Why I’ve Joined Sideways as Co-Founder

Adventures in Trust

I first met Daljit Singh in Cannes. Not the Festival of Creativity set in sunny June but Milia (multimedia) in a cold, dark early Feb slot. This was 1998 and we got to know each other over a cold beer huddled at the back of an even colder bar. He was running Digit, one of the first genuinely digitally-native design consultancies, doing work that synced closely with what I was doing at antirom at the time. We’ve stayed friends ever since.

Both our careers have taken plenty of turns in the decades since, but there’s a through-line we share: trying to help brands navigate a digital landscape that keeps getting more powerful, more pervasive and simultaneously more complex and fragmented. And in particular, taking seriously the role of experience as a brand-building force, something the industry has been chronically slow to realise.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about running a consultancy today: generalism is a trap. The landscape is too broad, too competitive, too genuinely complex. I look at things holistically, I always have, but that’s precisely why I understand that trying to tackle the whole ecosystem at once is like trying to boil the ocean. You end up spreading effort across too many disciplines and the strategic focus that should be your sharpest tool just dissolves.

The smarter move is to take a slice. Pick the most important foundational concept and use it as a lateral cut SIDEWAYS through the whole business, connecting product, experience, operations, communications and culture in one coherent line of sight. That’s what trust gives you. Not a soft, woolly aspiration, but an organising force. A lens that forces prioritisation and makes hard calls about what matters most.

One of the benefits of working across as many domains as I have, thirty years spanning digital product, brand, sustainability, fintech, web3, is that you get good at connecting dots that don’t obviously belong together. And the thing about trust is that it’s earned through consistency across all of those contexts. One inconsistency and the whole signal degrades. So the connective tissue matters as much as any individual touchpoint.

Daljit’s position here is rare. As a co-founder of ANNA Money, he’s operated the actual growth levers. He knows from the inside that LTV, NPS, retention, loyalty, brand love are all downstream of trust. These metrics don’t drive trust, they emerge from it. So asking how you earn trust and how you repair it where it’s been damaged, is one of the most commercially important questions a business can answer right now.

We’re starting with a focus on fintech and deliberately so. London is the global centre of gravity for fintech, a genuine cluster of founders, investors, regulators and operators who are all grappling with the same tension: the need to move fast while operating in a domain where trust is the whole product. That concentration of serious, relevant businesses makes it the right place to build a practice and test a thesis.

My own experience is directly relevant here. At Poke I worked on Zopa’s first product iteration, when peer-to-peer lending was a genuinely alien concept and the platform needed to project progressiveness while simultaneously earning trust from complete strangers. Zopa is now a unicorn. We also worked with HSBC after a student loan debacle left them deeply unpopular with a generation of customers, rebuilding trust through a sustained programme of engagement. And more recently, working closely with Publicis we relaunched the UBS brand to drive a recovery from the reputational fallout of 2008, a substantial reframing that required real honesty about what the business stood for and wanted to become.

So I’m not coming at this theoretically. Trust problems are concrete. They live in specific touchpoints, specific product decisions, specific moments in a customer relationship. The work is about designing your way into them.

So I’m very excited to support Daljit in Sideways. And I’m also genuinely excited by the network of collaborators around Sideways: Hem Patel, Alex Light, Greg Reed, Stephen Barber, Chanuki Illushka Seresinhe, PhD and her PhD research, Tom Banks. It’s a serious group.

More at trustsideways.com.