Louis Taylor is making a habit of being parachuted in at troubled state lenders. For seven years before he took over as chief executive of the British Business Bank (BBB) last year, Taylor led UK Export Finance (UKEF), the state-owned credit agency that had been dragged into the high-profile Airbus bribery scandal.
The pan-European aircraft maker, which had been issued export credits by UKEF that were later cancelled, was alleged to have used a network of secret agents to pay bribes to foreign officials to land high-value overseas contracts between 2011 and 2015 – resulting in Airbus being fined by three countries. “We were highlighted as the kind of ‘catalyst’ for identifying all of that wrongdoing,” Taylor said of the case.
That scandal – as well as a separate judicial review over UKEF’s investment in a gas project in Mozambique – was among the “bruising endeavours” that Taylor navigated the agency through. “I’m proud of the way that we dealt with that and I’m proud of the impact it’s had on Airbus, which is a better company today than it was at the time,” he says.
It helps explain why the 56-year-old geordie appears calm discussing the BBB’s own controversies, which – while they too pre-date his arrival – continue to draw scrutiny.
They include its dealings with scandal-hit lender Greensill, which was originally accredited to hand out government-backed loans to struggling businesses during the Covid-19 crisis, but was later found to have breached the £50m-per-company cap by lending £400m to a string of businesses linked to embattled metals tycoon Sanjeev Gupta. The BBB eventually stripped Greensill, which has since collapsed, of those guarantees last year.
The BBB, a state-owned economic development bank, was a key conduit for the government’s largesse to businesses during the pandemic – money that it has struggled to recoup. UKEF also provided £7.3bn in support to exporters such as Nissan, easyJet and British Airways during the pandemic, in a move the government says secured up to 71,000 UK jobs.
The BBB’s £47bn bounceback loan scheme has become synonymous with fraud and mismanagement of taxpayer cash. It let commercial banks run fewer checks on small businesses to allow them to borrow up to £50,000 apiece during the Covid crisis, to ensure money was distributed at speed.
While Taylor’s predecessor Keith Morgan warned the government over the fraud risks as early as May 2020, the latest estimates suggest taxpayers will be left nursing about £1.1bn in losses due to error and fraud by scammers, with disqualified directors spending tens of thousands of pounds on anything from a Range Rover to pornographic websites. The issue prompted former Cabinet Office minister Theodore Agnew to resign in protest in January 2022, citing the government’s “woeful” efforts to control potential fraud.
The BBB was also later dragged to a tribunal by campaign group Spotlight on Corruption last year for failing to disclose the names of businesses that borrowed taxpayer cash – secrecy that the anti-corruption charity contended could help identify fraudsters. A tribunal ultimately ruled in favour of the BBB, which argued for commercial confidentiality and succeeded in keeping names under wraps.
But Taylor believes critics are starting to acknowledge the trade-offs of the Covid loan schemes, which the government credits with having saved 500,000 businesses and 2.9m jobs.
“We have certainly learned some lessons,” he said. The BBB now has “a heightened awareness of need for fraud and financial crime expertise in the bank” and “a far greater understanding of the data that’s necessary in order to prevent fraud”, including better digitisation of business data filed at Companies House, and coordination between lenders to ensure businesses can only apply for one loan.
At the very least, the Covid schemes have elevated the BBB’s public profile. “Awareness of the bank is much higher,” Taylor said. “We’re linked to 1.6m businesses now through bounceback loans. That is a third of the UK business population and that gives us a lot of insight that we otherwise might not have had.”
That kind of pragmatism was undoubtedly influenced by Taylor’s father, who served as a judge during what Taylor calls a “privileged” childhood. He says he was offered a “huge number of opportunities”, including attending private school, and then Cambridge University, where he unintentionally followed in his father’s footsteps and studied law.
The degree required a kind of diligence that came easily to Taylor, who, as a self-described “eclectic” child, took up planespotting at a young age. “It gives you a memory for data in a way that is incredibly useful later on in life. And you remember facts or you remember a pattern, and that can be very, very powerful.”
But rather than enter the courtroom, Taylor was lured to the City, which in the mid-1980s was booming because of the “big bang” wave of deregulation, which reshaped the capital’s financial sector into a global hub. “There was a real revolution going on in the financial services world and to me it seemed that world would give me opportunities to work at quite a senior level that I otherwise wouldn’t get.”
That led him first to JP Morgan, where he worked on corporate deals and debt, and later to Standard Chartered, where he became its chief executive in Vietnam. Supervising that overseas office laid the groundwork for an internationally focused role at UKEF – where he was drawn to work that, he says, was about more than just the bottom line.
“That’s the attraction of this role [at the BBB] and my previous role [at UKEF]. They’re both really serious financial services roles, but they’ve got something beyond the pure profit motive as well. There’s a real social impact that you’re seeking to have on jobs, on communities and on families that rely on those jobs – all of that.”
CV
Age 56
Family Married to Kate, with three children.
Education Royal Grammar School Newcastle, Cambridge University.
Pay £330,000
Last holiday Northumberland.
Best advice he’s been given “The world is full of pessimists, but the optimists are usually right.”
Biggest career mistake “Not seeking a mentor throughout my career and being too slavish to hierarchy.”
Word he overuses “Silo – as in getting rid of them. They’re everywhere and often inhibit imagination and creativity.”
How he relaxes Cycling, dog walking, dinner with family.
