The Martindale Hubbell Counsel to Counsel on best practice in corporate legal services, which was held in January

Egg started life as a telephone bank set up by our majority shareholder, the Prudential Insurance Company, to take in the cash proceeds of maturing insurance policies rather than allow those proceeds to be banked elsewhere.
In October 1998 the telephone bank was relaunched under the Egg brand as an internet bank. We felt that by then the internet was sufficiently developed to use as a new distribution channel.
The plan was to attract customers by offering a savings product at market leading interest rates. The policy was to adopt an approach that would disrupt the traditional structure of pricing and margins in this sector of the banking industry. The hope was that customers would respond despite the traditional reluctance of banking customers to change their banking relationships.
This policy worked to an extent that took the company completely by surprise.
The plan had been to build up to a significant customer base over a five-year period ending in October 2003. But the target was reached in just seven months.
Not even in our most ambitious moments had we imagined initial demand of anything like that scale. Consequently, we learned the hard way about the down-to-earth practicalities of dealing with huge demand, when launching a new product through a new distribution mechanism – in this case, the internet.
That experience remains of enormous value to us and has influenced the way we organise the launch of new products.
Now we have three main businesses.
One is the internet bank, with a range of traditional products presented and distributed through mediums that are not traditional, primarily through the internet. These products include the Egg savings account, credit card, mortgages and personal loans.
The second main area of business is the selling of “best of breed” products of other financial services providers through our website and under our brand as part of our strategy of open finance.
And finally, there is Egg Retail which is our online shopping mall.
Some of the products we have launched have been traditional ones delivered via a new distribution channel, such as the internet. But we have also launched products that, at the time of launch, had not been seen before in the UK.
When looking back over the experience of the legal function when launching these products, certain common factors emerged. These have now become our “best practice” in the sense that they describe, albeit in a fairly generalised way, the process through which we create and launch new products.
Our best practice is founded on four main pillars:
- culture;
- the value of precedents;
- the interaction of the creative process with certain checks and balances; and
- approval by the board.