Reimagining the logic: PayPoint
8,000terminals in 18 months
Cash bill payments at the local shop, with money travelling the opposite way to a card sale.
Read the story →Case studies
Built, delivered, proven
Payment services designed and delivered at national scale. Different problems, the same underlying logic.
Scaling change: Chip & PIN
12.5mcards issued
No one had done a migration of this size before. Every link in the chain re-engineered.
Read the story →Case study · Nexus Payment Services
Reimagining the logic: PayPoint
8,000terminals nationally
18months to deliver
One of my earliest challenges was designing and building PayPoint, a service that would allow utility customers to pay their utility bills in cash at the local shop. At first glance, it looked different: money wasn't coming from the customer's account to pay the merchant for what the customer was buying. It was travelling in the opposite direction, collected from the customer and then passed from the merchant to the utility.
But what struck me was how much it still resembled the card payment ecosystem I already knew. Even though everything was backwards, the same principles of authorisation, data capture, and settlement applied. We just needed to reimagine the logic and then tweak and reconfigure the processes. I built the system around standard service technologies, tweaking them to perform fundamentally different tasks.
That project taught me two things I've carried ever since: first, that the logic of payment ecosystems is remarkably adaptable; and second, that innovation is often less about tearing everything up, and more about seeing how existing rails can be bent into new shapes.
Case study · Halifax
Scaling change: Halifax Chip & PIN
12.5mcards delivered
EMVmagstripe to chip
Another milestone in my career was leading the Chip & PIN project at the Halifax, where we delivered 12.5 million cards to existing and new current account customers. On the surface, it might have looked like a straightforward migration from magstripe to EMV. In reality, it meant re-engineering every part of the card payment process. Chip & PIN was new, and no one had ever done a migration of this size before.
The existing magstripe logic was sound, but EMV added something new. Whilst the overall end-to-end flows of authorisation, clearing and settlement remained intact, every link in the chain had to be re-engineered and rebuilt. That meant rethinking card issuing and replacement systems, PIN change processes, ATM operations, and adding the ability to authenticate cryptograms in real time during authorisation.
What I learned from that project was that large-scale change in payments rarely comes from replacing the underlying logic; it comes from adapting infrastructure so it can carry the extra weight of new demands. For Halifax, the shift to Chip & PIN wasn't just about security. It was about giving millions of customers confidence in a new way of paying, whilst ensuring the bank's systems could deliver that reliability at scale.