2019 finalists lunch – Scotland & Northern Ireland

Another fine lunch and a particularly fine Edinburgh venue for our encounter with finalists for the Scotland & Northern Ireland region of The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor Awards 2019. We’re in the Register Club, inside the Edinburgh Grand Hotel on St Andrew’s Square – a building which happens to have been the headquarters of Royal Bank of Scotland before its chief executive Fred Goodwin commissioned an extravagant new campus on the city outskirts. Fred’s name will forever be associated with RBS’s 2008 collapse, and guess what: we’re lunching in a handsome room that actually used to be his office. So here we are discussing new frontiers of entrepreneurship in a setting where the seeds of the financial sector’s near-destruction were once sewn. Proof, perhaps, that capitalism constantly finds interesting ways to renew itself…

With me today are regional guest judge Irene McAleese, co-founder of See.Sense, the Northern Ireland-based smart-bike-light venture that was our regional winner last year; and Gordon Scott, regional director of our sponsor, the private bank Julius Baer.