PSE Consulting draws together a set of payments experts who deliver insights across the payments business. Our team comes from processing, acquiring, and issuing backgrounds and draws on extensive experience of sales, marketing, operations, finance, compliance and strategy. Our project teams are carefully selected to combine this breadth of experience in order to deliver insightful advice in a flexible and customer focused manner.
PSE was established in 1991 in London. It is now run by Peter and Chris Jones. PSE is a founder member of the European Payments Consulting Association, and has been an Associate Member of Payments UK since its inception as the Payments Council.
The European Payments Consulting Association (EPCA) is a group of companies from across Europe and Russia who are focused on the payments market. PSE works closely with the members of the EPCA to deliver in-country expertise in many of its assignments. PSE meets twice yearly with members from across Europe in order to gather the latest insights into the domestic payments market from across Europe and Russia. For more information about the EPCA, please click here.
Chris Jones, Managing Director, with over 18 years’ experience working for PSE Consulting and Accenture. Chris has worked in both the telecoms and payments industries helping develop clients’ innovative product strategies. He has worked across Europe for major institutions assessing topics such as: in store mobile payments, omni-channel transaction handling, and tablet based POS. As well as technical and business model innovation, Chris has worked extensively in the area of regulation and has considerable experience in identifying opportunities created by regulation such as the GDPR and PSD2
Peter Jones, Chairman and Founder, has over 35 years business and IT experience, 4 with a major European retailer (C&A Brenninkmeyer), 17 with a UK clearing bank (Royal Bank of Scotland) and 23 as Director and owner of PSE Consulting. He has had operational responsibility for a number of eftpos, bespoke retail systems and credit card related services. He has particular expertise in retailer systems, debit and credit cards, card schemes, interchange and processing. Over the past 23 years he has been responsible for the management of over 1,000 payments assignments for clients within the UK and Europe. He is from a processing and IT background and has led and managed major development projects relating to payments systems. He is well known within European payments businesses and is a regular writer on payments related issues and a speaker at conferences.
Luke Purser, Consulting Director, is an acquiring specialist with over 21 years’ in banking, cards and acquiring. Of these, 15 years have been spent in the acquiring business with LloydsTSB, Citigroup Merchant Services and Elavon Financial Services. His career has encompassed eight years as a Manager within LloydsTSB Acquiring Services. At Citigroup he was Senior Business Development Manager for European acquiring operations. At Elavon, he was Head of Card Association Management responsible for relationships with Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Diners, JCB and value added service providers. He has a thorough and detailed knowledge of all aspects of the acquiring business . Recent assignments have included: support for a large Nordic/Scandinavian multi-country bank card processing outsourcing strategy; developing an acquiring strategy for Russia’s second largest bank; conducting an acquiring RFP for an online currency dealing bank; a RFP for the EU’s second largest low cost airline; for the EU’s largest acquirer a study to optimize interchange processing; for several Nigerian banks support in constructing their domestic market acquiring strategies.
Bill Bougourd is a Senior project leader and planner with significant experience in card processing software selection and the development and planning of major payments systems projects and migrations from a business, technical and operational perspective. He spent 19 years as Head of Payment Systems Retail Banking Systems for RBSG. Projects delivered include the WorldPay/Streamline acquiring platform, the UK’s Switch debit scheme, the migration of NatWest’s interbank acquirer processing in-house. Also as Head of Electronic Communications he developed a strategy for the Group’s internet banking system. Recent assignments have included: RFP help and support for a large Nordic bank in choosing an outsourced card and acquiring processing service; for a private equity client a carve out strategy for a new acquiring platform for WorldPay and building a plan for a new processing software platform; a platform integration study for two Romanian commercial card payments processing bureau and the identification of a common software card processing platform (FIS versus OpenWay). As a project manager for Visa CEMEA he supported the deployment planning of a Russian mobile payments project. For a large multi-country (13) Italian bank developing a migration plan from two processing centers to one group common platform and the evaluation of two internal software processing platform options for issuing and acquiring.
Michelle Price Comfort, Senior Consultant, is a Chartered Accountant with over 30 years in professional practice and commerce and twelve years with PSE Consulting. Her work for PSE includes a range of research and analytical assignments relating to acquiring benchmarking, pricing, eCommerce, valuations, profitability assessments and scenario modeling for issuers, acquirers and payment processors. She has led several RFP activities and developed an acquiring pricing model.
Gerard Savage, Senior Consultant, has worked in the payments industry for almost 20 years. Having trained as a business analyst, Gerard worked for Visa Europe in a variety of roles including Service Manager, Senior Market Implementation Manager and finally as Business Architect for the regional clearing and settlement system. As Senior Market Implementation Manager Gerard work with member banks in a number of countries to implement domestic processing solutions on VisaNet. At Elavon Gerard worked initially as Head of Sales Support and Business Solutions leading the sales support and pre-sales technical support teams across Europe. He transitioned into the Corporate Development team leading Elavon’s M&A activity across Europe. Finally as Chief of Staff Gerard was a key member of the European management supporting the European President to manage the European P&L and as well as drive the change agenda across all facets of the business.
Nicola Henshaw is a Senior Consultant who has over 24 years professional and IT experience and has worked for PSE Consulting for 20 years. During her working life she has been employed as a programmer, systems analyst, trainer and financial modeler. As a Cambridge Mathematics Graduate she has strong numerate and PC-based financial modeling skills. She has developed many business case and evaluation models for payments and processing related products and services. These have included a wide range of interchange models for card, stored value and ACH payment instruments; consumer portfolio segmentation models for new card propositions; business case models for credit/debit card and account products; models for merchant physical and virtual world acquisition costing and pricing; models relating to ATM and EftPos card processing and switching entities; many models to evaluate vendor hardware and software proposals. She has also constructed models to evaluate businesses as part of the M&A bidding process.
Will Linsdell has worked in the Financial Services industry since 1982 and has over 23 years experience in the payments sector in business development, proposition development and compliance roles. After spending seven years as a business development manager for RBS Group in the UK domestic and international card acquiring businesses, he joined Citigroup where he headed up their cross-border acquiring business, plus domestic businesses in UK, France, Belgium & Netherlands, as well as working closely with some of the world’s leading brands in the car rental, cruise, airline, hotel, travel & e-commerce sectors. After four years with Citi, Will joined Lloyds Cardnet to run their SME division, an ever expanding role that he held for a decade as he helped the business grow substantially by leading his teams to greater success and forming strategic partnerships with business introducers. Latterly he held a position with Lloyds as a senior compliance manager, leading all aspects of internal & external payments regulations and policies. During his career in payments, Will has also picked up an expert understanding of the Risk, Legal, Marketing, Product, Customer Services and I.T. functions. Since working with PSE, assignments have focused on working with a leading international travel company to centralise their payments across Europe and supporting several payments organisations towards developing their strategies & solutions from both a product innovation and regulatory compliance point of view.
Chris White, Senior Consultant, having worked for NatWest Bank for 32 years and 13 years in payments consulting with PSE Consulting. He has a wide base of experience in research and analysis, product development, project management, planning and credit related roles. Prior to leaving Nat West he was involved in the e-commerce arena where he carried out major research on the e-commerce potential in emerging markets and was involved in the marketing of a chip-based identity card. During his time at PSE he has conducted many consulting and research assignments into the European card market. He has a substantial understanding of the interbank structures, card issuing, acquiring and ATM landscapes in each of the 25 EU countries, as well as a thorough knowledge of banking and payments regulation.
Nick Saywell, Senior Consultant, is a former financial controller with solid accountancy and academic skills. He trained for ACA in practice with PDF and is an Oxford graduate. He has excellent analytical and communication skills, experience in process design, cost reduction studies and financial modelling. His track record is more than just an accountant and he has particulars helping and advising clients. Recent assignments have included participation in a pan EU study into opportunities for a new instalment credit offer, a strategy and proposition development for SMEs and eCommerce supplier and assessment trends.
Karl Cantwell, has 23+ years banking experience, 13 in UK and international acquiring. Ten years of his career were with RBSG as an Operational Supervisor in branch payments processing and then 3 years in International Merchant Services advising on scheme rules and local implementations. At Citibank Cash Acceptance (4 years) he provided business and technical support for merchant implementation, scheme certification and on-going enhancements and modifications. For Elavon Merchant Services (3 years) he was responsible for managing card scheme relationships, new network version releases, defining internal requirements, and user co-ordinating the installation of a new host system. For MasterCard he was a Senior Technology Account Manager responsible for technology and the identification of customer requirements. At SIX Pay he was Associate Director for Projects co-ordinating project teams implementing merchants in several European countries including Poland. For PSE he has conducted an assessment of a major Northern European processor’s multi country Customer Support units as part of M&A due diligence, for a UK based acquirer Subject Matter Expert support in developing a new CBA acquiring offer and for a large e-Commerce PSP, a review of its back office acquiring processes.
Goncalo Caraslindas, Consultant, has over twelve years’ payments business experience as a senior marketing and product manager. He was Product Manager at Unicre (the primary Portuguese acquirer) for eight years with responsibility for key accounts, new product development, eCommerce, business expansion plans, pricing and the development of new card acceptance solutions. Over a six month period he planned, developed and implemented Unicre’s Distribution Card payment offer for the B2B market (the first Visa solution in Europe). As Payment Marketing Manager at Montepio (Portugal’s sixth largest retail bank) he specialised in developing plans for the implementation of mobile payments, as well as contactless cards (Visa payWave), enabling Montepio to become one of the first adopters of this technology in Portugal. He also led the merger of the payments business of Montepio and Finibanco and the start up of Montepio’s acquiring business. He was an active member of the Portuguese Cards and Mobile Payments working groups. Recent assignments include a study to build action plans to grow eCommerce in Portugal, a study to help a group of Luxembourg banks develop their plans for payments innovation and an assignment to recommend the implementation of a personal current account for an ethical bank in the UK.
