Celebrating Entrepreneurship: Daniel Suppey – Breaking boundaries in UK consumer finance
Daniel Suppey is on a mission: to build a finance company that black people globally will be proud of. He tells me “I'm a bit of a Pan-Africanist and I believe that it is time for black people to stand up and show that we can also do the things that other races can do”.
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With that mission in mind, after completing a Master’s degree in Information Systems at the prestigious London School of Economics (‘LSE’), Suppey took a job as an insurance salesman – a job for which he didn’t need a degree, let alone a Master’s degree from LSE.
Friends and loved ones were not pleased as it was difficult for them to understand why he would “waste” his Master’s degree in that manner.
But Suppey had figured that the ability to sell was going to be key in building the company of his dreams. The insurance sales job at AIG, which came with no salary – just commissions – provided him invaluable experience and taught him resilience and confidence, shaping the person he has become.
He recounts a story from that period in his life: “There was a day I booked eight appointments and left home at 7a.m thinking that by the time I came back at 10 p.m, I would have made a sale but I came back with zero sales. You know what I did? I went straight to bed. I didn’t even eat, woke up the next morning and just forgot about it and went back to work as if the previous day never happened. That period put me in good stead to do the things I am doing now”.
In 2004, Suppey set up Jeremy Lawrence Limited – a London-based financial services business, brokering mortgages and insurance policies, and offering a host of financial services products. Gradually, Jeremy Lawrence started lending money, and today JL Money, a thriving consumer finance brand provides consumer loans ranging from GB£100 to GBP£50,000.
According to Suppey, many of the incumbent UK consumer finance companies have become so big that they’ve lost touch with what customers want and therefore no longer provide personalised services. That’s the gap Suppey is looking to fill and that’s where JL Money comes in: to provide a compelling alternative proposition and old-fashioned customer service.
JL Money’s model is that of community banking. Account managers operating from service centres across the UK, nurture and develop relationships with customers at the community level. This approach reduces the risk of default and fosters a large degree of trust between JL Money and its customers.
Suppey is undeterred by the force of competition from well-funded companies operating in the UK consumer finance space. He is focused instead, on the opportunity and the size of the pie. He tells me UK’s consumer credit market is worth GB£200 billion of which his goal for JL Money is to take one per cent market share.
It is important to Suppey that he succeeds in the UK. “Succeeding in a global capital like London is very important to me because it means that you have done things excellently, you have competed at the highest level and you have managed to succeed. You know then that you can roll out anywhere else”.
Entrepreneur from the start
But Suppey has not forgotten his roots. He grew up at Madina in Accra during Ghana’s difficult 1980s when “there was never enough” for him and his seven siblings. “One of the things that drives me is not to go back to those days”.
That period is also when Suppey began to dabble in entrepreneurship. As a child, he would team up with friends from his neighbourhood to gather firewood from a nearby bush to sell to bakers for their wood-fired ovens.
At Achimota School, he continued to try his hands at a number of ventures including organising a Valentine’s Day delivery service.
Suppey is concerned that the next generation may not be ‘hungry’, given the relative abundance and “because things tend to be handed to them easily”. So through classes on business and finance at his local church, he teaches children to dream big by inspiring them with stories of successful entrepreneurs.
Inspiring the next generation
He also guides them to set financial goals for the year and to stick to them. He is currently taking them through the biography of Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motor Company.
It is a calling that he takes seriously. As he puts it: “We want to inspire a generation that will come after us to think differently and to be able to do a lot more good, the more money you have, the more good you can do”.