Best Startup
At Best Startup UK we track over 130,000 UK startups and over 500,000 people who hold key positions in these companies. We use this directory of startups to highlight top employees, founders and board members we think deserve more appreciation than they are currently getting.
This list showcases the top United Kingdom based Product operating in the Payments space. If you think a Product is missing from this list, feel free to contact our editor on editor@beststartup.co.uk.
The individuals on this list have been included because of exceptional performance in one of the following categories:
- Innovation – Operating as a key part in an extremely innovative business or startup.
- Growth – Operating as a key figure in the growth and upscale of a market leading business or startup.
- Management – Showing exceptional management skills.
- Societal impact – Putting their business on the map for their positive societal or environmental impact.
Our Data – We source our data from OSINT (open source intelligence) and public directories such as Companies House UK, Crunchbase, SemRush and many more. The data from these sources should be treated with a degree of caution and verified yourself.
Sharon Anne Kean
Product Lead – International Expansion of Wise
Product, UX, tech and start-ups. Excitable, empathetic, enthusiastic. Love a challenge.
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About Wise: Wise is a money transfer service allowing private individuals and businesses to send money abroad without hidden charges.
Gregory Talon
Senior Product Director of Wise
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About Wise: Wise is a money transfer service allowing private individuals and businesses to send money abroad without hidden charges.
Tessa Pettman
Head of Product Marketing. of Wise
Tessa Pettman is the head of product marketing at TransferWise.
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About Wise: Wise is a money transfer service allowing private individuals and businesses to send money abroad without hidden charges.
Vincent Thome
Product of Klarna
Vincent Thome is the Product of Klarna.
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About Klarna: Klarna is an e-commerce payment solutions platform for merchants and shoppers.
James Gibson
Head of Product of Revolut
James Gibson, Head of Product for Revolut for Business oversees the team that is changing the way British and other European businesses manage their day to day business finances. An Oxford graduate with a background in consulting, James Gibson joined Revolut back in 2017. He spent a year in business development in the retail side of Revolut and his second year building the Revolut for Business product from the ground up. Today he oversees multiple product teams, business development and marketing.
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About Revolut: Revolut is a financial services company that specializes in mobile banking, card payments, money remittance, and foreign exchange.
Joshua Fernandes
Senior Product Owner of Revolut
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About Revolut: Revolut is a financial services company that specializes in mobile banking, card payments, money remittance, and foreign exchange.
Si Jia Wen
Product Operations Manager of Revolut
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About Revolut: Revolut is a financial services company that specializes in mobile banking, card payments, money remittance, and foreign exchange.
Paul Baker
Vice President Product Management, Identity Solutions, Cyber & Inteligence Solutions of Mastercard
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About Mastercard, Mastercard: Mastercard provides payment processing products and solutions, and related consulting services.
Jennyfer Yeung-Williams
Head of Insurance Products, Europe of Mastercard
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About Mastercard: Mastercard provides payment processing products and solutions, and related consulting services.
Antonio Gagliardi
Vice President – Strategy, Product, and Analytics – Merchant Services of American Express
Before founding CompareEuropeGroup, Antonio was an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company in their UK Financial Services practice. Prior to this, Antonio worked at Bain & Co and at JP Morgan Chase. Antonio holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, with a special distinction for finishing in the top 10%, and graduated summa cum laude from Bocconi University.
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About American Express: American Express is a global financial services company best known for its credit card, charge card, and traveler’s cheque businesses.
Omar Haque
SVP, Chief Product Officer, Merchant Services of Nets
Omar Haque is Nets MS’ Chief Product Officer and over 17 years of experience in managing digital and technology-driven transformation at global organizations. He has helped companies exploit and develop market and technology trends. Before joining Nets he has been with e.g. Worldpay, Vestas, Cisco.
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About Nets: Nets is a provider of payments, card, and information services with an ambition.
Marius Lobontiu
Head of Product of Bink
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About Bink: Bink develops a mobile application that links card payment to loyalty schemes.
Jon Hodges
VP Product – Head of Buy-Side Portfolio Manager of FIS
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About FIS: FIS focuses on retail and institutional banking, payments, asset and wealth management, risk and compliance, and outsourcing solutions.
Mike Walters
Chief Product Officer of Form3
Mike joined Form3 from Barclaycard Payment Acceptance (card acquiring) where, as Product Director, he was a member of the Executive Committee and responsible for P&L, product management, strategy development, vendor selection and management, digital transformation and M&A. Prior to this, as Head of UK Corporate Payments for Barclays Corporate Bank, Mike held product management responsibility for all payment, receipting and reporting products and services delivered to Barclays corporate clients – this included defining the Barclays Corporate Bank mobile payments strategy and initiating, building and scaling the multi-award winning ‘Pingit for Corporates’ mobile payment solutions. Earlier in his career he managed client relationship teams responsible globally for the North American Financial Institutions and FTSE 250 sectors. With his significant experience across the payment and client landscape, Mike and his team is responsible for designing, scaling and managing the Solutions delivered by Form3.
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About Form3: Form3 is a cloud native payments-as-a-service platform that designs, builds, and runs the technology that powers the future of payments.
Duncan Barrigan
Chief Product Officer of GoCardless
Founded in 2011, GoCardless is building a global network of recurring bank-to-bank payments, offering a solution for multiple direct debit schemes in Europe that will soon be launched in Australia. With its simple API and pre-assembled integrations with large software vendors, it enables businesses of all sizes to reduce losses, improve cash flows and save money. Winner in 2016 of the fastest growing FinTech business award at Deloitte Fast50, support 30,000 businesses and bill more than $ 3 billion per year with customers such as Box.com, TripAdvisor, Glovo and Podo. Its headquarters are in London and have as main software partners Zuora, Sage and Billin. Duncan joined the business in 2015 and has been building product management from scratch. Prior to working in technology he was a strategic consultant advising PE / VC investors at Fintech and M & A financial services at Oliver Wyman. He holds a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge
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About GoCardless: GoCardless is a payment company that makes collecting payments by direct debit easy for everyone.
Deepak Colluru
Principal Product Manager of GoCardless
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About GoCardless: GoCardless is a payment company that makes collecting payments by direct debit easy for everyone.
David Stobs-Stobart
Senior Product Manager of GoCardless
David builds and leads enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) products and product teams for growth-stage technology companies. He brings a wealth of experience in product management and user experience (UX) within technically complex online environments, in both large and small teams. David specialises in products relating to analytics/ business intelligence (BI) and customer experience (CX) management. Users are increasingly mobile, social and demand a more personalized, human interaction with the brands they use. I’m proud to be working in the enterprise space helping organisations to engage with their customers, make better decisions and improve their workflows; solving complexity with well-designed applications users love. Over the last 10 years, he has taken the lead product role in 4 early-stage companies and built the product team and product management function. During that time, he has launched 7 products covering search, analytics, machine learning, content optimisation, conversion rate optimisation, self service, workflow management, data mining, social media, APIs, customer service and customer experience.
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About GoCardless: GoCardless is a payment company that makes collecting payments by direct debit easy for everyone.
Luke Reynolds
Chief Product Officer of Featurespace
Luke is responsible for Featurespace’s fraud clients in Financial Services and Insurance, and has over twenty years’ experience in banking fraud management. Prior to joining Featurespace, Luke held a position as Callcredit’s Commercial Director of Fraud and ID for a year, and prior to this he served in a variety of roles in Lloyds Banking Group (Head of Retail Audit, Head of Fraud, and Head of Group Security and Investigation). Before joining Lloyds Banking Group,Luke held fraud prevention roles at the UK Card Association (formerly APACS) and NatWest
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About Featurespace: Featurespace provides an adaptive behavioral analytics technology and automated deep behavioral networks for risk management.
Sean Neary
Senior Product Officer of Featurespace
Sean joined Featurespace as the Financial Services Subject Matter Expert at the end of 2016. His role is to use his industry expertise and knowledge to ensure that Featurespace’s ARIC platform development matches the Finance sector’s needs and expectations. Sean’s been in the Financial Fraud industry for over ten years. Starting his career in the operational environment as a Fraud Analyst at Barclaycard, where he worked his way through the operational sectors, from complex fraud to special investigations & management. He then moved from the front line and into fraud strategy and analytics,where his main role was to risk assess new trends, technologies and project that affected fraud across the bank. This role enabled him to work within all areas across the bank, gaining an understanding of the holistic aspect of the business and how fraud was linked to everything! Sean spent the last three years leading the global fraud technology team at Barclaycard, covering issuing, acquiring & commercial.
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About Featurespace: Featurespace provides an adaptive behavioral analytics technology and automated deep behavioral networks for risk management.
Kristian Carter
Product Marketing Specialist of Featurespace
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About Featurespace: Featurespace provides an adaptive behavioral analytics technology and automated deep behavioral networks for risk management.
George Evers
Senior Vice President, Product, Realtime Payments of VocaLink
George has spent the last 15 years driving technology innovations, leading product and strategy development across emerging technologies and enabling digital banking channel transformation. He is a huge advocate of providing more businesses and consumers with access to immediate payments.George joined VocaLink in November 2014 as Immediate Payments Services Director. He oversees the international development of VocaLink’s real-time payments proposition and associated mobile payments solutions. Since joining, George has pioneered the development of international strategies for VocaLink in the US, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. Before joining VocaLink, George was Head of Channels within the Corporate Banking Division at RBS. It was there that he developed a Corporate Banking self-service channel strategy and managed existing core digital channel propositions. George also held the position of Head of Product Management & Development for RBS Global Transaction Services where he managed the growth development of the UK Domestic Cash product set. Building on VocaLink’s 2014 success of implementing Immediate Payments in Singapore, George’s most recent career highlight has been part of the team involved in the signing of a contract with The Clearing House- a partnership that will bring real-time payments to the United States.
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About VocaLink, VocaLink: VocaLink develops and operates payments infrastructure solutions in the United Kingdom.
Andrew Quan
Head of Product of Littlepay
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About Littlepay: littlepay is an Australian fintech start-up focused on transit contactless payments
Rosario Garcia de Zuniga
Product Manager of Wave Mobile Money
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About Wave Mobile Money: Wave Mobile Money provides an app-based financial solution to save, transfer, and borrow money.
Matthew Thompson
Head of Production Services of Bankable
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About Bankable: Bankable develops white-label payment solutions including e-wallets, remittance services, P2P money transfers and prepaid card programmes.
John Ward
Lead Product Designer of Adhara
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About Adhara: Real time global liquidity management, FX and international payments on CBDCs and tokenized money for banks and central banks
Ryan Philo
Founder & Chief Product Officer of Optomany
Ryan was one of the founding team behind Optomany and brought with him over 20 years of experience in the payments arena spanning all areas of product and platform design, development and testing. Previously Head of Product Innovation at Verifone, following its acquisition of Point International, he led the rollout of the Payments as a Service (PaaS) model across multiple international territories. As CPO, he is responsible for Optomany’s system architecture design and our product and solution strategy.
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About Optomany: Optomany specializes in omnichannel payment processing technology, delivering reliable and secure solutions to the retail sector.
Braham Djidjelli
Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Hugo Save
Braham Djidjelli is the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at Hugo Save.
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About Hugo Save: Hugo is a digital account that helps you spend, save and invest, starting with gold.
Mark Barlow
Head of Product of Ravelin
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About Ravelin: Ravelin is a smart fraud detection and prevention platform that helps companies stop online payment fraud.
Will Green
Senior Product Designer of Ravelin
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About Extensible, Ravelin, Wellth: Ravelin is a smart fraud detection and prevention platform that helps companies stop online payment fraud.
Robert Doherty
Product / Channel Manager of Allied Irish Banks plc
Robert has more than 20 years’ experience in the payments industry. He has seen it grow into the multi-million euro industry it is today. His current role as Head of Product involves the deployment of next generation POS such as Clover™, payment gateway integrations, value added products, authorisation analysis and identification of future product requirements. Robert has previously managed all of AIBMS partner relationships including MSPs, ISOs, and PSPs. Robert represents AIBMS at both Visa and MasterCard’s Irish Members forum. He is also part of the Card payments working Group within the National Payments Plan.
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About Allied Irish Banks plc: Bank
Dennis Nemerov
Co-Founder and Head of Product of Rizq
Dennis Nemerov is the Co-Founder and Head of Product of Rizq.
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About Rizq: Rizq is the first fully digital sharia-compliant, ethical account in the UK.
Andy Lee
Founder & Chief Product Officer of Sphonic
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About Sphonic: Sphonic is a Context-Broker that leverages 3rd party vendor data with a workflow engine to enable fraud prevention, AML, KYC
Kamran Yazdanjoo
CTO and Head of Global Products Development of Spire Payments
Kamran has over 25 years international experience in executive leadership positions within card payments. Before joining Spire, Kamran served on the Board of Directors of Cubic Transportation Systems Limited as Director of Open Payments. Prior to this, Kamran was the Vice President of Global R&D at VeriFone Inc. with responsibility for products and services. In this role he led a global organization across Asia, Europe and North America. He also served on the Board of Directors at VFI Pvt Ltd from 2003 to 2009 and had a lead role in a number of key business transformations at VeriFone. Kamran holds a BSC Honours degree in Mathematics and a post graduate Master of Science degree in Optimization and Computing.w
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About Spire Payments: Spire Payments is one of the fastest growing European POS solutions provider.
Neal Michie
Product Manager of Inside Secure
Neal Michie is Product Manager at Inside Secure for Code Protection; where he oversees Inside Secure’s foundational security products for protecting and hardening software applications. These are used by the largest players across industries that put security front-and-center, including IoT, content streaming, finance and health care. With a background in software engineering, Neal has spent the last decade building secure software solutions. These include the first to be fully certified by both Mastercard and Visa. This experience has led to Neal being an active participant in influential industry forums.
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About Inside Secure: Meontrust provides banking grade security for online identities and payments.
Ashley Burton
Head of Product of Eckoh
Ashley joined Eckoh’s contact centre in 1999 and over the last 18 years has worked in a variety of roles including project management, business analysis, data warehousing and mobile application development before becoming Head of Product. Ashley is passionate about identifying emerging technology and applying it to contact centres to improve customer experiences and deliver outstanding engagement and trust.
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About Eckoh: Eckoh is the UK’s leading provider of speech recognition and associated payment solutions across voice, web and mobile channels.
Manish Kumar
Head of Product Management & Delivery of Tyl by NatWest
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About Tyl by NatWest: Tyl by NatWest is payment dealer that collects card bills from the customer.
Marc Irvin
Head of Product of Secco
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About Secco: UK based startup creating a mobile social economic network
Henry Taylor
Chief Product Officer of DoshDash
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About DoshDash: DoshDash is a money transfer service provider.
