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 London based CTO’ operating in the Payments space. If you think a CTO’ 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.
Vlad Yatsenko
Co-Founder & CTO of Revolut
Prior to co-founding Revolut, Vlad spent ten years building financial systems at tier one investment banks. Serving as CTO, Vlad has been at the forefront of Revolut’s award-winning technology, building a next generation banking experience.
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About Revolut: Revolut is a financial services company that specializes in mobile banking, card payments, money remittance, and foreign exchange.
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Ali Minaei
Co-Founder and CTO of Gr4vy
Ali is the Co-Founder and CTO of Gr4vy. who has more than 15 years’ experience in tech engineering, has been in payment for the past 8 years working at PayPal and Wonga prior to Yoyo. At Yoyo he is responsible for leading and scaling the Engineering team and building the next generation of Yoyo’s payment and loyalty platform.
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About Gr4vy: Gr4vy is a cloud payment orchestration platform that helps businesses manage their payment solutions
Edgars Kohs
Chief Technology Officer of Fly Now Pay Later
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About Fly Now Pay Later: Fly Now Pay Later is a fintech company that helps consumers split the cost of their travel in monthly installments.
Paul Pamment
CTO & Founder of Lendable
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About Lendable: Lendable is a peer-to-peer lending platform that provides instant paperless loans.
Robert Howes
CTO & Board Advisor of Judopay
Rob co-founded Algomi to build on a strong technology background engineering sophisticated solutions to complex problems. Drawn to opportunities where technology can be used to challenge the status quo, Rob has spent many years successfully leading the delivery of ambitious Fixed Income solutions, including Credit List Trading at UBS and more recently a first of its kind anonymous crossing platform for bonds. Rob holds a M. Eng. in Information Systems Engineering from Imperial College.
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About Judopay, Judopay: Judopay is a mobile-first payments platform.
Donovan Frew
Chief Technology Officer of Goodlord
Donavan brings to Goodlord over 20 years’ experience of building software and technology teams and has most recently occupied a similar role for six successful years at Secret Escapes. When he’s not busy improving the Goodlord platform, you can find him strutting his stuff on the dancefloor or watching one of his (many) favourite football teams.
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About Goodlord: Goodlord offers a cloud-based software to help estate agents, landlords, and tenants manage the rental process.
Chris Greeno
Chief Technology Officer of Cuvva
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About Cuvva: Radically better insurance, fit for the future.
Steve Cook
Chief Technology Officer of Form3
Steve has architected and developed great products and managed dynamic technology teams in the financial services sector for over 20 years. He brings a broad range of experience in FinTech, having led key technology teams across banking (Lehman Brothers, Nomura, Gain Capital), and having launched several startups in the FinTech and cloud computing space. Steve previously lived and worked in Asia for 15 years, and has extensive experience in the Asian banking and capital markets environment. He also holds a degree in theoretical physics from Cambridge University. As the CTO of Form3, Steve is responsible for all aspects of technology, including product architecture, development, delivery and support of the Form3 Financial Cloud.
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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.
Anders Hallsten
Co-Founder & CTO of Divido
Anders Hallsten is CTO and Co-Founder at Divido. Hallsten spent the last 10 years building e-commerce platforms for brands such as Hush Puppies and Fossil Watches.
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About Divido: Divido is a global white label consumer lending platform for financial institutions and multinational retailers.
Samuel Heather
VP, Chief Technology Officer of KodyPay
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About KodyPay: Revolutionising in-person payments to grow your business with a trustworthy and innovative solution.
Andrew Jones
Group CTO of Midpoint
Andrew (AJ) is a senior, results-oriented executive with over 25 years of leadership and management experience at premier investment banks across a variety of front, middle and back office functions, locations and markets. AJ was previously Global CTO at Macquarie Securities (HK), APAC CTO at Deutsche Bank, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology for FX sales and trading at Morgan Stanley. His last role was Europe and APAC CTO at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. AJ has an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
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About Midpoint: Midpoint is a true peer-to-peer international payments platform for any businesses or individual wanting access to fair and transparent FX.
Morgan Sowden
Co-Founder & CTO of paydesk
Currently a product-focused CTO at Lendinvest, a VC backed fin-tech disruptor in the mortgage-lending space. Formerly the CTO at the Octopus Group, where I co-founded and built octopuslabs.com, octopuschoice.com and octopuscash.com; built the Octopus digital design team from scratch, as well as their product and (distributed) engineering teams; and initiated the group transformation from waterfall to agile. I am also co-founder and CTO of paydesk.co, a B2B media platform with 6000+ journalists in 165+ countries. Prior to Paydesk, I was interim CEO and CTO of birthdayalarm.com, a very profitable online greeting card site with 55+ million active members. I’ve also been: Entrepreneur in Residence at Monkey Inferno, a San Francisco based startup accelerator; a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded (and sold) two other web businesses, including an early social network (2003); and a board member / NED. Mostly though, I am DJ and love Techno. Search for me on Mixcloud.
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About Facebook AI, paydesk: On-demand workforce platform disrupting the recruitment industry one sector at a time. Starting with media and doing it with payments
George Wetz
CPO, CTO & Founding Member of Yumpingo
George Wetz is the Chief Technology Officer at Yumpingo.
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About Yumpingo: Yumpingo is an internet company that specializes in customer engagement and analytics platforms designed for the Hospitality Industry.
Natalia Mila
Chief Technology Officer of Upstream
Natalia joined Upstream in 2008 as a senior software engineer. She has worked in several roles within the company, as a team leader and later on as chief architect and head of engineering, leading the design and implementation of Upstream’s mobile commerce platform. She is now the company CTO, responsible for its technical product, engineering and infrastructure functions. She has more than 17 years of work experience in enterprise software, in companies such as Intracom and Intralot S.A. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and a Master’s degree in Distributed and Multimedia Information Systems, from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh.
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About Upstream: Upstream is leading the mobile internet revolution in high growth markets.
Mike Raath
CTO of Thunes
Mike Raath is the CTO at Thunes.
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About Thunes: Thunes offers a global cross-border payment network for seamless transfer of funds to 100 countries in 60 currencies.
John Davies
CTO & co-founder of Velo Payments
CTO and co-founder of Velo Payments & Incept5 Previously CTO and co-founder of C24, founded in 2000, sold to Iona Technologies (on NASDAQ) in 2007 (which was then sold to Progress Software 2008). C24 bought back from Progress Software in 2011 and sold to Gresham Technologies (on UK Stock Exchange) in Oct 2016. C24’s product was payments integration technology for investment banks, predominately SWIFT, Fedwire, SEPA, ISO 20022, BOJNet etc. and used by the majority of the worlds largest banks as customers. C24’s [patent-pending] “binary Java” technology-enabled Vodafone to handle over a million messages per second; John was the inventor. John is also CTO of Incept5, leaders in innovation and the team behind Visa Checkout and the BBC’s new iPlayer. John was also designed and ran FX trading technology at Paribas, head of technology consulting in BNP Paribas and global head of architecture at JP Morgan, also an interim chief architect at several startups. John has co-authored 5 Java and architecture books and is a regular speaker at technical and financial services conferences.
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About Incept5, Velo Payments: Velo Payments is the global smart data network for business disbursements.
Makis Saridis
CTO of Loyalize
Makis has an extensive track record in retail and technology. He is currently the Lead Systems Architect at ASOS, having previously been the Solutions and Innovations Director at Oracle. Before Oracle, Makis worked for some of the world’s largest retailers, including LVMH, M&S Group and Sainsbury’s to build out their IT solutions.
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About Loyalize: Loyalize is a white label payment, loyalty and customer engagement platform
Julien Deray
Co-Founder & CTO of Mespo
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About Mespo: Mespo is an independent platform that manages money across all of the accounts.
Julian Polzella
Founder & CTO of Shopwave
Julian founded Shopwave following the acquisition of his startup VouChaCha, which built multi-platform, location-based, scalable, API-driven architectures for top 200 UK retailers & enterprise clients such as Orange & Lastminute.com. VouChaCha was acquired as part of Markcomedia in a £55 million deal by Monitise PLC. Julian is an Entrepreneurial Spirit Award Winner and holds a first class honours degree in Computing Sciences. He developed expertise in economic, trading, social, reinforcement & machine learning AI technology at Palantir and at university.
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About Nift-e Labs, Shopwave: Kitchen & Ops Automation, POS, App Integration & Payments. Shopwave helps the worlds leading restaurant and retail brands to scale globally.
Gavin Lilley
Chief Technology officer of Zapaygo
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About Media Maison, UK Ministry of Justice, Zapaygo: Zapaygo provides a menu of goods or services and a pre-order and payment facility to consumers.
Richard Bastin
CTO of Cashplus
Richard is passionate about Technology. Really passionate. No obstacle is too big to overcome and all requirements have a solution. He blends his exceptional tech savvy, knowledge of standards and frameworks, with strong team leadership skills and real business acumen to deliver a highly effective development strategy and process that fulfils both the needs of the business and our customers. Richard has over 20 years IT experience across a variety of industries and has a strong track record of building teams of dedicated software engineers to design and deliver innovative products for customers. He has enviable experience of delivering Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions. Prior to joining The Currency Cloud, Richard had a variety of roles in technology including being the CTO at Digital Look providing real time stock market data solutions for various stockbrokers, media organisations and banks including HSBC and Barclays. Richard has also been Head of Platform Operations at Venda, delivering high availability and high transactional volume for over 100 eCommerce customers including Tesco, Wickes, Republic and many others.
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About Cashplus: Cashplus is a digital challenger to UK banks and has served more than 1.6m customers since launching in 2005
Franck Ndame
CTO of XPO
CTO @ XPO
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About XPO: We pay creator invoices, crazy fast.
Leonard Austin
Founder / CTO of Ravelin
Leonard Austin is the chief financial officer of [Ravelin](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ravelin), a smart fraud prevention platform. He was previously a technical lead at Hailo. Prior to Hailo, Austin founded Recensus before which he was a director at Welford Media. Austin holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Leicester.
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About Ravelin: Ravelin is a smart fraud detection and prevention platform that helps companies stop online payment fraud.
Hardeep Nagi
CTO and Co-Founder of Yordex
Hardeep is an experienced hands on architect, specialising in designing and implementing highly transactional and secure applications. Hardeep has delivered several multimillion production software working as an architect that codes whenever needed.
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About Yordex: Smart Spend Management Software, SaaS, B2B Payment Service
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.
Samuel Colvin
CTO of TutorCruncher
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About TutorCruncher: TutorCruncher is a tutoring management software offering CRM, online payments, invoicing and timesheets, and more related features.
Melvin Artemas
Chief Technology Officer of Localz
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About Localz, Medipass Solutions: Localz is the leading provider of Day of Service software.
Catherine Woolgar
Co-Founder/ CTO of SmartTrade App
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About SmartTrade App: Accept any card payment, organise your paperwork and run your business with a free application on your phone, SmartTrade App.
Flávio Heleno
CTO & Co-founder of Veridu
Founder at Veridu.com
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About sorteia.eu, Veridu: Veridu offers a range of frictionless, consent-driven social identity solutions to reduce fraud in the global internet economy.
Huw Jenkins
CTO/co-Founder/Owner of The Money Cloud
Huw Jenkins is the CTO and co-founder of The Money Cloud Ltd.
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About The Money Cloud: We’re an API driven platform that offers comparison, registration and execution from multiple payment providers when sending money overseas
