Jonny Fitzgerald

Jonny Fitzgerald (photo) joined Reuters in 1978 from an early career in hotel management after noticing a newspaper advertisement for someone who could sell the intangible benefits of financial information. It changed his life. He became one of the team of sales executives in the swashbuckling days of globe-trotting superstars tasked with selling first the Reuter Monitor money rates service and later Dealing before it even went into service.

“Monitor was probably one of the easiest sales jobs in my life,” he told Reuter Society members and colleagues from that era in a tour of his old horizons ranging from London to Hong Kong, Sydney, New York and finally the Channel Islands.

Those early days were before the Internet, before satellite services even. The UK Post Office, which controlled telecommunications, would take six to nine months to instal lines in client banks and brokerages.

Fitzgerald took early retirement in 2000 and settled on the Isle of Wight which he says he rarely leaves. ■