchester and then Nantwich. Ill and missing school due to bronchitis from a young age, he quickly fell behind on his education and was forced to catch up. “I remember being seven and not being able to write my name, which was quite a salutary experience for me.” At home, he would end up listening to hours of programming on BBC Radio 4’s predecessor, the Home Service, which sparked a lifelong love affair with finance and the private sector. “That really sort of piqued my interest in current affairs and business, and I always used to listen to the business news as a child.”
CV
Age 60
Family Married with two adult children, four grandchildren and two dogs.
Education Nantwich Grammar school (now Malbank school); politics, philosophy and economics at University College, Oxford; MBA at Cranfield.
Pay Not disclosed. However, his stake in 10x is believed to be worth more than £200m.
Last holiday Long weekend in Barcelona in October 2021.
Best advice he’s been given “Be true to yourself.”
Biggest career mistake Not being able to persuade the board of Citi to make an acquisition in the payments sector.
Word he overuses “Awesome.”
How he relaxes Running, listening to music and “spending time with my ever-expanding family”.
He says his father’s career as a production manager at a pottery factory also contributed to his burgeoning interest in business. “It was quite fascinating to watch a piece of clay be turned into something physical. And that really got me interested in how things work, and also how to make things work better.”
Despite his early educational setbacks, he became the first in his family to go to university, studying at Oxford – a feat he credits in part to free tuition policies. “I’ve been enormously privileged, and a real [beneficiary] of social mobility in a way that I think is less available to people today.” After Oxford, he became a graduate trainee at a South Kensington branch of Barclays in 1983, and after 17 years at Citigroup – including in New York – rejoined Barclays in 2006.
With the drama of Barclays behind him, Jenkins has built 10x from the ground up to a company worth an estimated £600m after an £187m funding round this summer. The cash injection will help scale up the business, secure more clients in Europe and Asia, and propel its push into the US, where banks’ aging IT systems will probably need to be replaced over the next decade – marking a major opportunity for the cloud-based tech firm.
“Half the time, I genuinely can’t believe that I’ve done all the things that I’ve done. And I think back my early childhood, when I really struggled even just to read and write,” he says. He says he is the first to admit he had help, but still takes credit for his motivation and drive – characteristics he says he now recruits for “over raw talent.”
“But I have to feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to do the things that I’ve done. They’re intellectually fascinating. They’re very challenging. You learn a lot, you get to work with great people, and hopefully make a difference.”