Name: London Stock Exchange CEO on Identity, Courage & Modernizing Markets
Uploaded: 2025-11-11T18:09:59.000Z
Duration: 36 min 32 s
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To-infinitive

We all have to make big decisions in our lives, decisions that define and influence our professional and personal journeys.

Future simple

If you reflect on them, some were good and some I'm sure you'll definitely regret.

In my nearly three decades as a financial journalist, I've interviewed literally thousands of CEOs, politicians and market voices.

And they all had to make choices to get where they are today.

In this podcast, I hear about those decisions, as well as the moments of doubt, risk and conviction that impacted our guests journeys and the people they lead.

This is Executive Decisions with me, Steve Sedgwick.

In this episode, I speak to Julia Hoggett.

What you're seeking to do is make the best possible decision that you can in that context at that time with the information that you have.

Which also means that if the context changes or the information changes, it is absolutely fine to also change your mind.

Julia is the CEO of the London Stock Exchange.

Today, she's one of the most important voices in British capital markets.

If you have a plan, what you think you're capable of at the time is not necessarily what time proves you're capable of.

Raised in a family of trailblazers, she made history herself as the first openly gay leader of a global stock exchange.

I remember thinking, if I don't come out, it's harder to deny who I am than it is to cope with the consequences of what I'm about to say.

That moment shaped how Julia leads, how she builds culture, and how she makes decisions that ripple across the financial world.

These are Julia Hoggett's executive decisions.

I can't work out why you became a banker, a regulator, and of course, more recently a CEO of the London Stock Exchange.

You have parents who are eminent QCs and judges as well.

I always describe my career as about answering exam questions.

That is sort of the philosophy of my life in many regards.

And I was, as you say, I was at Cambridge reading social and political sciences and chose not to go into the law because my family were all lawyers.

You say you didn't want to go into the legal profession because both of your parents were in that.

Your father, John Hoggett qc, your mother is a very famous judge, Baroness Hale of Richmond as well, who was, I think, the first female head of the Supreme Court, which is extraordinarily eminent as well.

As well, you didn't want to do it because they were doing it because what, you thought you'd be competing with them or because you.

I mean, I grew up with the law as just part of the conversation, you know, I grew up thinking I wanted to be a lawyer and understanding its amazing purpose in serving society.

There was one weekend when my godfather, who was also a Queen's Council, was hosting a party and I was talking with a friend of my father and my godfather's who was also a Queen's Council and ran a settler chambers in London.

And he said, look, Julia, when you graduate, give me a ring and we'll talk about what you can do next.

Fully assuming that I was going to read law and fully assuming I'd want to be a barrister like my father.

Now, my father ran the largest set of planning chambers outside of London at the time and had upwards of 2000 applications for the pupilages that they gave out.

Not giving me anything that they shouldn't do, but kind of articulating to me really clearly that unique opportunity that I would be given because of who my parents were, that those 2,000 other people who were handwriting their applications to my father's chambers in Manchester would not get.

And I realized would I know at the end of my career whether I got there because of me or because of who my parents were.

And that was why I did that handbrake turn and selected the thing I was next most interested in, which I thought was politics and became sociology because I realized I wanted to make my own path.

But I didn't want to feel that I'd kind of gone on their coattails in terms of what I did next.

Extraordinary maturity at a young age, to say at the end of my career, I won't know whether I made it on my own.

It's the opposite of the Nepo baby syndrome we hear so much about now as well.

Have you always been so considered in everything you've done?

Because I think one thing I know is you only make it in life if you're very hard working, you are incredibly talented or you have enormous amount of luck.

You need at least a couple of those to really make, in my opinion, to make it as well.

I believe in the hard work bit and you believe in the hard work bit, but I mean, luck and opportunity, they do come into it as well.

My career has been an almost infinite number of sliding doors moments for me.

The way I describe it is I, I got taught the rules of the game of what I think kind of classically, and we shouldn't call it this anymore, but so white collar work around the dining table, you know, that sense of how do you operate in these spaces, how do you understand what the appropriate behavior is, how do you think about what those motivations are?

And one of the things I'm very conscious of is that's an immense privilege and there are incredibly talented people who are growing up in households where that's not the case.

I know you're stunningly proud of your father, but he was a man in a man's world.

Your mother has had unbelievable success.

No, not unbelievable, fantastic and well earned success as well.

But how much of a major influence has her as a groundbreaker become for you, as being a groundbreaker yourself?

She grew up at a time when there were only six places at Cambridge for women to read law, out of a hundred places, because there were only two female colleges and they had three students each.

We forget that actually by being men only colleges, it was actually saying you could therefore only have 94% of any year intake was men, not women.

I think there may have been one female High Court judge, no female appeal court judges, no female law lords ever.

And so she thought she was going to be a solicitor in a small county town solicitors office, you know.

And so the idea that kind of if you have a plan, what you're actually capable of is what you set in the plan is, is actually not often the case.

I think it's incredibly valuable, particularly the, the more senior my roles have become and the more high profile they've become to be able to have observed somebody else go through that.

Yeah, you know, I think getting a ringside seat to some of the things that mums had to navigate gives you an understanding of just the realities of what it actually is to sit in these kind of seats and what, what comes with it, if you sort of mean.

I think there's something more fundamental actually though, which is that what Mum has done at various points in time.

It's two philosophical things I think that it's taught me.

The first is one of the most foundational things.

She was, was a law commissioner, so she wrote the Children act, she wrote the no Fault Divorce Report that took about 20 years to actually come into being.

They're tasked by the government to look at the existing body of law, look at this world as it is today, and decide whether that body of law is fit for purpose or whether it needs to be updated.

And she was doing that at a time that it was really to give children rights both vis a vis their parents and vis a vis the state.

First time in British legal history, effectively.

And therefore she engendered in me this concept that if you don't like the system, work to change the system.

Not that you're just passive recipients of it, but that you can act on a problem and you can think big about doing so.

And when you become a regulator, that's how you have to think.

You don't make rules for one company, you make rules for an ecosystem.

So that sense that that is possible, I think has just always been there.

From watching my mother's career and every stage of your career as you've become, gone from success to success to success, that line, if you don't like the system, change the system that stuck with you.

We all have loads of wonderful sayings and things we want to do, but is that one of the key things for you?

If it's not working, don't be a passive recipient of it.

Consider what role you could play in making it work.

The other thing is, one of the things I realized, particularly when I became a regulator, is one of the acts of leadership is to decide things.

Now, if you just punt it back time and time again, go, I need a bit more information about this, a bit more information about this.

You're actually not moving your organisation forward, particularly as a regulator, because it just spins the wheels and goes back around the houses.

So you have to be prepared to have a risk appetite to make decisions.

But Mum used to tell me this about judging.