The Monitise service is marketed as Monilink in the UK and around 60 per cent of bank customers currently have access to the service – banks include HSBC, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, Alliance & Leicester, first direct and Ulster Bank.

It has recently done a deal with Carphone Warehouse to provide Monitise mobile money software on handsets sold by the retailer. In March it signed a joint venture agreement with Made in Africa to launch a pan-East African mobile money network. This is a significant advancement in Monitise’s growth plans since it delivers the sort of economic growth that Made in Africa is championing, and it gives Monitise a foothold in a country that is fractured in terms of the banking system.

 Lukies came up with the idea to connect the banking world with the mobile phone world so that customer payments could be made in 2002. He describes his idea as ‘more serendipity than strategic genius’. And yet he hit on a market that is growing exponentially: Juniper Research predicted that more than 41.4bn financial transactions will be carrier out by mobile phones by the end of 2011.

Despite being a start-up with no track record Lukies and his Monitise co-founder Steven Atkinson succeeded where the mobile phone industry had previously failed. “It looked logical,” says Lukies of the opportunity. In fact the mobile operators had come up with their own version of a mobile phone payment system but the banks did not trust them. Lukies tackled it from a different perspective and realised that the key to making his business work was to get the banks onside.
From the outset the Monitise team was convinced that their idea and the simple technology that underpinned it would be accepted by the banks. “We spent the first six months listening to people,” says Lukies.

But even listening to the concerns of the banks did not help the Monitise team understand the nitty-gritty of banking regulations. Lukies admits he underestimated the complexity of dealing with the banks and navigating their security requirements. He points to one bank that took three and a half years and 279 meetings to convince.

But Lukies’ determination to turn his idea into a reality is proof that successful entrepreneurs don’t give up – especially if they have come up with a means of transforming an industry.

He says: “I am a passionate believer that the great ideas will come from small companies rather than big because they need their own life to breathe. And then they need scale.”

Lukies recognised that big companies can help smaller enterprises to transform their innovative ideas or products if they recognise an idea is good and that it can be scaled – and then help scale it.

It is a strategy that Monitise has successfully employed. It was incubated by the IT giant Morse, which gave it a track record, financial capital, and crucially the credibility needed for negotiations with the mobile operators and the banks. Lukies admits this was an important part of the early success of Monitise.

He says: “We were clever with the capital raising. We became part of a £300m company with public shareholders. You can inherit a track record. Companies can fall down if the structure of the company is not set up to do business with big companies.”

Even with the might of Morse, Lukies still had to overcome hurdles to get Monitise off the ground.  He had a contact at Link, whose ATMs were used by the UK’s High Street banks, and this gave him a head start in persuading the highly security conscious banks that they could work with the mobile phone companies. But even this apparent advantage did not help Lukies navigate the complex labyrinth of red tape that came with dealing with the highly security conscious banks.

In fact Monitise succeeded because it was small enough to adapt when it needed to in order to comply with what the banks required. Lukies says: “Small companies can reinvent themselves and be more flexible. It does not mean you always win, but it means that you come at things from a different angle.”

Lukies is convinced that every small company goes through the same five stages of the journey he is on with Monitise. It starts with a concept, then comes validation of the concept, commercialising the concept, growing the business, and finally making it sustainable or exiting.

For Lukies the expansion of Monitise is the realisation of a dream. He says that anyone who sets up a company exists on ‘a combination of fear of failure and confidence’.