The fascinating Travelex story is told to Malcolm J. Naudi by none other than its chairman and CEO Lloyd Dorfman
Signage at the Thomas Cook Financial Services branches in Malta and Gozo came down last week and, in a major rebranding operation, new signage of the Travelex Group went up instead.
"This is a historic occasion for our business in Malta," Lloyd Dorfman, chairman and chief executive officer of Travelex, told me last week when he made it a point to be here to be part of it.
"Malta is one of the jewels in our European crown. Following our acquisition of Thomas Cook on March 27, 2001, we are rebranding the Thomas Cook operations under the Travelex name.
The Malta operation, he said with pride, is "well established and well run", under managing director Brian Micallef, "a combination of really dedicated local focus, but leveraging off the global resources of the business that Travelex is today".
The Travelex story is one that started 26 years ago when Mr Dorfman, a young lawyer, opened a small foreign exchange shop in the centre of London to service the tourist public.
From those humble beginnings, the Travelex Group has grown to the world's largest foreign exchange specialist and the leading non-bank provider of global payments for businesses with a £25 billion turnover, 6,000 staff in 31 countries doing business in 97 countries.
Still a private company, Mr Dorfman is a 63% shareholder, 3i (a leading European investment company) has 33%, with the remaining 7% owned by the Travelex management.
Looking back on that growth, Mr Dorfman told me his first expansion in 1979 was to open a foreign exchange bureau in a motorway service station half-way between London and Dover, the world's busiest ferry passenger port.
"I started to develop the business in the area of servicing the travelling public as opposed to the tourist public," he observed. The next step was to service ferry passengers on board the ferries, and the ferries themselves.
"We built a name and a reputation not only in servicing the passengers on board the ships or going to the ships, but also in servicing the requirements of the ships themselves: taking money off the ship for the ship, the duty-free shops - all those sorts of ancillary services," Mr Dorfman said.
"The recurring theme throughout the development of the business, and indeed even here in Malta, for example, with the growth of our payments business, has been to provide added value and to provide service in an area of activity where the banks, historically, did not try very hard."
In 1986 he made his first big step into airports. "From ferries, ships and ports, I decided that if ever we were going to be a serious business in this area of activity, we needed to get into an airport.
"The only airport opportunity that seemed to be coming up at the time was the brand new Terminal 4 at Heathrow, the busiest international airport in the world, which is where Air Malta flies into.
"We had to fight to reverse two refusals just to be able to participate in the tender because we were not a national bank, we weren't a high street anything and in those days they only gave those contracts to the very big national banks.
"But sometimes long shots - and the small man (not in size, for Mr Dorfman is over 2 m tall) - win. It was a huge watershed; very controversial at the time. The rest, as they say, is history.
"Today there are no national banks operating in any of the major UK airports, or indeed around many of the gateway city airports around the world. In time all airports, particularly those that want to maximise their commercial revenue, will only be able to do that if they go to the specialist operators.
"For the big banks, this is not a core business. This is one of our core businesses. We are the world's largest operator of airport currency exchange facilities. Something like 40% of the world's airline passengers go through terminals that we operate in. We live and breathe this business.
"All of us, from me downwards, are applying all our thinking time to what opportunities there are, how we can operate our marketing, operations, systems. Everybody's involved in these businesses but these businesses for the traditional providers of these services, the big banks, are not core businesses."
Bigger things were yet to come. Speaking to members of the financial services community at a business breakfast at the Eastern Breeze restaurant at the InterContinental in St Julian's last Wednesday, Mr Dorfman listed four recurring themes in the Travelex story:
1) persistence is everything;
2) stick to what you know and who you know;
3) conventional thinking will only produce conventional results; and
4) self-belief.
"When Travelex wanted to bid for Thomas Cook's financial services business, we were excluded. This was a business that was three times the size of Travelex and I saw it as a lifetime opportunity. I had to kick the door down to get into the ring and bid.
"Look and work with people you feel comfortable with. We had to think differently from the big banks, which are bureaucratic and offer an insensitive service. We concentrate on added value relationships.
"In Australia we put currency exchange facilities in domestic airport terminals. People thought us crazy and yet we were dramatically successful.
"In the Thomas Cook acquisition, we competed against much larger companies and outbid everybody else. I borrowed £440 million from Barclays Bank and repaid the purchase price in seven months.
"Fourthly, self-belief was fundamental in the development of the business. When we bought the Mutual Omaha network, we obtained 50 terminals in the US overnight."
Mr Dorfman is a hands-on businessman. "I love business with a passion. The culture and spirit of business comes from the top. As it cascades down, people can feel that enthusiasm. We pride ourselves on being still enterpreneurially cultured and spirited."
He has lost little of his lean and hungry attitude. "We try very hard to keep our reporting lines short and historically short reporting lines, our flexibility, our can-do attitude, our willingness to go where no-one has ever boldly thought to go before, has been our competitive edge.
"One of the key challenges for us as a business the size we are today is to keep those qualities. And we try hard to do it. Yes, we need to respect the need for systems and control because of the nature of the business.
"I pride myself on the fact that any manager - pretty well at any level - if they want to pick up the phone can speak to me."
Mr Dorfman is also a good listener. He made it a point while in Malta to visit all seven branches in Malta, apart from head office at Il-Piazzetta. He also spoke to many clients at a reception last Wednesday evening at the Intercontinental and met Finance Minister John Dalli and the chairman of the Malta Financial Services Authority, Joseph V. Bannister.
Yet, at the end of the day, he is decisive and will commit himself with a firm decision. Apart from the large banks and financial institutions, Mr Dorfman sees as Travelex's main competition coming from American Express. "They operate in many countries, they have a travellers' cheques business, they have a smaller outsourcing business than ours, they have a much smaller airport business than us and even for them our equivalent businesses for them are not core businesses.
"But we come against them on a global basis. We pride ourselves on being innovative... (We were the first) foreign exchange company to participate in frequent flier programmes. We invented something called the buyback guarantee. As far as airports are concerned, we look at it as if we are a retailer of money rather than a provider of financial services."
Looking to the future, Mr Dorfman sees the euro more of an opportunity than a threat. "It is not for me to say what Malta should do. Whatever happens, we regard the euro as a win-win situation. Our vision is that of a global group and we will end up with a larger slice of a small cake."
My final question to Mr Dorfman related to the development of the Malta business. "We see Malta as a hub of expertise from where we can expand our business to North Africa and the Middle East. We would be crazy not to build on that.
"Malta has a strategic position and I would be surprised if, five years down the road, we would not have developed the business further."