PSE Consulting employs an expanding group of payments experts able to deliver complex assignments 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 UK Finance (formerly Payments UK) since its inception as the Payments Council.
The European Payments Consulting Association (EPCA) is a group of companies from across Europe 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 at EPCA Forums designed to update attendees with the latest developments and insights into member’s domestic payments markets. For more information about the EPCA, please click here.
Chris Jones, Managing Director, with over 20 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: Open Banking and card convergence, BNPL, platform and marketplace based payments in/out, and softPOS. 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.
Michelle Comfort, Senior Manager, 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.
Nick Saywell, Senior Manager, is a former financial controller with solid accountancy and academic skills. He trained for ACA in practice with PKF 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.
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.
Tom Hay is a Senior Manager with over 30 years experience working in payment sector technology. He he founded and managed a well-known payments licensed software company which was subsequently sold to Metavante. For several years he worked at Vocalink, supporting the introduction of Faster Payments and the introduction of Zapp. He also worked as a consultant supporting a number of major clients. More recently he has headed IT development for a well-known consumer a payments company.
Goncalo has over 20 years’ payments business experience as a senior marketing and product manager and as a consultant in the cards business. Gonçalo joined PSE Consulting in 2012 and heads up PSE’s research team. Assignments include several acquiring and processing market entry strategies; studies into large banks, neobanks and fintech issuing requirements; analysis of BNPL value proposition and consumer experience; plus several innovation related assignments.
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.
Simon has over 25 years of experience in the payments industry and 12 as Senior Manager in Product and Innovation, with HSBC and Global Payments. With expertise across card payments and bank payments. Experience includes developing new partnership channels in the ISO and VAR sphere, leading innovation in new product areas and core platforms product owner enhancing merchant payment experiences across face to face and ecommerce channels.
Graham has over 25 years working across the European payments acceptance players, delivering both Change Execution and Business Development. Graham specialises in Partner distribution strategy and can draw on his knowledge following his successful leadship of the Partner Relationship Management team for a leading European acquirer. Graham has also direct retailer experience, having worked for the largest retailer in the UK helping them with a range of projects to maximise their payments acceptance goals. This range of experience, ensures that Graham brings a healthy sense of pragmatism to all aspects of his assignments.
Georgina’s previous experience at a corporate research and advisory firm has provided her with insights into how large enterprises wish to consume research. At PSE she is responsible for maintaining PSE’s global payments models and she supports PSE’s senior consultants with modelling and research. To date Georgina has researched the banking needs of European SMBs, payments requirements for global verticals and the eCommerce landscape in European and global countries.
Stephanie comes to PSE from a background in market research and marketing consulting which has given her expertise across sales, marketing, innovation, and strategy. At PSE she specialises in payments innovation and trends. To date Stephanie has supported delivery on projects covering open banking in the UK, global industry specific payments trends and the Buy Now Pay Later customer journey in Europe.
