Meet Our Team – Daniel Harrison Interview

We are committed to providing the best service and support for our clients, and that starts with recruiting the best people to work across our company.

One of our most innovative leaders has been Daniel Harrison. He has been with True Potential from the beginning, working across several departments and helping to build successes such as impulseSave®. He has been one of the great advocates for helping people to close the Savings Gap, and has pushed our business to build technology that makes goal setting and performance tracking easier.

As one of our Senior Partners and Head Of Technology, Daniel is one of the inspiring key figures at True Potential. We sat down to talk with him about business, investing, and the future. 

How did you get started in the industry?

I was lucky enough to have a father who was in the industry, and he was setting up a new business venture. He’d told me that I’d have to save up to pay to go to university. However, I knew enough about computers, and decided to go straight into work with his new venture. He was lucky enough that I was able to help, and I came cheap and desperate to prove myself!

Eighteen years later and it was the best decision I made. I’m very glad that I was given that guidance and help.

Tell us about your area of expertise?

I’m an organiser, a problem solver, and someone who enjoys making big decisions.

Having worked in just about every department, I like to think I have a great understanding of our product and how it can best suit our clients.  

What do you enjoy most about your job?

It sounds a real cliché, but no two days are ever the same. True Potential is an organisation that does so many things for our clients, and this means there’s always something new to look at, adjust and improve.

Dealing with a wide spectrum of clients, from advisers to accountants, from consumers to corporations, it means that we have to be able to deal with a multitude of needs and questions. It keeps things fresh!  

What makes the company special?

Three things really:

1) Our clients, particularly our advisers. They do a great job showing people that they’re going to have to stop spending as much and start saving something. That’s never easy I’d imagine!

2) Our staff. A lot of the people who are here have worked with me and the others for years now. This level of retention is great – they understand our clients and they understand what makes True Potential tick. In addition to that, I like to think that we have a great working environment here. Yes, we push the team hard and demand high standards of them, but there’s a great deal of fun and joking which goes on too here, which I think is important.

3) Our agility. If you look at True Potential ten years ago you wouldn’t recognise it if you compared it to today in terms of what we offer. Whilst our approach has fundamentally stayed the same, we’ve not been afraid to predict trends and implement them for the better. For instance, nine years ago, we were the first Financial Services organisation in the UK to offer a mobile app. True Potential has the agility and courage to change and improve our proposition. We don’t always get it right, but I like to think we do most of the time.  

What are the most important things to consider for first time investors?

Do you know what you are buying and why? That’s why we’re so set on goals as a way of investing. If you have a defined/named goal then you can truly ‘own it’ and fully understand why you’re investing it and how well you’re performing against this goal.

What are you most excited about in regard to the future of the company?

Hitting our targets and becoming the pre-eminent FinTech brand in the UK. That sounds very simple, but I think the UK market still has huge potential to continue to grow. We want to help millions of people begin to invest and take a real interest in their savings. Nobody does that right now and we think we can.

You can learn more about what Daniel has worked on, visit our Savings Gap and technology pages. 

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