This is Money’s Richard Browning died suddenly last weekend aged 57, this is a tribute to our wonderful friend.
It’s only rock and roll… but he liked it: Richard Browning, 1966 to 2023
Richard Browning was a founding member of This is Money in 1999.
He would tell people this meant he was one of the few financial journalists to have seen out the dot com boom and bust – and that it made him very old in internet years.
Yet, almost 25 years later, Rich was still at the forefront of every new This is Money venture and had never lost his enthusiasm to push us to try to do something new.
A man with a wicked sense of humour and natural comic timing, Richard had a knack for bringing people together and making their days shine a little bit brighter.
As our development editor he didn’t write much – although when he did it was pure gold – but worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make This is Money work as well as possible for readers.
If you’ve ever used one of our calculators, checked the savings tables, looked at a share price, listened to the This is Money podcast, and much more, then you have Rich to thank.
In fact, anyone who has ever read a This is Money story has Rich to thank.
His hard work, dedication and good humour are the foundations that have underpinned This is Money since day one.
But Richard’s endeavours reach much wider than that.
Our friend Rich was one of the men and women who built the internet.
When we think now of those who’ve done that and shaped our lives in the digital era, it’s names like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk that spring to mind.
Yet, away from the billionaire barons are those with a lower profile – and much less in the bank – who are just as important.
From today’s vantage point, where mobile phones put the digital world in our pocket, it’s easy to forget quite what a pioneer Richard Browning was to be working on a new financial website in 1999.
To put it in perspective, that was the first year I even used the internet, having started university after a snowboard season when I’d go shiver in a French Alps phonebox and get my parents to call me back to communicate with those back home.
By the time I started as a reporter at This is Money in late 2005, Rich had already played a vital role in turning it into a successful, award-winning website, with an array of tools and features to help people understand their finances and engage with them.
That was when I first met Rich, just over 18 years ago, and he instantly became a friend who made me feel welcome in the daunting environment of my first national newspaper job.
We bonded over a shared love of music and travel, swapping tales of live gigs and crazy long car journeys across Europe.
Rich, whose wife Isabelle is French, would reply to the question of ‘what are you up to this weekend’ with a response such as ‘going to France for dinner’.
His dry sense of humour would mean that you’d think he was winding you up, but often he really was just casually popping across the Channel.
This is Money in the early days – a screenshot from February 2000 as the dot com bubble burst and Richard Browning was involved in pioneering online financial journalism
From the outset, Richard’s passion for trying to make the internet that little bit better each day was obvious.
Over the many years we worked together, he launched everything ranging from blogs, to videos, calculators, tools, new sections of the site, newsletters, savings alerts and much more.
He was passionate about the aspects of the digital world that create a sense of community, from the early days of message boards to social media. These elements can often bring out people’s not so favourable traits, but that only seemed to make him try harder.
He’d inject that sense of togetherness into even trivial everyday things. In the dark days of the pandemic, it was Rich who stepped up to the plate everyday to try to help get people talking in Zoom team meetings.
His group emails for the world’s most inept lottery syndicate were the stuff of legend and meant it stretched far beyind This is Money and kept gathering more members from around the business.
In 2008, Richard Browning wrote How to Survive the Credit Crunch – a book of 101 money-saving tips.
Richard had a madcap genius and treated the internet as an adventure.
For some unknown reason, about five years ago he decided to try to top Google search for Taco Bell in the UK and succeeded in claiming number one spot in the results.
When he was eventually knocked off, he treated it as an exercise in search engine optimisation and never stopped occasionally trying to get back up there.
In the late noughties, at the height of the bank charges scandal, Rich and I decided to do a short video explaining what people needed to know.
We came up with the idea of a recipe for getting your money back. Armed with an apron, mixing bowl, wooden spoon, and chef’s hat, we filmed the first episode of Cooking with This is Money in an empty meeting room.
Beyond this headline concept and the props, we were busking it – this became obvious as soon as Rich started the camera rolling. Somewhere there’s a lost tape of us falling about laughing trying to make that ill-fated pilot episode, which I ensured never saw the light of day.
Rich was always disappointed we never put it out.
In the weeks before his death, Rich had been beavering away at trying to grow This is Money’s YouTube audience with our considerably more professional new series Lunch Money.
He was determined to get the number of people we have signed up to our savings alerts above 20,000 this year. We are about 500 off right now, so if you haven’t already go and subscribe to do Rich a favour.
The spirit with which Rich approached these exploits and the countless other bootstrapped undertakings he was involved in over the years is one that embodies the best pioneering bits of the internet.
Richard’s attitude meant that he left an impression on almost all those he’d ever worked with or met. In the days since his death, we’ve been touched by how many people have got in touch to tell us their stories about him and what he meant to them.
He was a talented musician, playing in Surrey covers band Broken Switch, and had a career that as well as local and national journalism also involved working as a TV and comedy script writer.
That talent would shine through in his This is Money writing, such as a travel review of going to Lakeside instead of New York for a shopping trip.
He could even bring humour to a far more serious subject, such as his writing on the financial fallout of dealing with treatment for bowel cancer – something Richard stuck two fingers up to a decade ago and was given the all clear from.
His travels took Rich much further than Essex shopping centres and he loved to explore new places, particularly with his wife and daughter, meet new people and return home with some more incredible stories to tell – often involving a very roundabout way of getting to his destination.
This year his trips inluded watching his daughter graduate in Holland, making it to the Galapagos Islands and the weekend before he died he went to Finland to aim for Lapland. His email to me on his return said: ‘Morning from sunny Epsom. I’m back. I met Santa. Cheers, Rich.’
Richard leaves behind his wife Isabelle and their daughter Emilie and our hearts go out to them.
Rich was much loved by the This is Money team past and present. We will miss our friend Rich – the man who helped build the internet.
