‘Felt like ordinary people were being excluded’ – Why man, 33, started £5million business
Mr McGillycuddy and Matt Latham founded CIRCA5000, formerly known as tickr, together after bonding on the Barclays graduate scheme in 2011 where they both found themselves doing a lot of ‘firsts’ for both of their families
Entrepreneurship was not the plan at the beginning either, as Mr McGillycuddy elaborated: “I honestly never considered starting my own business until I’d spent a few years in finance. I felt like I’d been let behind the curtain, been shown how finance works, and realised that it was largely inefficient, charged extortionate fees to unsuspecting customers, and had been designed to confuse ordinary people like me.”
Alongside these philanthropic motivations, the reason Mr McGillycuddy got into finance in the first place was his curiosity for the world around him: “My interest in investing came from just wanting to know how the world works. Understanding finance gives you that context. It’s an industry that encompasses economics, politics, behavioural science, psychology, and a whole host of other disciplines, and that fascinated me. In a capitalist system, understanding capital markets and the flow of money is parallel to understanding the world. And if you understand it, then you can change it.”
He continued: “After leaving Barclays to join Wellington Management, I started to think that if we – Matt and I – weren’t going to solve the problems we could see, who would do it? This pushed us over the line to start CIRCA5000, but I think it took us a few years to learn about an industry in detail, before we could see what was truly wrong with it, to then leave and try and address the problems we found.”
The entrepreneur had convinced himself that channelling the knowledge the pair had learnt from their time at Barclays and Wellington Management to right these wrongs.
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