Interview with John Wallace

John Wallace was born in 1935 in a village approximately six miles from Carlisle. His father, Joseph having served in the Border Regiment during the latter part of World War 1 worked at the local grocer’s shop. He was married to Margaret the daughter of a Methodist minister and they had four children – two girls and a two boys. The family was not especially well off but they believed very strongly in education and put all of their children through grammar school. John says of his childhood: “with my father being a grocer and living in the country we never really struggled for food during rationing that continued during the post war years until 1954. We had our own home, a nice four-bedroom house with about an acre of land and a big orchard. I’m not sure how they got that place with the wages Dad earned. I’ve got an apple tree at my current home but I hate picking fruit as it reminds me of the hours I lost for soccer or other sports to reap our own harvest.”

John attended Warwick Bridge primary school about one and a half miles from his home, which he often walked. Having passed his eleven plus, he, like his brother and sisters, went to grammar school. Unlike his siblings he had a co-ed education at the White House School in Brampton but says that was not fully responsible for his pretty miserable O level results as he describes them. At the first opportunity he decided to leave school and seek a position where he could earn some money of his own.

After leaving school, John found a job with National Provincial Bank. “I wasn’t particularly interested in banking as a career but they had a vacancy at 92 English Street, Carlisle so that’s where I started.”

Asked what his role involved, he says: “Everything – I was the office junior so whilst I learned basic clerical roles, hand posting customer ledgers, typing statements and balancing the remittances I also needed to change the calendar and the blotting paper and fill the ink wells even stoke the boiler in winter.

The Carlisle branch was very much a taker-in of cash. Large retailers like Woolworths banked there and we had 5 cinemas banking with us so we always had more cash than we needed.   We had to wrap up high value packages (HVP’s of circa £5,000 each) to get rid of the excess to London and walk it round to the post office, two of us with a whistle and a truncheon. After a short while I was entrusted with counter duties.”

At the age of eighteen, John was called up for his 2 years of National Service which he did in the Royal Air Force. He did his basic training at Padgate near Warrington then trained as an air wireless mechanic at Yatesbury in Wiltshire near Stonehenge where he got his “sparks” for being qualified to service, repair or replace the radios that were fitted in the fighter and bomber aircraft at that time. John was given the opportunity of an overseas posting and went to Tengah in Singapore that had Avro-Lincoln and Lancaster bombers and deHavilland jet fighters guarding against the terrorist activities mainly in the Malayan jungle to the North. “It was a great place to spend the majority of my National Service and I sometimes wonder if the air radio experience had any bearing on me getting into computers in later life.”

Having completed his National Service, John returned to NP in Carlisle. It was during an inspection of this branch by Reg. Nicolls that paved the way for a move to a larger branch for broader experience and career progression and it turned out to be Stockton-on-Tees. I was only there a short while when I was asked to attend a Bank training course that had been recommended by Reg. This led to me being selected for the Manager’s clerk position at Stockton to William Miles Truelove, quite a formidable character. He offered John strong advice of never specializing but keep moving around the different roles and branches. He said “You go from here to one of our biggest branches, then inspection department, then advances department which was the central lending place and you go ‘on the road’ and your career will be made.

Asked if he enjoyed it, he says the early days were quite tough, adding:”Quite honestly if I hadn’t come into computing I think I’d have left banking. An awful lot of it was boring stuff. As you got higher up it became more interesting but wasn’t terribly exciting and the pay was terrible.”

In 1960 less than 2 years at Stockton John was called up to London and interviewed for a position in Automation Research, part of Inspection Department, that Ralph Hopps was setting up to research and establish computers in the Bank. John was planning to marry Elizabeth within a year and the Bank promised he would be offered Bank accommodation and a return to branch banking in 2 years time if that’s what he wanted – it never happened. So much for Truelove’s advice but he was on holiday when that decision was made.

Ralph now had a team of six, two guys with large accounting machine experience, then Derek, Byron, Dave and John  who were all bank clerks working in NP branches. Ferranti was one of the few computer companies operating in the UK and we accepted their offer to develop a branch bookkeeping experiment on their Pegasus 1 computer in Portland Place – Southgate branch was used and whilst limited in functionality, it was sufficient to persuade NP to place an order. NP ordered the Ferranti Orion one of the most advanced machines of its time with multi-processing – probably the first ever to be used commercially.

The first thing that John did in the department was to complete a Pegasus programming course. Delivery of Orion was delayed so they took a Pegasus 2 computer into Basinghall Street premises to which we converted five branches and gained invaluable experience. The first, New Bridge Street was the first branch of a UK Bank to be dependent on computer accounting. It was followed by Strand, Lincolns Inn, Southwark and Park Lane. Orion was delayed but worked extremely well when it eventually arrived and over 50 branches were taken on. Because Ferranti only had a limited range of computers the bank needed to move to IBM for cheque reader/sorters 1419’s and 1401’s. These were followed by four of the earliest IBM 360’s. John says “We put two into London and built a computer centre in Birmingham and another in Bradford and attached the local branches there.

We were going along that path when a wave of bank takeovers and mergers was announced in the late 1960’s and NatWest was formed by the merger on NP and Westminster in 1968 making it the UK’s biggest bank. Tom McMillan headed Management Services which included IT. We had less than 3 years to merge the various computer systems and convert to decimal currency on 15^th February 1971 so getting IT ‘sorted’ was highest priority. John was given Systems Development responsibility in the new IT Department and is proud to say “everything went smoothly on D-Day thanks to all of the hard work and preparation that went before”

In 1977 John was invited to join Eurocom that Tom McMillan had set up on a 50/50 basis with US Datacorp owned by an Oregon based bank in the USA. However the US Bank was forced by new regulation to leave the partnership and it became a wholly owned NatWest subsidiary. John became Managing Director with operations in UK, Sweden, and Denmark, Finland and Germany and plans to move in to other countries. The main service was to take computer output on magnetic tape from a variety of customers and convert it to microfilm or microfiche rather than printing paper (COM – Computer Output on Microfilm).  There was a strong economic case for this service and large users would install their own COM equipment and others would bring their output to one of Eurocom’s centres.

John says “It was a very interesting life, it was the first time I’d had anything to do with an international operation that was doing well in Scandinavia, OK but could be doing better in the UK and hemorrhaging cash in Germany.

As Geschaftsfurer of the German company based in Dusseldorf and Frankfurt I had to fire Rainer, the impeccably dressed manager who always talked a convincing story but never delivered the results.  Finding his successor in the German market was no mean feat.”

In 1981 John reluctantly left Eurocom because there was still much to do. “I had been selected to succeed Terry Smith who was sadly killed in a car crash in France as Managing Director of Centrefile, another Natwest subsidiary. It was a computer service bureau based on mainframe computers with minis and PC’s just beginning to emerge.”

John says “the company sold a range of services and built bespoke systems for large organizations. It was leading provider of payroll service in the UK with Woolworths being one of the biggest customers getting their pay-slips delivered by Centrefile each week. It provided settlement and accounting services for all of the top stockbrokers pre ‘big bang’, accounting services for many building societies and law firms.”  It was great experience for John to have such interesting and demanding customers. It was based in Leman Street in London with a further operation in Trafford Park, Manchester.

Having already completed an executive education program at the London Business School, after 3 years with Centrefile John was offered the opportunity to join another senior executive program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston USA. “A 3 months course, it had a truly international make-up with 45 participants from a variety of organizations. I gained so much business experience from it. Some of the brightest guys on the course were the military people at a very senior level – Brigadier General for example. Our course was unique in that it has convened regular get together’s with members and their spouses. Apart from USA we’ve met in Germany, South Africa, Iceland, Alaska, Singapore, UK and more. It made a lasting impression on me and its great to have so many friends around the world.

When I returned to Centrefile everything was still very much controlled by mainframes but minis and personal computers were being used increasingly in our services. During my time there we provided more and more to the Bank itself on minis from Digital Equipment and Personal Computers mainly from IBM.” Talking about NatWest’s progress with the use of technology, John says: “Natwest was the only bank that had a computer service company; In my time in Centrefile we started doing more and more for the bank itself because we had the expertise in minicomputers and pc’s. We were advanced on online systems. For example, Pisces the system Centrefile set up for petrol retailers forms the basis of the debit card that is now so commonly used right across the banking industry.”

In 1986 John returned to NatWest as General Manager of Group IT. He also retained responsibility for Centrefile bringing in a managing director who reported to him. Bert Morris was the Chief Executive of Group Services, the part of the bank where Group IT sat together with other support functions. John got NatWest Board approval for how IT would be organized in the Group and a major move was to establish a professional purchasing unit to handle all negotiations with IT suppliers. Steve Mullins and Mike Whitby, purchasing professionals were recruited and built their team with the proper skills to do the work previously done by technicians. “We were the first UK Bank to have such a function and our suppliers were in for a few surprises – it wasn’t all about saving money but that helped and we also got improved contractual terms.”

John explains what was involved: “I was responsible across the whole of the Natwest group for IT. I had specific responsibility for developing and maintaining systems in the UK Bank and ensuring IT developments were all co-ordinated and kept in line across the whole of the group. If the USA wanted to make an IT investment, hardware, software or new system they needed my approval before the finance was sanctioned. It worked pretty well avoiding incompatibity issues at a later stage and ensuring we got best terms from suppliers. It was a pretty big job. I had 4,000 staff, mainly development and operational plus Centrefile and a small unit looking after the co-ordination of systems across the world. My annual revenue expense at that time was in excess of £400 millions – not a small amount.”

“NatWest was the only Bank that held all of its customer information in one place on a relational database – IBM’s DB2 – the biggest IBM had installed anywhere. It gave the Bank a complete picture of its relationship with each customer for the first time – bank accounts, savings, mortgage, loans etc. We were ahead of our time in that respect but I don’t think we trained our customer facing staff in how to get the most out of it. That was really down to the business and there was always this problem between IT and the users”. Bridging the gap between business and IT was always a challenge”

To try to close the gap between IT and the business, John says: “One of the things I did as General Manager of IT was pushing all of the responsibility for getting financial approval and so on to the business units. Each unit was given its own account manager, so I put some of my people out in branches to try and bridge this gap. It seemed to work and there was much more responsibility for IT pushed over to the business.  Before I got there it was almost a data processing set-up, where the users used to come up to IT and say, I want this and they’d be told you can’t have it, we don’t have spare resources; turning business away.  So, we changed all that and I enjoyed it. I was the general manager for nearly eight years.”

“The relationship with suppliers changed with Purchasing Department handling all of our formal dealings, saving us millions. We were the first large bank to acquire non IBM mainframes – Amdahl and Hitachi and that was when Sir Edwin Nixon the IBM UK chairman was on the NatWest Board. We hosted an annual supplier’s golf day at Hadley Wood golf club playing for the Morris Wallace Trophy. We matched two players from directly competing suppliers with a Bank player to maintain good order. It was a very popular gathering. We also had a Christmas party for suppliers that Bert hosted and in wishing them a happy festive occasion did warn that he was expecting our Purchasing Department to perform even better in the forthcoming year.”

Asked about whether IT was respected by business, John adds: “I think they were always respected. We had some of the biggest online systems anywhere and the reliability was phenomenal.  The discipline when things went wrong was extremely well worked out.  In NatWest we didn’t have any major outages of service until RBS took us over.  RBS took a lot of the NatWest technology out, for political reasons; they said theirs was much cheaper, but it fell over.”

John left NatWest in 1994. After leaving he took on a number of non-exec positions including chairman of Symtec Solutions which John says “worked largely with the Swift organization attaching customers to the SWIFT Network for financial transactions. Gordon Skinner had invested in Symtec with 3i and had concerns. They were both happy to get a return on their investment when a purchaser was found.”

John was invited to be a non-executive director of Lorien by Bert Morris who was Chairman. It was an IT recruitment and contracting company. He stayed with them until they were sold.

John was a joint founder of CIO-Connect together with Craig Redbond, Des Lee and Andy Coppell. He became Executive Chairman and says “CIO-Connect was very successful and its members were the top IT Directors in the UK who exchanged information, ideas and research. We also had a limited number of IT suppliers   that we needed to carefully manage to make sure it didn’t become a sales forum for them. We recruited almost 250 members and ran it like a club. We not only had the top guys as members but we provided additional services to their direct reports and their personal assistants. That was the idea of a lady ex BA and it worked a treat. If the PA’s like it, renewal of annual subs was much easier. The PA’s had their own events and I didn’t give my colleagues a look in when it came to chairing these! Eventually we sold CIO Connect and the founders retired.”

John next took on the role of WCIT honorary treasurer which he did for 3 years until the Company obtained Charter status.  “I inherited an over complex organization and systems with inadequate controls in place.” He says “we had five or six companies and each was cross charging each other. It was complicated and the first thing I did was simplify things and bring in Rachel as a full time accountant. I’d like to think that top management understood the financial issues much better and could clearly see what was needed to ensure our finances were in a healthy state.”

Asked what he considers his key expertise to be, John says “he never considers himself to be a “techy” adding I’m hopeless with computers and leave the nitty gritty to technologists. The thing I bring to the table is keeping it simple and developing good relationships. Customers always come first, suppliers must be respected and colleagues must work as a team. I was fairly tough but always respected people.  I made sure I had good people around me and I think that paid.”

Offering advice to young people considering their career options today, John says: “Technology has come a long way in my time and its going to continue to advance probably even quicker than it has done in my time.”

Interviewed by Tom Abram

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley