AS ITS co-founder and launch director, Richard Duvall played a key role in the creation of Egg, a division of Prudential Banking and now the largest and most successful internet and telephone-only bank.

He joined Prudential in the early Nineties, during a period of radical transformation; it was teaching managers to challenge assumptions and question everything. Duvall embodied this ethos, and conveyed his ideas with such enthusiasm that Bill Gates described him as “one of the most dynamic people I have ever met.”

Born in 1962, Duvall read physics and electronics at Imperial College London, gaining a first. He started his career at GEC Systems in 1983, developing speech compression systems, and in 1986 moved to Logica, where he worked on computer security evaluation.

He was part of the team that created the Information Security Forum and he was co-author of Coopers & Lybrand’s report series The Security of Network Systems. He worked with Cooper’s & Lybrand between 1987 and 1992, setting up its financial services consulting practice in Malaysia and leading its IT practice there.

As the creative force behind Egg’s beginnings, Duvall developed the brand and business plan. When outside consultants prepared reports that pointed to the impossibility of Egg breaking into an apparently saturated banking market, Duvall unpicked them and persuaded Prudential that Egg could work. He secured £50 million for its launch and, becoming chief marketing officer in 1998, helped to convert an uncertain public to the ideaof internet-only banking.

In 2002 Duvall became Egg’s chief international officer. It bought Zebank, a French internet bank, and launched itself in France in November 2002. Duvall headed the French operation but it failed to break into the French market and withdrew in 2003.

Duvall then left Egg with two other executives to start New Barn Studios, a company whose mission was to look for, and work with, future trends. He employed market research companies and social ethnographers, who researched people’s choices and motivations by living with them.

A champion of the “individual revolution”, Duvall coined the term “freeformer”, a label used to describe a consumer tired of working with institutions and more inclined to go it alone. Some ten per cent of society at the moment are freeformers, according to Duvall, and there is an accelerating trend towards the “consumer entrepreneur”.

The result of Duvall’s thinking was Zopa, a kind of lending-bank-meets-eBay, which he founded in 2005. The idea was to match would-be borrowers with potential lenders online. With intermediary high-street banks out of the equation, in theory borrowers can expect a better rate, and lenders a better rate of return.

Some have criticised the fact that, although the exchange does credit assessment, customers lending money through a P2P (peer-to-peer) exchange are taking the risk of bad debt, albeit a risk diversified by the money being split into small parcels going to lots of different lenders. Nevertheless, Zopa currently has more than 100,000 members and has recently been launched in the US. The financial services industry is watching it closely, interested to see whether it succeeds as Duvall imagined.

Duvall is survived by his wife, Krys, and by two sons and two daughters.

Richard Duvall, co-founder of Egg bank, was born on January 24, 1962. He died of cancer on October 16, 2006, aged 44.