Independent payment strategy & solutions consultancy
Clarity for the moves that change everything.
I help leaders navigate the complexities of payment acceptance, allowing them to clearly see the shape of the future, make the hard choices, and move forward with conviction.
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Experience built over 25 years working for iconic enterprise organisations
VISA
CYBERSOURCE
ARGOS
HOMEBASE
HABITAT
BARCLAYCARD
What i do
How i do it
Strategic delivery which brings payments into sharper focus.
GATEWAY & ACCEPTANCE STRATEGY
Omni-channel commerce
Regulated Market Entry
Enterprise payment questions, answered
Clear answers for consequential payment decisions.
How can a merchant reduce processing fee drag?
I've sat on both sides of this conversation — buying gateway services and selling them — and the fee drag almost never lives where the headline rate says it does. It's in avoidable declines, routing that defaults to the safest option rather than the cheapest, and authentication rules nobody's revisited since they were switched on. Map the cost at transaction level, not contract level, and the real saving is usually smaller than procurement wants and bigger than finance expects. Fixing it properly means gateway, acquirer and authentication decisions all pointing the same way — not a renegotiation exercise every eighteen months.
What should an enterprise consider when selecting a payment gateway?
I've been a part of well over 100 payment RFPs now, from both the buyer's chair and the seller's, and the ones that go wrong almost always went wrong at the shortlist stage — chosen against a feature list rather than against what the business actually needs three years out. Test acceptance performance, orchestration flexibility, resilience, who owns the data, and what migration actually costs if you ever need to leave. The question isn't which gateway has the longest feature list. It's which one still makes sense once your architecture has moved on from where it is today.
When does a payment platform need sovereign architecture?
I led the build that took Visa's Saudi Arabia platform onto sovereign cloud infrastructure for the first time — 127 applications refactored and containerised, working directly with the regulator at every stage. You need that kind of architecture when regulation, data residency or national infrastructure rules genuinely change how a transaction can be processed, not just where the servers happen to sit. The trap is treating it as a one-off local build. Get the balance wrong and you've either failed the regulator or built something so bespoke it can't scale to the next market you enter.
How can an enterprise improve payment approval rates without increasing fraud exposure?
The instinct is always to loosen the rules — widen an exemption, soften a risk score — and approval rates tick up for a quarter before fraud catches up with you. I'd rather diagnose the decline first: is it the issuer, the acquirer, the gateway, or the authentication step actually losing the transaction? Targeted routing, tokenisation and retry logic recover genuine demand without touching your risk appetite. Approval rate and fraud performance aren't in tension if you fix the right stage — they're only in tension when you guess.
How should a retailer modernise a legacy payment estate?
I spent nine years doing exactly this at Argos and Homebase, and the businesses that get it right treat it like pre-season, not a January Transfer Window emergency rebuild — you sequence the work so trading never actually stops. Start with a clear target state, then map where the commercial leakage and operational constraints really sit, not where the org chart assumes they sit. Phase it: gateway, orchestration, fraud, data, checkout — each stage protecting the one before it. The result should be a platform that can take on the next channel or market without another multi-year rebuild.