THE final moments of a sports match can be excruciating. Even more so if you placed a heavy bet on one of the teams to win. That was what happened to Conor Foley, an avid rugby fan, when he watched New Zealand lose in a shock defeat to France in the quarterfinals of the Rugby World Cup in 1999.
“I never had exposure to losses like that before,” says Foley. But that sickening experience, coupled with the dot-com boom, had an even more dramatic effect on his life. He quit his job as a head trader at Banque Paribas in Dublin, Foley’s hometown, and set up an online spread betting firm.
“I decided that you couldn’t beat the odds, so I jumped to the other side,” says Foley. With his brother Michael and another partner he set up SportsSpread in Dublin in March 2000, a mere six months after New Zealand crashed out of the World Cup.
The launch cost £250,000 – the trio’s own money – most of which went on the website and marketing. But it didn’t exactly get off to a flying start. “I remember the first day, I don’t think that we got a single customer until about 4.30pm.”
A decade ago, the internet was fairly trial and error. After an aborted online casino, Foley hit the jackpot when he launched a financial spread betting platform called WorldSpreads back in 2003. “I had an economics degree and my background was currency trading, so it was what I knew.”
Until 2009, the company had two brands: sports and financial, but last year he sold the sports and Irish side of the business for €12m to concentrate purely on WorldSpreads. Foley held the role of group CEO until earlier this month when he also took over the day-to-day running of WorldSpreads in London.
To say that he relishes the role is something of an understatement: “This is the age of financial spread betting. It’s as perfect a product as it gets. There is leverage, no capital gains tax, low transaction costs and you can trade 24 hours a day.” The company has grown from six employees in 2000, to more than 80 now across 14 locations. It listed on Aim, the London Stock Exchange’s small cap exchange, back in 2007. And what about the future? He wants to continue building “white label”, revenue-sharing partnerships – it currently has partnerships with Ladbrokes, Victor Chandler and 188Bet – and developing the business overseas.
Although it’s obvious that Foley’s ambitions stretch beyond this (it’s given away in his razor sharp focus and the plush office in the City) he isn’t going to adopt the traits of a super-charged boss: “I don’t get up everyday and go for a run before 6am. I get up at 8am, am in my office at 9am and put in a full eight hours, although inevitably, there is something happening to keep you back in the evevning. Something like this has to be a labour of love.”
CV | CONOR FOLEY
Age: 43
Home: London
Hobbies: Currently training for his pilot’s licence in Florida: “the weather is good there.”
Reading: A Mobile Fortune: The Life and Times of Denis O’Brien, by Siobhan Creaton.
He is also the founder of the Irish International Business Network (IIBN): “Every successful business man can network well.”
