Interview with Dr Rebecca Harding

Rebecca Harding enjoyed her schooling and had a happy childhood. She says of growing up: “I think childhood’s always interesting, you look back on it and you think bits of it were absolutely amazing although when you’re actually going through it you might think I would want to change everything. I think in a way that’s what an entrepreneur is, somebody that wants to change things all the time.

“Was I happy at school?  Absolutely.  Was I a happy child?  Absolutely. Some of the things that I did stood me in very good stead for where I am now. In particular I do a lot of music and drama and I think nobody can underestimate the importance of music and drama for their education and how they present themselves as they go into the professional world, whatever they do.  My parents were fantastic, have a very loving family, loving sister, and that always stands you in good stead.  One big thing as you set up businesses and you run through a career, particularly as a woman, is having supportive people around you, and I’ve always had that.”

Rebecca attended a state comprehensive school in Essex from the age of eleven to eighteen. She studied for A levels in economics, maths and German. However, she had to attend a local boys’ grammar school to study for German A level; as the course that was not on offer in her own school. She says: “I was the first girl that did that, it was breaking with a lot of tradition at the time. I rattled a few cages at that point, but had a lot of fun doing it, as you can imagine; the only girl in an all-boys grammar school.”

Rebecca adds: “I’ve always been a self-starter, somebody that knows her own mind and somebody who has a very clear direction of what they want to get out of their life educationally and in career terms.  Right from the word go, my learning has always been part of me, I’ve always wanted to read, to find out about other people, find out about big economic, political, social issues, and that’s what we’re doing at Coriolis now, it’s always been part of me to solve those problems, I guess.”

 Rebecca says that her German A level teacher was an absolute inspiration, adding: “To this day, I think of him almost every day, the things he used to say, books he recommended to read, his whole philosophy on life, he was absolutely magnificent.  I owe an awful lot to him.”

After completing her A levels, Rebecca went to University of Sussex where she took to academic life and obtained a BA in Economics with German, MSc in Science, Technology and Innovation, and completed her D-Phil. She went on to become a Reader at the University of Brighton for nine years and then spent two years as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex.

 She says of the choice to study: “I come from an academic family, parents both in education and I don’t think there was ever any doubt in my mind that I would study for to doctorate level.”

Rebecca says the experience was ‘brilliant training for being an entrepreneur’. Following her doctorate, she continued with research into organisational change. She explains: “I looked at science and technology innovation policy, and then eventually ended up in innovation and entrepreneurship at London Business School and published and wrote about all of that.

“As an academic you’re generating ideas all the time, thinking about ways of solving problems, building up methodologies to think about a problem and then solve it and it’s brilliant training if you’re going to be an entrepreneur because your mindset deals with all of these things laterally all the time. My training at Sussex University was excellent because it was a bit of politics, philosophy, economics, sociology, a lot of international relations and it gave me a very hybrid background and for somebody looking at technology and science now, it gives you that sort of inter-disciplinary approach which. I think is absolutely essential in a big data world.”

In 2002/3, Rebecca, having already done various consultancy roles for think tanks, alongside her teaching roles, decided to move away from teaching. She joined the Work Foundation as Chief Economist and the London Business School as Senior Fellow and Executive Director of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Programme (GEM), a study of entrepreneurial activity across the world.

She says: “I’d done, a lot of teaching, a lot of presenting, and I felt like I needed something else.  I went to the Work Foundation and developed some interests there, but also joined London Business School at the same time, so I had two part-time jobs alongside each other.

“Running the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Programme (GEM) gave me my first taste of being an entrepreneur. I was finding out about what it’s like to set up a business, and I didn’t have a regular salary.  Most people assume that academics have a safe salary and lots of holiday and things, I didn’t, and so I had to generate my own income and at that point I realised how difficult it was to do and it gave me my first taste and made me realise that I could do it, which was interesting.”

 She says of the GEM programme: “It was basically a survey to find out how much entrepreneurial activity was going on in the adult population; a little bit like the Labour Force Survey. I ran that in the UK to start with.  When we started it off we had a sample of 2,000 individuals that we interviewed, and within two years we had 40,000 people that we were interviewing and a budget that was over half a million pounds a year, which for an academic project is pretty stunning. I learnt that by helping people to understand that they needed data and then understanding their data needs, that there was scope for growing a business.

In 2007, after working on GEM and as head of corporate research at Deloitte, Rebecca decided to set up her own business. She explains: “I had up to that point a very eclectic career and I thought to myself, well, you’ve been talking about entrepreneurship, particularly female entrepreneurship, for a very long time and how good it is for women to set up a business, if you don’t do it yourself, you’ll never have any credibility, so here I am.”

Rebecca started Delta Economics in 2007 when she was working part-time at the London Business School, along with teaching and some consulting to make ends meet. She say of the experience: “This was in the era of the global financial crisis, so it was very tough time to be starting to grow a business.” Having organised a conference, the sponsor pulled out at the last minute. Rebecca says, somewhat wryly, “It left my husband and I with a huge bill. My husband is an ecologist and studies animal species and went off to do a butterfly survey or something….”

Whilst walking the dog, Rebecca started considering her options, she continues: “I started to think about whether or not entrepreneurs all had to go through this process of putting money in themselves, why people set up businesses, the types of challenges they have to go through, the types of money they have to invest themselves. At this point, my academic mind kicked in and I thought that’s quite an interesting bunch of questions. By the time I got back to the car I’d walked about seven miles, the poor dog was on his knees, and I designed a survey.”  Rebecca called the survey the ‘Opportunities and Growth Study’.

The next day, at a meeting with HSBC, Rebecca suggested they ran the survey. They were in favour.

Rebecca says of findings of the ‘Opportunities and Growth Study’. She says: “The project ran for three years and it was the most amazing thing because we discovered all sorts of things about entrepreneurial businesses, about the differences between men and women and the profiles that they grow their businesses, the capitalisation of female businesses compared to male businesses.  We started to understand that whole process of internationalisation as well.  But then the most important thing was that we discovered was that companies actually aren’t all driven just by a profit motive.  More often than not the entrepreneur that wants to drive growth is motivated by things that are solving a problem, creating an innovation, a much bigger picture.  Also solving social or environmental problems as well, even back then in 2010/2011.”

 As well as wanting to run the survey, HSBC also wanted Delta Economics to start analysing trade and international business for them. Rebecca adds: “That was in the post-financial crisis, 2011, when trade was everything and everybody wanted to know about international trade, international business, that was the flavour of the month, if you like, and somehow or the other I was in the right place at the right time with the right solution and Delta grew from there on.

“This is where the big idea behind Coriolis started to emerge.  Banks are very, very, very unwilling to let information about bank accounts and details of flows of money out, because it’s client confidential information and, for all sorts of reasons, they have to treat that information very sensitively.  So banks don’t want to share data, unless it’s survey data that they’ve generated.  However, if you’re going to understand trade and cross-border payments and cross-border transactions and interactions, you need to be able to understand how the money behind trade flows. What we started to do at Delta Economics, which I’ve now turned into a whole technology at Coriolis, is to aggregate trade data. We started to pull together data from all the way around the world.  In Delta’s case we pulled it from the United Nations mostly, but we started to make estimates and run forecasts and provide data-based consultancy to our clients that allowed us to understand the patterns and the profiles of businesses that were within international trade. We started to solve that problem. It was very much a consulting focussed business because we produced data solutions for people that they then bought.  So it was very different to Coriolis, but that was where the idea came from; that there was this huge data challenge within trade and trade finance that hadn’t been solved and to some extent, it still hasn’t been solved, and that’s what Coriolis is doing.”

Rebecca explains what the term ‘trade finance’ is. She says that most people think of shipping, exports and so on when they consider world trade. However, this is supported by the banking system. She says: “The banking system is responsible for a large amount of the finance behind international trade.  When you look at the numbers, the banks, either by helping with senior debt, helping the companies themselves finance trade, or by providing some form of a bridging finance between when something leaves a port and arrives somewhere else, that’s what trade finance is.  It is the biggest unknown sector for trade in the world, for anything in the world.  Trade finance is worth something in the region of fourteen to fifteen trillion US dollars per annum.

“The process includes cross-border payments, it’s how a buyer pays a supplier, or how a supplier gets paid, so you can see it from either side of the equation.  It’s how you manage the risk that either the goods won’t arrive or the buyer won’t pay.  It’s how you manage the risk that either the buyer or the seller is selling on to somebody that you don’t necessarily want to trade with, things like corruption and fraud or arms trade, and so on. All of that is incorporated within this whole sphere of trade finance.

“If you then consider that we haven’t got adequate data and we don’t really know what’s happening in that space, then it becomes a big issue for the banks because they don’t know where the risks are, where the problems are going to be. Since the global financial crisis, we’ve seen banks fined a huge amount of money for non-compliance with anti-money laundering and ‘Know Your Client’ considerations; they’ve been fined a huge amount for funding things that they shouldn’t have been funding.  So that data problem has become a really big one across the whole of trade finance.”

In 2015, Rebecca left Delta Economics. She says: “You create success out of the failures that you have. I didn’t sell Delta for any money at all. I left because I didn’t want to take it in the direction that at the time it was going to go in. I decided that this was the end of my journey with Delta Economics and moved on into a bridge where I worked for the British Bankers’ Association, found out more about banks, and then started to set up Coriolis.”

On the subject of failure, Rebecca points to the work she did at the London Business School where she found that female founders were more afraid of failing than their male counterparts. She says: “There’s this real fear of failure which acts as a barrier to them setting up a business in the first place. I can completely understand why, because I’ve had my fair share of failure through my career. I’m on television the whole time, I’ve written tons of books, I’ve set up successful businesses, I raise money, I have clients and I’m well known in the space, but I learned from all of those points where things have gone wrong.  If you haven’t failed, you haven’t learned, you haven’t admitted that things haven’t gone as well as you might have wanted them to do.

“All the way through the world of entrepreneurship, you can see very, very clearly the heroic entrepreneur who’s raised millions, they’ve done this, they’ve done that, and this is the type of role model that’s put out there.

“For me personally, yes, I am successful but I like to show that you can get to be successful even though you’ve had more than your fair share of failure through your life. I don’t think people understand this and it brings out the humanity in you if you know that actually, things haven’t gone well. It helps you understand other people, it helps you run your business in a better way, because you’re more able to understand the challenges that people are having with learning in a particular situation. That’s my whole philosophy now.”

After leaving Delta Economics and before starting Coriolis, Rebecca was Chief Economist for the British Bankers’ Association for eighteen months. During that time, she also wrote The Weaponization of Trade, which she says prompted her to start Coriolis in 2017.

She explains: “It was the right book at the right time and it launched what I wanted to do with Coriolis.

“I’d kept my trade data running behind the scenes and I was looking at it and beginning to realise that what we were seeing was a big shift away from how we’d seen globalisation in the past.  We weren’t talking about opportunities any more, we were talking about enemies.  We weren’t talking about integrating supply chains, we were talking about the threat from China, we were suddenly imposing tariffs.

“This was in 2016, so we had Brexit as well.  We had a huge amount of economic nationalism beginning to come into our strategic thinking in Europe and in the United States. I wrote that the language around trade had effectively been weaponised and if we’re not careful we will end up with a situation where global institutions like the World Trade Organisation and the rules-based international order start to break down.  That was in 2017 and look at where we are now.”

It was while publishing the book and speaking at the Sibos international bank conference, that Rebecca saw the reaction to the data. She adds: “The banks were absolutely mind-blown by it, they couldn’t believe that some random lady had stood up and said your world’s falling apart and you are effectively the foot soldiers in this war where there’s weaponisation of trade, banks are going to be absolutely critical.  It created a lot of attention around what I was doing and at that point I realised that I needed a business and a structure to do it.  So Coriolis came out of that.”

 Rebecca started Coriolis to aggregate data with an ambition that it would be “the Bloomberg for trade and trade finance”. She explains further: “We were going to provide the information and the data in a timely and flexible way that anybody in trade finance could access at any point to be able to answer whatever problem they had with specifically tailored solutions for trade or trade finance.

“We’ve created almost a data fabric where we have trade data, customs and excise data, bill of lading data, company data (there are 400 million companies within our frameworks), and we have other macro-economic data as well.  We’ve integrated all of this into one place.  We’re beginning to integrate satellite and higher frequency type of data.” Each of those forms a separate product, but if you integrate them, then it can create very specific solutions.”

In November 2021Coriolis launched its Kosmos Working Group, which is a working group of banks, looking at developing a standardised metric for sustainability.

Rebecca explains more: “About eighteen months ago, one of my clients said wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could put a passport on every single transaction that we do for their Environment Social and Governance status (ESG)– can we do it?  Think about the problem that that’s trying to solve, it’s absolutely colossal, it’s literally boiling the ocean.”

After giving this challenge some considerable thought and with insight from her ecologist husband, Rebecca decided that any process had to be automated, independent and scalable. She continues: “I decided to boil it down to something that is really, really, really simple to understand.  Being an economist, I started with the fact that every single company has one thing in common, they buy or the sell a product or a service.  Simple.  If you can then match those goods or services over to sustainable development goals, which is how all of the ESG things are measured, then we can measure the ESG status of a company. I did some research and it turned out that the United Nations had already started that process of mapping products to sustainable development goals and every product in international trade has a code, and so you just match those codes over to sustainable development goals. Every sector has a code, so you match the products into the sector, and every sector has a record within the taxonomies for sustainability for certain types of activity.

“In November last year we launched our Kosmos Working Group, which is a working group of banks, looking at developing a standardised metric for sustainability.  We put forward this idea that it was all based on products and services and their matches to the regulatory frameworks that were coming through and sustainable development goals.  By December we had our first client and we’ve now got seventy banks within that framework looking to standardise measurements for sustainability using our product and our product approach and matching to sustainable development goals.”

Asked about pioneering this new standard for industry, Rebecca explains that it is a priority because it is often regarded as ‘too difficult’ to do. She continues: “Sustainability is an absolutely massive problem for everybody, we have to make a difference, we have to change things, but it’s all too easy to just say ‘it’s too difficult, let’s put it in the too difficult box, let’s focus on one thing’.

“It’s not enough.  If you’re going to measure ESG properly you have to look at a completely different way of measuring trade activity.  It’s almost like back at the beginning of measuring national income, you had to measure something, you had to start with something that you knew in order to understand economic growth.  Now we need to understand sustainable economic growth and we need to be able to measure it knowing that we’re measuring something meaningful. The products are meaningful.  So if we can start to create a standard around that and scale it, then we can make life more complicated afterwards.

“For example, if I give you a red flag on something that you’re consuming, you’ll know that if you consume a lot of it you’re actually damaging the planet. That’s one of the ways that this can work.  Equally, if you’re financing something where there’s a big red flag against it, then you know that you’re financing something that will damage the planet so you can start to manage that transition away. This is what we’re trying to do and that’s what’s important.”

“We are in the process of using satellite data to create a solution whereby we can geolocate climate incidents, human rights incidents, fraud, corruption or terrorism, and associate them with a postcode.  The key thing at the moment is that everything is non-standardised. …  Our solution will apply anywhere in the world, and that’s the differentiator. It’s always consistent anywhere in the world.”

Rebecca explains that the International Chamber of Commerce are working on a similar framework to create guidelines for businesses. She adds: “They can set guidelines but they can’t recommend commercial solutions because they are an industry body, but they’re suggesting the same structure and providing it. … What we’ve done is take that framework and put it into a technology. If the ICC guidelines become standard then ours is one of the solutions that’s already implemented it.”

Looking towards the future and asked if she will eventually sell Coriolis, Rebecca says: “Not at the moment. I may promote myself at some point because being in a growing business you need two senior people, a chief executive and a chairman role, and I’m both at the moment.  So I could well see myself moving into a chairman role where my job is actually to be that challenge, the future thinker, the strategy person, and challenge the organisation.  We aren’t quite there yet.”

Although, Coriolis was set up in 2017, during the first three years, Rebecca spent time writing a book to build the company’s reputation of what they intended to do and doing consultancy work. The Covid pandemic also happened during that period. Rebecca says: “The first three years of Coriolis were an unreliable indicator of where we were going to go.  We’ve changed, we’ve pivoted, we’ve turned into a company that is focussing on using all of the data fabric I’ve described for sustainability reasons and pivoting totally.  It’s too early in the journey for me to go right now; for me to sell out and just go would be lazy and it would defeat why the company is here in the first place. I shall always want to keep my head spinning with something or the other, so even if I did sell out I’d still be doing something exciting in the future.”

On the subject of mentors, Rebecca says: “When you’re an entrepreneur and founding a business, you are very single-minded in focussing on what you need to focus on, but the support of people around you is absolutely critical.”

She highlights the support she has from her family including her son who at fifteen encouraged her to set out on her own and her husband who has helped her remain on track.   She also highlights professional advice including some from Sir Ken Olisa who told her to learn to ski, she explains: “I looked at him and I asked why on earth do I need to learn to ski?  He told me that setting up a business is like skiing down a black run, you need an absolute focus on where you’re going and you mustn’t look at the bumps along the way because if you do you’ll come off your skis.”

Rebecca highlights the difference in attitudes to starting up businesses in different countries that existed when she was setting out on her own entrepreneurial journey.

She says: “In the US, if you want to set up a business there’ll be hundreds of people to support you, you’ll get the money you need and all the advice you need.  If you’re in China and you want to set up a business, your family will help, everybody will help and you’ll get the thing up and running, everyone will put time in.  If you’re in the UK and you want to start up a business, there will be at least fifty people who will tell you can’t do it and another 350 who will scratch your car when you succeed.  Isn’t that a sad story.

“One of the American professors at London Business School said that until you change the dinner table conversations in British families, you won’t get to the point where people, and particularly women, want to start up businesses.  We still see far too few women setting up businesses.  The really successful entrepreneurs, even now, are largely men, and women tend to drop out of running their businesses along the way quite easily. But there are signs that a younger generation wants to share childcare responsibilities and risk, has a slightly more open attitude towards exploring new ideas, wants to do something meaningful around sustainability, doesn’t necessarily want to work in a large organisation, and likes the idea of working in something that’s a little bit more risky.  Those things have changed and they’ve changed a huge amount for the better.”

Rebecca says that there are things that she would do different because “that’s part of learning from failure.” She continues: “If I had my time again, I would make sure that I was capitalised every single step of the way.  Another thing that data tells you, and I hate to say I’m exactly the same, growing a business without decent capitalisation is very, very difficult. Doing it on the basis of an idea and a wing and a prayer is not the best way to go about it. I’ve done that too many times so I would advise to make sure you’re properly capitalised and you keep within budgets always.  I think choosing the people around you who are going to help you grow is absolutely the way you should go.  Sometimes I’ve chosen people for the wrong reasons and it hasn’t worked.

“The biggest thing of all, I’ve made mistakes because I haven’t listened to that little voice, and that little voice is really important because it will tell you every single time whether or not you’re making the right choices and you have to listen to it. Sometimes it can be really difficult to listen to that voice, but every single day of your entrepreneurial life that voice will challenge your thinking and you have to listen to it. I haven’t listened to it all the time but I do listen to it now because it gives you your sense of direction and your sense of purpose and your sense of meaning in what you’re doing as well. The voice inside your head will tell you what’s going on and it is gut feeling, it is instinct, but it’s also your own capability to challenge yourself to learn from yourself and your own mistakes, and that’s what you have to listen to. It’s a bit more of a trick to learn, it’s a bit more difficult than just going with your instinct because you have to listen and learn and reflect and self-reflect as well.”

Asked why people choose to become entrepreneurs, Rebecca says: “To innovate, make a difference, do something different, take a break with the sort of orthodoxy, all of those are reasons. Making a profit and making money was possibly the fourth or the fifth ranked item of all of those possibilities.” She explains the reasons for this as: “If you are going to set up a business and it is going to be successful, just making money won’t get you there, it’s not enough, because you’ll just be thinking about how you accumulate, you won’t be thinking about the ideas that have led you to the point where you’re able to make money in the first place.  You won’t be thinking about the innovation, about why you’re different and why people should buy you as an individual. The other thing of course is that you have to eat, sleep, breathe this the whole time.  If it’s all about money you are eating, sleeping, breathing money, but it isn’t enough to sustain you as a human being.  Making a difference or having an innovation is important as well because it allows you to believe in the long-term direction of where you’re going, it gives you a sense of purpose.”

Of the challenges over the next ten years, Rebecca says: “The opportunities in trade and trade finance are around digitisation, technology, and data and information.” As an example of some of their work, Rebecca highlights the potential of creating and introducing automated and digital services for companies that still require ‘wet signatures’ on documents and which can take up valuable time. She adds: “That’s why data and analytics and digital solutions in international trade are so important and the work that I’ve done in that space has enabled the law to change in the UK.  I provided a business case to enable digital solutions to become more widespread in international trade.

“There are huge opportunities out there, the market is colossal.  That means if it becomes digital there are colossal opportunities for all the entrepreneurs out there that think trade’s dull.  Actually, trade isn’t dull.  Trade is about political risk, automated solutions, digital solutions, machine learning, artificial intelligence, all of these things, and it’s all in the cyberspace, and ultimately it’s about sustainability as well. If we make trade sustainable then all of our economies become sustainable.  So trade’s the place to be and it’s really exciting and technology in trade is only just getting going.”

For those considering studying technology subjects, or considering a career in technology, Rebecca advises: “If you’re studying you’re A levels today, always make sure you have a data science component to whatever you’re doing.  You can do art, biology, chemistry, physics, economics, history, but always make sure that you know a little bit about data science, and that means a little bit of coding, a little bit of Python, a little bit of statistics, and the most useful thing I have ever ever ever had in my portfolio is knowing where to find data.  It’s one of the things that you have instinctively as an economist, it is actually something that economics courses train you for and it’s immensely valuable.  If you’re a data scientist and you can find data, it’s a fantastic career.

“I always say to people, one of the things I’ve got is a statistical imagination, which sounds like it’s a bit dangerous, but data isn’t dull any more, data is something that is just deeply fascinating and there are so many wonderful ways of analysing it and making it useful.  Right at the very beginning with Delta Economics – the clue’s in the name, Delta means change – the one thing I wanted to do was make economics and data useful, and it’s still a goal of mine.”

“In a world where we have so many problems and in a world where we need to solve so many problems quickly, data and finding out what’s going on and diagnosing the problem is now a lot easier than it used to be.  And so actually everybody has that capacity to be a diagnostician and to solve at their fingertips.  So it’s not just about Twitter, it’s not just about Instagram, it’s not just about social media, it’s about how you use all of that information actually to make a difference and that’s fantastically exciting.”

Rebecca ends her interview with a story  she heard at a conference in Munich in 2005, told by Ben Verwaayen, she explains: “Ben was the then chief executive of British Telecom, and he said, it takes a dog, a chair and a computer to participate in the global labour market.  The dog to wake you up in the morning, the chair to sit on, and the computer to connect with the rest of the world.  I’d now say it takes a dog, a chair, a computer and an imagination to connect with the world of data.  You don’t need to move from your armchair, you’ve got everything at your fingertips.  Most of these sources are open source, so much of this information is free.  That’s what people are not capturing, they always assume that in order to go into the type of world that I’m in, you have to pay vast amounts of money for data.  You don’t. Everybody has the capacity to find a problem, find the data and find the solution, at their computer.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley