A drive to change lives

Welcome to The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019, sponsored by Julius Baer. We’re waiting to hear from entrepreneurs in every business sector across the UK who are eager to tell us how their products are bringing radical benefits to consumers in terms of price and choice. We’re looking for disruptors who can make an impact nationally and globally. Meanwhile, we’ll be presenting inspirational stories about the people behind the UK’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial ventures. In the first of the series, Martin Vander Weyer meets Virraj Jatania, whose low-cost banking app Pockit was the overall winner of our 2018 awards.

Virraj Jatania doesn’t need to be an entrepreneur. He’s a scion of a respected Asian business dynasty who made their fortune with Lornamead, the personal-care products empire which owned brands such as Vosene shampoo; the group was sold by Virraj’s father Danny and uncles Mike, Vin and George in 2012. Having trained on the wealth side of a large bank, Virraj — who’s 30, but looks younger — could easily have settled into a ‘family office’ role, helping his elders manage their portfolio of investments, and no doubt having fun with his own inheritance too.

But he wanted to do something bolder — and to emulate the business-building from scratch achieved by the older Jatanias, who came to England from Uganda with very little. Entrepreneurship, he says, is ‘our heritage… My brother and I started young, running a video rental club when I was 13’. He wanted to put his UCL degree in computer science and business management to use, but he didn’t want to be a cog in a corporate machine. And he had an idea for a start-up venture that would fulfil a genuine social purpose — by bringing banking to the unbanked and those who are badly under-served by established providers.