Simon Rogerson: Three ingredients needed to earn customer trust

Naiveté - that is what Simon Rogerson says is the genuine answer to why he left Mercury Asset Management (later acquired by BlackRock) in 2000, aged just 23 and still on the company's graduate scheme, to set up Octopus alongside colleagues Chris Hulatt and Guy Myles. "None of us knew any better or what we were doing," he says. "All we knew was that we were working in an industry that was broken and one that nobody trusted, and we wanted to change it." The trio swapped the high-rise City tower for a shared office above a supermarket in Farringdon, spending the first nine months raising...