Leaders' Lives: Dame Julia Hoggett

Dame Julia Hoggett: The Market-Maker with a Mission

From the trading floor to the heart of UK capital markets, Dame Julia Hoggett has built her career not by climbing ladders, but by solving problems. She talks to us about purpose, leadership, and why she still hasn’t finished her first exam question.

“You don’t climb. You pivot. You interrogate. You run towards the fire.”

That, in essence, is how Dame Julia Hoggett has navigated her singular career, which spans from sociologist to investment banker, from CEO of a covered bond bank during the global financial crisis to Director of Market Oversight at the FCA, and now Chief Executive of the London Stock Exchange.

She doesn’t describe it as a career path. She calls it a series of exam questions.

“That’s what gets me up every day,” she says. “It’s the same thing that drives founders: a problem you want to fix. Once I see the question, I have to try and solve it.”

It’s a framework that makes sense of what might otherwise look like an eclectic or even unorthodox trajectory. But the logic behind it is razor-sharp: move not towards titles, but towards impact. And it’s this same logic that now sees Hoggett leading the London Stock Exchange - a 300-year-old fintech, as she describes it, with a reformer’s mindset and a reformer’s energy.

The First Question

Hoggett was born in the northwest of England, into a home steeped in law. Her mother would later become President of the Supreme Court; her father, the head of the largest set of planning law chambers outside London. The law was always present: over dinner, in books, on phone calls. It was, initially, her destiny.

But then came the first exam question: was a legal career really hers or one she’d inherited?

“I realised I’d never know if I’d got there on my own merit,” she recalls. “So, I took a handbrake turn.”

That turn took her to Cambridge, and to sociology, where she found herself fascinated by the ways societies are shaped, power is distributed, and decisions are made. It was, in hindsight, the ideal foundation for someone who would spend her life exploring how systems - from capital markets to regulatory frameworks - serve (or fail to serve) society.

A postgrad scholarship studying Malawi’s place in the global economy brought a stark realisation: the answers weren’t in the stacks of Cambridge’s library. They were out in the world - in policy, in markets, in capital flows.

Her father made a suggestion: go and work in investment banking. Find the answers there. So, she did.

And she hasn’t followed a traditional blueprint since.

“What you think you're capable of at the time,” she says, “is not necessarily what time proves you're capable of.”

It’s why she never had a rigid career plan. “If you’d planned based on what was visible to you at the time you started your career, you would have lowballed the plan.”

From Capital to Conduct

Over the next two decades, Hoggett became known not just as a technical expert, but as someone who could ask (and seek to answer) the hardest questions. Could she help sovereign nations raise capital? Could she run a bank through a crisis? Could she try to design a better regulatory approach from the inside? At every turn, she tried to say yes - not because she had the answer, but because she wanted to find it.

Her time at the FCA, which spanned the forex probe, Brexit, and MiFID II, was instrumental. She approached regulation not as an oppositional force to markets, but as a means to strengthen them.

“In Investment Banking, you can have good conduct and good returns. That shouldn’t be revolutionary or oppositional.”

At the FCA, she also learned the difference between authority and leadership, and why the latter can be claimed from any seat, not by waiting for a title.

“Leadership is dancing on the edge of your authority,” she says. “It’s going right to the edge of the box for which you’re responsible - and owning it, all of it. You don’t wait to be told.”

Leading the Exchange: Two Exam Questions on the Curve

One evening in 2020, as Apple surpassed the entire FTSE 100 in value, Hoggett, then at the FCA, sat down and started to write down her thoughts on the answer to another exam question. What could she influence that needed to change in the UK’s market structure to stop this from happening again? The next day, she was called by a head-hunter asking why she hadn’t applied for the CEO role at the London Stock Exchange.

Now in post, she is tackling not one but two major exam questions: how to make UK capital markets the best place for great companies to start, grow, scale and stay - and how to ensure the exchange itself evolves, embracing private markets, digital assets and tokenisation to better serve companies and investors at every stage.

“If exchanges are valuable when a company lists,” she asks, “why aren’t they valuable throughout the whole lifecycle? Why not convene capital earlier, with more transparency, more liquidity, and more optionality?”

She describes stock exchanges as conveners: “our job is to bring together those who have capital with those who need it” and believes that convening power can be transformational, especially when deployed beyond public equities and into the broader universe of assets.

Leadership, Failure, and Finding Your Style

What’s striking about Hoggett is how little ego she brings to the role. She takes the job seriously, herself, less so.

“I’m just a custodian,” she says. “Someone more talented could be in this seat. That’s why I work as hard as I do.”

She believes leadership starts long before a title.

“You can lead from any seat you’re in,” she says. “If you're waiting to be given authority, you’ve already missed the point.”

Her own style (direct, curious, deeply human) was shaped early on by the example of two senior women in her first team. One was meticulous and methodical. The other was more free-wheeling. Together, they showed her there was no single archetype.

She’s still rigorous today: she plans her weeks obsessively, keeps everything in OneNote, and approaches crisis as a cultural litmus test. Because, for her, failure isn’t the exception, it’s the proving ground.

“Running businesses is about a brutally honest assessment,” she says. “Delusion is dangerous. You can only lead if you're honest about where you are.”

Championing Women and Visibility

As one of the most senior LGBTQ+ women in the UK, Hoggett knows how powerful visibility can be and how rare it still is.

Her first two female bosses were vital role models, and one encouraged her to come out at work: “What they taught me was that I could be myself, that I didn’t have to construct two versions of me just to succeed. That meant all my energy could go into the work.” It’s led her to believe that leaders have a responsibility to create safe environments for others to do the same.

“If you can’t see it, it’s hard to believe you can be it,” she says. “And if there’s only one version of success in the room, anyone who’s different assumes they have to become that version to fit in.”

She’s vocal about expanding the definition of leadership, particularly for women in male-dominated sectors like finance and tech.

“I’ve met so many women who say, ‘But I can only do this.’ And I say: you trained just like me. You’ve got the same skills. You’re just describing yourself through the lens of your current role - not through the lens of everything you are capable of.”

It’s a point that resonates deeply with Boardwave’s mission to multiply female leadership in software.

“The way women help other women is by making sure their contribution is recognised,” she says. “We need to amplify each other - and men need to do that too.”

“Leadership isn’t about being the loudest voice in the room. It’s about making sure the right voices are heard.”

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Quick Fire with Dame Julia Hoggett

Most important skill for leaders today? “Humility. And humanity.”

What do you wish you'd learned earlier? “That it’s never about you. It takes a village.”

A book or resource that changed your perspective? “People have done that. My mentors. My friends. I’ve also learnt that I don’t need to be right, I just need us to get to the right answer.”

What piece of tech could you not live without? “OneNote. Every meeting, every to-do list, every paper - it all goes in there. It’s how I organise my week, and I’ve got it on every device. I can go back and find everything.”

What do you do to recharge after a tough day? “Play golf. It gets me outside, it gives me focus, and I don’t need to think about anything else.”

One habit that’s contributed to your success? “Just boring old hard work. You have to work very hard to make it look easy.”

Advice to aspiring entrepreneurs? “Act. That’s it. If you want to solve a problem, solve it.”

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In Closing

Dame Julia Hoggett may be leading one of the world’s oldest financial institutions, but her mindset is anything but legacy. She is restless, intellectually rigorous, and relentlessly focused on impact - on fixing the plumbing of capital markets so that capital flows where it should.

Over the years, she’s built a rare kind of panoramic perspective having sat on every side of the capital markets table.

“I’ve been an issuer, I’ve run a bank that was also an investor, I’ve been a regulator, a policymaker. It gives you context. And when you lead with context, hopefully you can lead with reasonable judgement.”

And though she jokes that she still hasn’t answered her first exam question, it’s clear she’s already helped reframe the syllabus for the next generation of leaders.