Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is serial entrepreneur, Justin Basini, co-founder and Group CEO of The ClearScore Group, a technology business helping users understand and manage their credit and finances. Having learnt the art of brand marketing at Procter & Gamble, Justin, aged 27, launched his first business, a dot-com consultancy at the height of the dot-com boom, but with the market crashing, the pressure of trying to run an unsustainable company took a huge toll on Justin’s mental health. After joining Deutsche Bank, where he realised he was mission driven rather than money driven, then Capital One, he founded and then sold his second business, ALLOW, offering consumers the ability to protect their data and privacy. And in 2015, believing everyone should have free access to their own credit score to help them take control of their financial health, Justin co-founded credit management app ClearScore. Acquiring 200,000 users in their first month and refocussing after a sale to Experian didn’t proceed as planned, the ClearScore Group now helps over 23 million people on four continents. Not bad. It’s hard to do the intro for someone who’s done so much but we managed it.
Justin Basini
Yeah, thanks very much, it was a great introduction and it’s…
Elliot Moss
Is it you?
Justin Basini
It, well, a lot of it is me, I mean obviously as you described some of these achievements, that’s not ever the whole story.
Elliot Moss
And I’ve read and that’s why I asked you the question, I’ve read obviously that you are an extremely successful person by any metric if you look at the paper and you say wow, look at all these things, and the awards, if I listed them as well and the fact that you know I am always, I am very privileged, I get to meet lots of people like you Justin who go and do stuff. Where’s this engine? Where’s this drive from?
Justin Basini
I think it comes from you know my parents both being immigrants so, I’m second generation on my dad’s side, you know, Italian, Welsh Italians and my mum was a refugee after the War, so my grandparents were displaced from Poland, now sort of Ukraine and couldn’t go back home and so ended up in the UK and the UK gave my family and her family a start after the War and so that immigrant sort of story of a focus on education, a focus on driving yourself, taking the opportunities that new countries can give you was pretty important as I was growing up and I think that gives one a real sense that you can’t waste time and you have to take the opportunities that are ahead of you.
Elliot Moss
And that ‘can’t waste time’ thing, I love that phrase. Was that inculcated from what you were told or what you saw?
Justin Basini
I think a bit of both.
Elliot Moss
You know, were you pushed, I guess? Because you know, we…
Justin Basini
Yeah, I was pushed, yeah, I was pushed academically, both my parents were teachers and so academic performance was really important and yeah, we were, they were productive and they pushed themselves and worked hard and I saw that throughout my family and so that gives you I think a set of hardworking values that you know I practise today.
Elliot Moss
And that, you know again, academically, am I right in thinking you didn’t do as well in you’re A Levels as you should have done but then you went and got a First at University?
Justin Basini
Yeah, that’s right. So I did, so I did well at GCSE…
Elliot Moss
He smirks slightly, he went damn, he’s going to mention the A Levels.
Justin Basini
…you know, I went to a, I went to a south London comprehensive and you know loved my time there, did very well at GCSE and then I sort of stopped being a geek in the Sixth Form, discovered you know girls and drink and all of those pleasures in life and so didn’t perform very well at my A Levels. Managed to blag my way into Bristol, so I had an offer from Bristol and, which I didn’t get, and I remember, I mean nowadays you can’t do this but I rang up the professor who had interviewed me and I begged him to let me in, that summer, I remember just like being on the phone to him, like my hand shaking, going “look, this is the situation, I really, please let me in, please let me in” and they let me in. Wouldn’t happen today, right, but I got in and but I was really determined to you know prove to myself and to my parents that, you know, my academic performance wasn’t reflective of what I got in my A Levels and so, yeah, I took a First in biochemistry and was very proud of that. I remember the results came out and my dad was picking me up that day – this is one of my favourite memories of my dad, my dad’s passed now – and he, and in those days no mobile phones, right, and so he left the house in London at about 11.00 o'clock coming down to Bristol to pick me up with all of my gear and I was going, I got the results around midday they were released and I remember when he got out of the car and I just walked up to him – oh I’m sorry, I’m getting a bit emotional here – and I said, “oh Dad, I got a First” and he gave me the biggest hug and he said, “I’ve spent the whole time in the car coming down, going ‘2:1’s fine, 2:1’s fine, 2:1’s fine, 2:1’s fine’” and he was super, super proud of me and that was a really great moment.
Elliot Moss
We should jump from the joy of sharing a First with your dad to right now and then I want to go back again. Just in your own words describe what, what your business does and why you created it then because you’ve got a bit of a knack for looking at datary, you should have it kind of businesses. What’s this one about?
Justin Basini
So The ClearScore Group, now a group, ClearScore originally was really set up to help consumers to own their own data and so, like data in financial services is all around us and the reality is that if you apply for financial products now it’s very ‘computer says no’ and computer is saying no based on the data that exists about you and so we set up ClearScore to basically give control and access to that data so that they can make sure it’s right and they can improve it so that hopefully they get greater financial wellbeing and what we’ve done really is create a credit marketplace, a financial product marketplace which really allows everybody to come and see what offers of credit they can get and to improve their credit situation so that they get better access to better products, which ultimately means they get more access to products and they’re at lower interest rates and that saves a lot of people money. Typically, ClearScore users, who are regular users, will improve their credit score anywhere between about 80 and 100 points and that can mean the credit card that you’re offered going from 39.9% APR down to 24.9% APR and that puts money back in your pocket by owning and controlling your own data and that’s what we do.
Elliot Moss
I mentioned earlier about this distinction between being money driven and being purpose driven. How did you find your purpose, Justin or was it always there?
Justin Basini
Well…
Elliot Moss
Because this is a very specific thing.
Justin Basini
Yeah, yeah it is specific. I mean it came out of you know when I went into Deutsche Bank and sort of saw the power of money and then went to Capital One, the credit card company, and saw the power of data and how you could use data to unlock financial opportunities for people and through all of that basically, if you, if you spend any time in consumer financial services, it becomes pretty clear to you that the market is fundamentally unfair. The less affluent you are, the more you pay for financial services and the less access you have and that is fundamentally an unfairness and it’s based on the fact that you know the way that market works is you have sort of groups of consumers and when you apply for a product you are grouped with a bunch of consumers that you look similar to and so if you’re an affluent person and have got lots of credit, you’re grouped with a bunch of people where you won’t have to pay very much for your credit. If you’re grouped with a bunch of people who are lower affluence, lower credit score, you will pay a lot more. Now if you look at the, and that’s driven by what’s called ‘losses’, so how much money am I going to get back from the £100 that lent. If you look at the affluent people, the good credit score people, there might be like for £100 lent, there might be sort of £96/£97 that comes back. If you look at the, the less affluent group, that will probably be about £75/£80, right, and so that’s what drives the cost up, but that still means that 75% of those people are paying back, they are making sure that they are making their payments every month, they’re just grouped with a bunch of people that mean that they have to pay more and so data and allowing data to flow and allowing financial services companies to go no, this isn’t a group of people but now we can pick the people who are good and the people who are less good in that group means that everybody gets a fairer outcome and that’s really what we want to do.
Elliot Moss
You make it sound so simple. Much more coming up from Justin, my Business Shaper today, he’s the co-founder and Group Chief Executive of ClearScore and it’s a group because they also do clever things with car insurance, which we’ll hear about shortly as well. Much more coming up from him, right now though, it’s a taster from the Mishcon Innovation Series, which you can find on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their practical advice and industry insights for those of you thinking about starting your very own thing. In this clip we hear from Tariq Rauf, architect and founder, and CEO, of Qatalog, a digital work hub aiming to give people a radically simpler way to coordinate work.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast – 500 of them, I think – and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your favourite podcast platform. My guest today is Justin Basini, co-founder and Group CEO of The ClearScore Group, a technology business – that’s nice isn’t it – helping users understand and manage their credit and finances and if you were just listening, Justin explained exactly how it worked. There are two bits to your working life, as I observe it. One is the corporate bit and one is the ‘I’m running my own show’ bit. At what point did you decide I don’t want to work for someone else? Was there a moment or did it build and build and build?
Justin Basini
No, that happened pretty early. So, I started my career with Procter & Gamble, the FMCG consumer packaged company, American, and actually I loved it there and I thought it was really great but…
Elliot Moss
They’re brilliant, I mean they were my client for ten years in advertising. Phenomenally well run, structured, great place to learn.
Justin Basini
An amazing business. Great brands, global, but very large and what I found you know as I got into my sort of mid-twenties, having spent a few, you know four/five years there, was that I was becoming increasingly sort of frustrated and disruptive because of the hierarchy and the fact that you were a, a small cog in a very large machine and so I wanted to you know basically run my own show pretty early and that’s when I set my first company up, which was this dot-com consulting company.
Elliot Moss
Do you remember what it felt like when you set it up and you’d made that move, were you, I mean you seem a confident, confident guy, where you worried that you didn’t really know what you were doing or did that not cross your mind?
Justin Basini
No, I wasn’t worried and it was because I didn’t know what I was doing. So, you’re not…
Elliot Moss
You mean you’re not aware of what you don’t know?
Justin Basini
Yeah, you’re not worried about what you don’t know, right, but I if I look back, you know, ClearScore is the result of, you know, 25 years of work, you know, like I’ve worked in lots of different places, I’ve had failures, I’ve had different start-ups and so, you know, every overnight success has been baked for decades and decades and so in my twenties when I set this first one up, I was sort of quite naïve and it was the time of the dot-com boom, everybody was going to be a millionaire by the time they were thirty, right, it was like incredible and that, that, that period was actually a bit similar to what we’re seeing now with AI and it hasn’t happened since but there was just such energy around these new technologies and literally everybody was thinking they were going to change the world and I was going to be part of that and so, I went into it very hopeful and very optimistic which I think you have to be, but not very realistic and therefore as the business failed, you know it was you know a very difficult experience.
Elliot Moss
And you got help for the difficult experience, stuff was going on in your life in, you’ve talked quite openly about mental health and thank the stars that we now all talk about this stuff much more, how did therapy help you resolve the challenges you were facing?
Justin Basini
Yes, so what happened was, and it’s very much linked to your first question where we started this conversation around like you know how are you wired, where does that drive come from and what I learned was that you know that really ruthless focus on external achievement is a very precarious way to run your life because if you don’t have an internal sense of yourself and everything is the external things that you’re achieving, when you fail, that is extraordinarily difficult to your psychology and that’s what I had and so as the business was failing, I wasn’t thinking clearly, I made mistakes, I put salaries onto credit cards, got into 50 grand’s worth of debt, a lot of money, I couldn’t pay that back, everything started to snowball, I had to let people go and it was just an awful time and I ended up, you know, basically with a suicidal episode where, you know, I’m sitting in a friend’s flat with a bottle of vodka and a load of pills, not really knowing what was going on but in that situation, like literally sort of thinking about like what do I do here and luckily I had, you know, a relationship and I had friends who could get me out of that situation and immediately and then allow me the time to repair myself, and that, the therapeutic process was incredibly important to just decode how you’re wired and how you can get onto a much more sustainable and ultimately healthier way of thinking about how achievement is and how you define what success is and that’s, that was a really important experience for me and has held me all the way through all of the subsequent failures that I’ve had, because there, obviously you’re failing all the time, but now I can see that in the light that it should be seen in rather than a really personal thing around who I am and my self-worth.
Elliot Moss
The flip of the failure is the success and here we are in 2025, Justin and there’s, things are going well. We always, I always touch something, Formica, wood, whatever it might be. Rudyard Kipling always talks about, you know, treating success and failure and managing the two people as if they’re both imposters and don’t ever get seduced. How are you remaining calm now, as you look at this business which is growing? There’s been conversations about more investment, conversations about going public at some point in the future, obviously you had the Experian moment when it looked like things were really going to go big then and they didn’t. How do you deal with the success? Because the failure is one thing, you seem to have got that nailed, what about the other side of it?
Justin Basini
Well, I think the important thing to understand about success is that you know hard work and talent is necessary but not sufficient. You also need a huge amount of luck along the way and so, you know, it is very important to understand that yes, you do need to work hard and you do need to be talented but you shouldn’t take success or failure too personally because a lot of that outcome, that bifurcated outcome will be based on circumstance and so having that really in your mind as you do anything is really important because it depersonalises it. It’s one of the things that I talk to entrepreneurs a lot about and young people, which is you know there’s an over fascination with the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Elon Musks and how these people are geniuses. You know, they are definitely very clever people, they are definitely hard workers, but they have also been really, really, really lucky and so, and there could have been another version of Mark Zuckerberg or another version of Elon Musk based on the cards falling slightly differently, a different thing happening at a certain time and so it’s always worth, you know, remembering that there’s always a certain amount of imposter with everybody and I, I tell young people in the company a lot as well, ‘just remember everybody is making it up all the time’, I mean I really believe that, like I’m making it up all the time.
Elliot Moss
Well I was going to ask you about that, of course you are making it up all the time but 25 years you’re working, is the Justin I’m now talking to about work a very evolved character to the one that was there are the foothills ten years ago? And if so, what are the key differences? How have you improved and upped your game, even though I accept your thesis that circumstances obviously dictate a lot of this, where have you changed?
Justin Basini
What you get with experience is you don’t get more talent, you don’t get I think more hard work or whatever, that’s sort of hardwired into you. What you get is you get pattern recognition and pattern recognition is very, very important, right and so, the fact that you know I’ve set up three businesses, I’ve worked in lots of different places, I’ve been through a lot and I’ve done a lot of work, gives me the ability to see patterns that myself twenty years ago wouldn’t have been able to see, right, and so call that you know wisdom, experience, whatever, but that allows you to make better calls and to see things much more clearly, I think as to what’s actually going on versus what may be is appearing to go on, on the surface and that’s really the value of experience and just time.
Elliot Moss
My final chat will be coming up shortly with Justin and we’ve also got some music from Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Justin Basini is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes. In terms of the entrepreneurial thing and I think you’ve been incredibly clear about how that works and where it fits and the advice that you give, I get that, you’ve also kind of drifted is the wrong word but you veered into this, the margins where you’re involved with, as a non-exec in the Competition and Markets Authority, you’re there with the government talking about what they should be doing in terms of investment and national capital, not international capital and views of growth and things. It’s kind of quasi-governmental, quasi where business meets you know power and politics. Do you enjoy that? Is that something that you’ve intentionally done or have you just found that’s been your new path?
Justin Basini
No, I do enjoy that because ultimately, the government regulation sets the rules for the game and being able to influence that in a way that I think is going to give maximum benefit and, you know, governmental regulation interventions tend to be quite subtle and they can have a heating or a chilling effect and seemingly, one thing versus another, the difference is quite small on the surface but when that compounds over time, over decades, you can really end up in a very, very different position and so, being able to bring all of the wisdom round the table, all of the experience around the table, which is what I think good governments really try and do and I think this government is trying to do that, is really important to make those the right decisions for our country in order to be able to achieve what we need to achieve and we are at a point in time where the decisions that are being made are incredibly material, with all of the global uncertainty that’s out there, the realignment of global economy and markets, you know the UK has a significant opportunity I think to thrive and to recast its role in the world and that’s what we need to do and I want this government, not because necessarily they’re my government or that’s my politics, but we need the government to be successful. Why? Because we need our country to be successful and a better government, making better decisions with all of the decision-makers and all of the experience around the table is the way to do that and that’s why I’ve chosen to, in my small way, get involved with this sort of stuff.
Elliot Moss
Now, let’s just go into the Wizard of Oz world, which says at the end of the Yellow Brick Road, Justin, something happens in your business, there is an event in a few years’ time and then suddenly Justin enjoys his work but probably financially doesn’t need to work, what I just heard was, someone who sounds quite public spirited – he’s smiling at me and saying where’s, what’s he going to ask me? – something quite, somebody who’s pretty public spirited and wants to do good things. Is the world of politics, Justin Basini, anything that interests you or would it be more, if money didn’t need to be earned, would there be other things you’d be doing with your time?
Justin Basini
Politics definitely interests me, whether that, whether it interests me as my own personal career, I don’t know. Obviously, there’s a lot of, I really admire politicians for the sacrifices that they take for all of us, they’re very maligned in the media and there’s a lack of trust and whatever but they are in very, very difficult situations and they put themselves and their family at huge sort of risk and focus and so whether I want that for myself, I don’t know. I think there are other ways to be influential and so, I think potentially, you know, I have thoughts and ideas and opinions which could be helpful and I will seek to try and voice those opinions and to make those opinions heard, whether that’s in frontline politics, I don’t know.
Elliot Moss
It’s been really good to talk to you. Good luck with whatever happens next with the business, it’s going the right way, I think it was Lloyd Dorfman who I interviewed many years ago who said, “as long as the graph goes from bottom left to top right, that’s a good thing”, right.
Justin Basini
So, simple.
Elliot Moss
Pretty simple, at the end of the day you just go ‘yep, that’s kind of working’. Thank you for spending some time with me. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Justin Basini
My song choice is Sir Duke but Stevie Wonder because, well I love that song, it’s got an amazing energy to it, but I remember seeing, I mean we’re both, we were both from south London, I remember seeing Stevie Wonder on Clapham Common about fifteen years ago playing in, you know, they used to do like music things there, I don’t know whether they still do it, but anyway…
Elliot Moss
Called concerts, Justin, concerts.
Justin Basini
Yeah, but on Clapham Common?
Elliot Moss
I know, but you know.
Justin Basini
I mean Clapham Common, Stevie Wonder’s there, it is the most incredible show and when he played this song, it just took off and I always remember that and that’s why it’s my song choice.
Elliot Moss
Stevie Wonder with Sir Duke, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Justin Basini. Talent plus hard work plus oodles of luck. Don’t forget that circumstances play a huge role in the success of the founders that I meet. He talked about depersonalising failure, don’t see it as a reflection of everything that is wrong with you, stuff just happens, and it’s a really important lesson to learn as you go along the way. And finally, the benefit of wisdom, the benefit of time, the benefit of experience is pattern recognition, the ability to see things because you’ve seen them before. Really great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.