5 Minutes with...

Going beyond the business to get to know Lesley Smith, recent Vice President Corporate Communications & Public Affairs at Revolut

With a career spanning politics, railways, retail, education, telecommunications and fintech, Lesley Smith has a wealth of experience breaking down complex topics and distilling the essence of the candidate, product or service she’s pitching. Below, she shares some thoughts and perspectives on her career.

Name: Lesley Smith

Title: recent Vice President Corporate Communications & Public Affairs

Organization: Revolut

Location: UK

Lesley Smith has been a senior director in corporate affairs and public policy in retail, e-commerce, technology, telecoms, transport, fintech and education for more than 25 years. For the last two years she was VP Corporate Affairs at Revolut before which she led Amazon’s UK Public Policy function and government relations. She has previously led group communications and corporate affairs functions at Cable & Wireless, Dixons Group plc, Railtrack, TSL Education, and Ark Schools and has been a consultant with Burson-Marstellar looking after clients including BT and leading FTSE companies. She started her career in politics working for Labour leaders Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair including Blair’s successful election campaigns in 1997 and 2001. She has an MBA from MIT.

On career consistency

The thing I’ve discovered is that I really like complexity. If I look at all my roles together, the overarching theme is a love of understanding new things. I love the job of being in the middle and having to translate complex ideas. I’ve spent most of my career saying to people, ‘explain that to me as if I was your mother.’

If we don’t translate ideas into a language our audience understands, it’s going to be a mess. And that applies whether you’re explaining broadband to journalists in the early 2000’s or walking through your profit and loss or justifying why you’re buying this company or selling that company or convincing your shareholders to agree with a decision. And just saying ‘this is strategically important’ or ‘there will be synergies’ isn’t going to cut it because it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. I suppose what I’ve learned is that I like simplification.

On the importance of a good CEO/CFO relationship

In every commercial job I’ve ever done, one of the most important relationships, if not the most important relationship, is the one I’ve had with the CEO and CFO. They’re your allies. And when you take a job, you know, those are the two people that matter. And actually, the chemistry between them matters as well. I had a job where it became fairly obvious that the CFO didn’t trust the CEO and it was like rival fiefdoms. If they aren’t absolutely in lockstep with you, with each other - that really matters to how the company is perceived and how the company works.

On a memorable career moment

I was working for ScotRail, which was then part of the British Rail infrastructure, and the rule was you really weren’t allowed to be more successful than InterCity because that was the flagship of the network - although at the time it was hugely subsidized and probably underperforming. ScotRail was doing well, so I rang up the head office and asked if I could put something out about our performance. And they said ‘No, because you’re better [performance-wise] than InterCity, so you can’t touch it.’

I thought, well, that’s not good at all. At the time we had commissioned a private submission to government that wasn’t meant to see the light of day but I allowed it to find its way to the Daily Telegraph. I knew that it wasn’t newsworthy enough if I press-released it but if given as an exclusive, it would hit the front of the business section – and it did. We got what we wanted, which was more attention and more money, and I got hauled into the Director General of British Rail. He said, ‘I have two options - I can fire you or I can promote you, and I’m very tempted to fire you, but instead I’m going to offer you a better but terrible job.” I took the promotion to Corporate Affairs Director for Railtrack.

On the growth of Fintech

A few years ago, I went to a fintech company, [Revolut]. Fintech is an industry that is massively reconstructing itself and about which I knew nothing about. But at the same time, it’s replicating the reinvention that has happened in other industries which is, you know, you can do a lot better job for less money by using technology. And that’s what’s happening in fintech. I’ve always taken jobs because I can learn from them, learn a new skill set. Fintech fits that desire perfectly and, in a way, takes me back to my earlier days in politics and retail where you have to spend a lot of time thinking hard about how deliverable your promises are and thinking who the customer is and what you are selling.

On a career high

You have tough moments in your career but then you have the good bits. For me, it was winning the [Tony Blair] election in ’97. It was an extraordinary experience being on that campaign, being at election night in Sedgefield with 200 journalists.

On current reads and podcasts

I am currently reading a very good book called, Freezing Order by Bill Browder about his experience exposing corruption in Russia. He was deported from Russia but his lawyer Sergei Magitsky stayed to try to expose corruption and was imprisoned and murdered. Browder is based in the UK and continues to campaign against Russian corruption. His lobbying persuaded the US Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act to punish Russian human rights crimes in 2012. I also recently read the astonishing Jonathan Freedland book, The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World. I think you could probably cut it by a third but it’s a brilliant book.

For podcasts, I’ve been listening to The Rest is Politics, it’s two British politicians - former Tory minister, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, my former colleague at the Labour Party. And then, The Rest is History, with historians, Tom Hollander and Dominic Sandbrook. They’re very clever and fascinating and they tackle a period in history with each episode. Recently they did the rise of the Nazis which tied into my reading of Jonathan Freedland’s book at the moment.

On her one piece of advice

Don’t put off the difficult stuff. You will always have lots of ‘urgent’ things, but you have to tackle the big stuff. I think that gets harder and harder to do because you’ve always got a fire right in front of you but sometimes it’s the one that’s smoldering quietly off to the side that is going to do the most damage.

Don’t put off the difficult stuff. You will always have lots of ‘urgent’ things, but you have to tackle the big stuff.

And I’d add to that – understand your business. You can’t be an enthusiast or an advocate without understanding – in my case working for ScotRail, for example – who puts the oil in the engines and how it works. I can still to this day tell you how many miles of track there are in the UK!