Michael was a force for getting ideas into the finance industry, and in passing was pivotal in my own finance services career. I first met him when he addressed a meeting of IBRO in London in early Autumn 1982 shortly after he had left FT. When I was seen by most as an ignorant young mother who upbraided a speaker for lack of understanding of what was happening in finance, he in contrast challenged me to expand my doctoral research from merely local to global. He promised to publish if I wrote a book on how technology would change finance over the next 20 years. Later in 1982, visiting his Hammersmith base, I observed a crowd of about 8, silent but for the professional hammering of ancient typewriters, the clicking of ticker tape, the ringing of phones and the excited whispered discussion between Michael and Larry Gurwin. Then followed the rapid creation of a new vital column-inch to lead the latest issue of ‘Retail Banker International’. In London in Spring 1983, he invited me to a dinner of the world’s top bankers at the Dorchester Hotel and gave me 5 minutes warning to lead what became a heated debate amongst them. (That night I took the train back to Scotland to the only paid job I had been able to get – teaching remedial mathematics at a technical college!) By summer 1983, he had published, beautifully, the preliminary findings of my new research. He then, again with no notice, put me on the platform of a full conference of bankers at Park Lane Hilton. Soon, learning from himself and Larry, my writing style began to meet his criteria of “complete, concise, correct”. I had by then seen, in that Hammersmith garret, newsletter issues, back from soft-metal draft printing, going through rapid thorough professional editing, and sent by deadline for hard-metal casting to be put to bed on the printing machines. For Michael, harbinger of the future of banking, was using the same movable type technology that Caxton had brought over from Europe five hundred years previously! In Autumn 1984 he published my new research as ‘Retail Banking in the 1990s’. He then furiously threw himself into its publicity, causing the book to be promulgated throughout the world and to become a seminal influence in technological change. Over the next few years, I continued freelancing in his publications, particularly his ‘EFTPOS Information Service’ that led, as much as chronicled, the advance in digitising retail payments. Meanwhile, I watched the arrival of his first fax machine. Increasingly too, printing was being computerised. Those were the days when fathers played with Sinclair Spectrums, desk-top computing was for scientists and nerds, and mobile phones were just something that dreaming innovators talked about. But Michael was in tune with all this sci-fi stuff that is today’s world – while keeping his feet firmly on the ground of the present day. For he was focussed on selling his newsletters and his conferences, and thus gently bring his readers into the mind-set that persauded them to create our world of fully integrated techological communications. In passing, that exposure his publications gave me all those decades ago rescued me from job limbo and set me on a path that took me to the top in the financial world.