We are quite a way off before people travel around the world without cash in their pockets. The growth of plastic and electronic transactions have tended to impact traveller's cheques rather than cash.
When I started the business, only banks operated at airports, only banks issued travellers' cheques, only banks issued international payments, only banks serviced their own branch networks.
In 2003, Travelex acquired Thomas Cook Financial Services. We only had use of the Thomas Cook name for five years, so I had to increase public awareness of Travelex to migrate all Cook operations over to it. It was a success.
If you are going to think the same as everyone else and do the same as everyone else, you will end up being the same as everyone else. In today's competitive environment you have to think a bit differently.
I've always loved and enjoyed the theatre, but I have to say that none of our sponsorships have been done because I'm one of those chairmen and chief executives who goes gooey-eyed about something. They are done for a very specific marketing and commercial agenda.
For centuries, the arts and philanthropists have worked well together: look at the Tate family and the Courtaulds. If you've been fortunate enough to have some success in business, I think it's important to put something back.
By all means, let's have free trade and no trade barriers and a common market. But where did it all suddenly become about our own economic and political destiny being surrendered to Brussels with agendas that arguably have very little to do with the interests of the British people and British voters?
Individual and corporate support is vital to building on London's leadership in the arts, and I hope others will join me in wanting to build on the National's role at the heart of modern theatre and sustaining it long into the future.
I do have a fundamental concern about us losing control of our own destiny, and this is not just about the euro. You can expand and extend it into the whole constitutional issue. The British people have been suckered with regard to how the whole currency and constitutional issues have been sold to them.
I have no interest in owning a football club; I don't play golf; I don't like horseracing and I'd rather become a professional bungee jumper than enter politics.
