2022
Foot Anstey focuses on six key sectors: Financial Services; Media & Entertainment, Developers, Retail & Consumer, Energy and Private Wealth.
In light of the above, if you could introduce one organisation to Foot Anstey, who would it be and why?
Please do not exceed 400 words
I would introduce Starling Bank to Foot Anstey. Starling are a new technology savvy bank which has transitioned from a fintech start-up in the past five years to be a high-growth bank. They have a range of direct to consumer offerings and specific support for SME financing. Their offer is already popular with startups, freelancers and other businesses looking for less traditional banking providers. At the core of their model is a vision to help customers manage their finances in a digital, intelligent and intuitive way. This is built on a serious investment in hard core technology using their own proprietary machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) platforms to create personalised customer experiences and tailored recommendations for customers.
In addition to these direct services, Starling also manage a Marketplace, which provides clients with access to third party financial services, and is actively adding new partners to this including bill management, insurance providers, savings accounts, and accounting software providers. They have ambitious plans to develop the breadth of this offering, including a charity section. All of these third party providers connect with Starling’s App via proprietary API technology.
Starling have also developed partnerships and approaches to help its customers bridge the physical-digital divide. They have a partnership with the Post Office so clients can deposit cash, and provide a simple mechanism to post cheques to Starling so they can be deposited.
Since November 2018 Starling have had a growth of more than 110% in customer numbers and more than 200% in deposit base, now approaching £1 billion. Starling have ambitious growth plans, including in-house technical team, new offices in Southampton and Cardiff, and are reaching into EU countries (Ireland, Netherlands, France and Germany). They are committed to diversity in their leadership and staffing, and have a Technology for Good approach to new technology such as Artificial Intelligence. They have a strong innovation pipeline, with a four year programme to create 50 new banking products.
Starling are ambitious and growing fast. They are actively disrupting the UK’s banking sector, and will need to be able to access a real breadth of expertise to ensure that they remain sure footed as they keep growing and new regulatory pressures and management challenges arise.
What has been the biggest challenge you have overcome? How did you achieve this? *
Please do not exceed 400 words.
My biggest challenge was to step up from being a waiter in a busy 50 seat cafe to seizing the opportunity to become its manager.
Since 2016 I have worked at an independent cafe called [redacted name and location]. I worked full time over the course of my gap year, and have continued part time whilst at University. The cafe prides itself on friendliness, high-quality food that is freshly made from seasonal ingredients, and value for money. Regular customers are particularly welcome at the cafe. There are two owners: one bakes cakes and works in the cafe, and the other manages the finances. In total the cafe employs about 12 members of staff, a mix of temporary and full-time chefs, kitchen porters and front of house staff.
At the start of the summer in 2018 the assistant manager resigned. I was keen to take on more responsibility, and I was able to persuade the owners to promote me to be the manager. My overall aim was to improve the efficiency of the business. I thought that several of the key processes used to run the cafe were inefficient and poorly thought through. I began making changes in the way that we managed stocktaking, and improved the consistency of stock quality and freshness. I recruited several new members of front of house staff, paying particular attention to understanding how they would deal with tricky customers during busy times. I timetabled the staff rota, trying to put together staff teams who could help meet the needs of the customers, and the rest of the staff in the cafe. As a trusted key holder, I opened up the cafe, set out the tables and checked on stock before the first customers. At the end of the day I closed up the cafe and tidied up. I was responsible for all cash handling and wage distribution.
I had worked hard to manage a team of staff in the dynamic world of hospitality, and to ensure that all functions of the 50 seater cafe were operating smoothly. I felt proud that at the end of my tenure as the manager, the cafe was much better organized and was nominated for [redacted local magazine’s] Cafe of the Year. My time at [redacted name of cafe] allowed me to combine my passion for supporting my team with my desire to provide a comfortable yet high quality consumer experience.
Identify a current commercial issue which has attracted your attention. Please explain why you have identified this and how you consider it to be significant to Foot Anstey? *
Please do not exceed 400 words
A current commercial issue which has attracted my attention is the profound impact that new digital technologies will have on the practice of law, including substantive applications of legal reasoning such as complex medical negligence cases.
Over the past 20 years digital technology has transformed every aspect of daily life and commerce. The latest wave of digital innovation has been the development of computational techniques that can automatically analyse huge amounts of digital data to identify unexpected patterns and connections. These methods, particularly Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), have begun to be applied in both healthcare settings and legal practice.
A range of AI tools have already been developed to assist lawyers in their day-to-day work. AI can be used to undertake due diligence, eliminate manual errors, and speed up some of the key processes routinely used in document handling. If these approaches are properly implemented, then the promise is that lawyers can spend less time on routine, and more time on higher value work.
In healthcare applications digital techniques are being widely deployed. AI can help busy healthcare professionals by shifting routine tasks from human staff onto automated computer based platforms. But in addition, AI enthusiasts believe that computational methods will also be used to make automated diagnoses with a predictive power equal to, or better than, highly skilled clinicians.
Our legal systems have well understood means for articulating arguments, and then weighing evidence for and against those arguments. We have yet to develop legal frameworks for weighing up the quality of a computer made decision in comparison with a human expert. A fundamental problem is that most current AI and ML approaches are black-box methods. The decisions or predictions are not explainable. In many cases, even the designers of a particular computational approach cannot explain in detail why they work as well as they do.
Alongside the technical challenges of applying AI, and they remain substantial, the use of digital methods in healthcare and law will raise a series of new legal questions for Foot Anstey.
Is AI software a medical device? Are AI generated contracts executed automatically? Who is accountable for a decision made by an AI platform if it leads to a clinical error?
Over the next few years, Foot Anstey will need to develop new competencies, both technical and legal, to maximise the benefits of these new technologies for its clients and itself.
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