May 2024 – Present · 2 yrs · Greater London, England, United Kingdom · Hybrid

• After exiting Velo Payments I set up Incept5.AI. I'd spent much of the last 18 months at Velo working on AI to reduce risk and improve scalability without resource costs, the opportunities in AI seemed too good to miss out on.
• The team has decades of FinTech experience, lead now with a forte in Gen AI, not so much for creative text but for innovative automation in areas such as sales and marketing, KYC/KYB, regulatory compliance and customer management and integration.

May 2008 – Nov 2020 · 12 yrs 6 mos · London, United Kingdom · Remote

• Incept5 is a high-end consultancy specialising in architecture, design and technical leadership, now increasingly around AI and private LLMs.
• Technically we have expertise in enterprise Java & Spring on Linux specialising in low-latency, high volume distributed systems and in-memory data persistence and recently LLM (AI) integration. We are strong on agile but not obsessed by methodologies.
• Our main concentration of resources are in the UK and US (East & West Coast) although we also have projects running in mainland Europe, Japan and Australia.
• Clients include Visa Inc., Apple, VMWare, the BBC, HSBC, SWIFT, Jesta Digital, Hailo, Kohl's, Velo Payments etc.

Jan 2017 – Mar 2024 · 7 yrs 2 mos · London, United Kingdom · Remote

• Velo Payments was founded with the intention to acquire customers, network and licenses. We took funding in 2017, built a strong engineering team and product. We did our first acquisition in late 2017 and in full production 2018 with a strong product and client base. Our acquisition of Western Union Business Solutions failed in 2019 and 2020/21 were difficult years with Covid too. We came out strong after investing in Open Banking and acquired YapStrone in 2023. Velo Payments now processes over $4bn of payments per year in the US and have two Open Banking products on the market in the UK.

Mar 2016 – Dec 2016 · 9 mos · London, United Kingdom

• LJP Tech was spun out of C24 to take on the services, architecture modernisation, data management and innovation (blockchain and payments). We made the board decision to sell C24 in early 2016 so this was my new vehicle to take R&D going forward.
• Early in 2017 LJP was rolled into a new company, for now in stealth.

Apr 2011 – Oct 2016 · 5 yrs 6 mos · London, New York, San Francisco, Paris and Tokyo

• Acquired by Gresham Computing PLC in early Oct 2016 --
• C24 Technologies "C24" is a software business specialising in messaging and integration solutions, aimed mainly at the wholesale financial services markets.
• Our product "Integration Objects" (C24-IO) is used by many of the worlds largest firms in Europe and the Americas supporting business critical applications for asset management, clearing and settlement, and payment processing. We are used by the majority of the world’s largest banks, many having been in production with C24-iO for over 10 years.
• The Product is a powerful code generator (Java), while we specialise in financial services messages with “off-the-shelf” support for standards like SWIFT MT/MX, FpML, FIX, ISO-20022, SEPA, ISO-8583 etc. we also work with custom binary formats, proprietary XML and CSVs used in telcos and manufacturing.
• We sold C24 to Iona Technologies in 2007 which in turn was sold to Progress Software in 2008, we then re-acquired C24 from Progress Software in April 2011. C24 is privately owned by myself and two colleagues (Wayne Meikle and Steve Miller). NEW: C24 was sold again in Oct 2016, this time to Gresham Computing PLC.

Jun 2010 – Mar 2012 · 1 yr 9 mos · Foster City, Ca

• I was one of the first people involved with what became Visa's V.me and now Visa Checkout. The initial idea was sold into the (then) president who sponsored its early phases. We created the first prototypes as a secret project in late 2010 which very quickly grew in early 2011 to over 100 people and several hundred by 2012. My company Incept5 played a key roll in the birth of V.me with over 30 of our staff running most of the design and development of the project along with colleagues at Lab Zero.

Jun 2009 – Jun 2010 · 1 yr · Los Angeles, California

• Verifi is an interesting business specialising mainly in "card member not present" transactions reducing charge-backs for merchants and thus reducing risk, at the same time payment gateways and anti-fraud measures increase profitability. A private business with several high-profile clients and close partnership with the major issuers.
• Without going into too much detail we are working on providing increased resilience, flexibility and scalability while at the same time introducing new functionality.

Sep 2008 – Apr 2009 · 7 mos · London, United Kingdom

• Joined Progress through the acquisition of Iona Technologies, there were a lot of good people at Progress, most of them inherited from previous acquisitions but the company as a whole was a mess.

Mar 2008 – Jan 2009 · 10 mos

• Revolution Money is a unique concept combining an anonymous stored-value card with internet payments. I was bought on to architect a new, more scalable and secure system. Without going into details we worked on Java, Linux, Grid and Cloud computing (EC2).
• Revolution Money was recently sold to Amex for $300m

Mar 2007 – Sep 2008 · 1 yr 6 mos

• I joined IONA through the acquisition of my company (C24) in March 2007. I am their Technical Director, head up research and evangelise C24's ex-Integration Objects (IO) now called Artix Data Services (ADS). My roll is very customers facing, generally in banking but more recently other areas too, telco etc.

Aug 2004 – Feb 2006 · 1 yr 6 mos

• Head of Technical Architecture at JPMC looking after Prime Brokerage, project was split between London and New York.

Aug 2001 – Apr 2003 · 1 yr 8 mos · London / Paris / New York

• After the merger of BNP and Paribas the bank was left without a central architecture group. I headed up a new global team called "TCG" (Technical Consulting Group), effectively the bank's cross business architecture team.

Jul 2000 – Mar 2007 · 6 yrs 8 mos · London

• CTO and co-founder of C24. Specialist in Financial Services integration and meta-data management. C24 were acquired by IONA on 5th March 2007.

Jan 1999 – Jan 2000 · 1 yr

• Worked under Pat, the CTO on the new matching engine and ran product development.

Jan 1998 – Jan 2005 · 7 yrs

• I authored and co-authored some of the Enterprise Java courses and was an instructor in Java technologies.

Jan 1998 – Jan 1999 · 1 yr · London / Paris

• I ran all IT for UK and European (non French) divisions. Call centre technologies, electronic ticketing, internet, e-commerce etc.

Jan 1998 – Jan 1998 · 0 mo

• Working on a BPM project called "PaceMaker", it was later spun off into a separate company called PaceMetrics.

Jan 1994 – Jan 1997 · 3 yrs · Luxembourg

• Initially taken on for 3 months to help design a new trading system but stayed on for another 2 1/2 years to see through the design and development. The system was called "SDM" (Salle de Marché or Trading Floor in English). Written in C++ running on Windows NT, we were one of the first banks on the planet to role out NT in production. SDM managed real-time limits and positions for counter-parties, currencies, countries, even up through the ownership of the counter-parties. Trading FX, Spot and forwards, fiduciary deposits and OTC deposits and loans.
• After the BNP merger Reuters Dealing 2000 was pushed into the trading floor and the traders resisted for 2-3 years due to SDM's 5 year old but superior functionality.

Jan 1992 – Jan 1994 · 2 yrs · Paris and then Washington D.C.

• Initially in Paris, Lyon and Geneva and later Silverspring Md. near Washington D.C. with travel all over the US. BancTec's head office was in Dallas Tx.

Jan 1991 – Jan 1992 · 1 yr

• Wrote network drivers for a telco switching system and drank a lot of great beer :-)

Jan 1988 – Jan 1990 · 2 yrs

• Wrote a lot of software for Gestronic's customers, mostly trading rooms in banks. Network drivers in C (for Arcnet), caches and price distribution in C, Objective-C and smalltalk distributing forward FX rates across large trading floors in what was then "real-time".

Jan 1981 – Jan 1985 · 4 yrs · Old Woking

• "Debugged" hardware faults on failed boards from the production line with an oscilloscope, logic analysers and CPU emulator. Also wrote test software in 8080 assembler, it was put on (2708) EPROMs and the production testers used it to test the functionality of the keyboards (before I got the bad ones). - Them were the days!