Listed gaming group20+ brandsHead of Payments & Risk
An acceptance-rate programme worth €8m a year, at no added cost
Situation. A Nasdaq-listed online gaming group ran 20+ brands across regulated European markets. Each brand had its own acceptance performance and nobody could compare them. Declines were treated as the issuer's problem.
What I did. Made acceptance rate the headline KPI for the group. Rebuilt the measurement from raw transaction data by acquirer, issuer, method and market. Introduced the processes and procedures that lifted acceptance on every site: routing and retry logic, acquirer selection per corridor, 3DS and descriptor hygiene, and a weekly review with the brands.
Outcome. €8m a year in incremental revenue across all brands and markets, with no increase in marketing spend.
Listed gaming groupCommercialHead of Payments & Risk
Every processing agreement renegotiated, saving €4m+ a year
Situation. Blended pricing across a dozen acquirers and PSPs hid the real cost of each market and card type. Redundancy was accidental rather than designed.
What I did. Renegotiated all processing agreements, moving each supplier to Interchange++ so cost could be compared at line level. Set up a multi-acquirer model that balanced acceptance rate against cost per corridor, with primary, secondary and fallback routes in every market.
Outcome. More than €4m a year in processing cost removed, full redundancy in every market, and a fee model the finance team could audit against invoices.
Listed gaming groupPlatformProduct owner · Dev centre lead
One payments platform instead of one per brand: 60% less overhead, three migrations in nine months
Situation. Every acquired brand arrived with its own payment stack. Each integration, rule change and compliance update was done several times over. Hardware and maintenance cost scaled with the number of brands, not with volume.
What I did. As sole product owner of the group risk and payment platform, set the strategy to run payments as an internal service: one multi-site platform serving every brand. Led the 50-strong development centre in Ukraine that built it. Owned the migration programme for acquired brands, including a KYC document management system and a new reporting engine.
Outcome. Infrastructure overhead cut by 60%. Three major acquired brands migrated onto the platform in nine months. One place to integrate, one place to comply.
Listed gaming groupRisk, fraud and operationsHead of Payments & Risk
Chargebacks under 0.5%, payouts 80% faster, promotional abuse cost down 30%
Situation. Risk controls were strong on paper and slow in practice. Payouts queued behind manual review. Promotional abuse by multi-accounting customers was eating marketing budget. Scheme thresholds were a constant worry.
What I did. Redesigned controls across registration, pay-in and payout so that risk was taken where it belonged and friction removed everywhere else. Built an internal high-risk customer identification rule engine and trained the team to use it through real-time risk tooling. Implemented device fingerprinting. Personally defined the procedures that governed chargeback handling, and ran the payments and risk operations teams that applied them, at their largest 160 agents across nine countries.
Outcome. Chargeback ratio held below 0.5% group-wide. Payout processing time cut by 80%. Promotional abuse and its cost reduced by around 30%. Compliance stayed documentable throughout.
FTSE 100 gaming and betting groupComplianceGroup Head of Payments & Risk
Payments, fraud and AML compliance across nine jurisdictions and 180+ processors
Situation. A London-listed group operated 20+ brands on five platforms under licences in nine jurisdictions. Each licence carried its own consumer-protection and AML obligations. Payments and risk had grown by acquisition and so had the supplier list.
What I did. Took group ownership of risk and payment strategy and of every risk platform, fraud process and compliance requirement. Designed a new internal payment platform and ran all payments and risk migrations onto it. Owned 180+ processor relationships end to end. Built training programmes that kept the operation compliant, and ran payments and risk due diligence on acquisition targets.
Outcome. One group framework for payments and risk compliance across all nine licences. A single platform roadmap for 20+ brands. Due diligence that informed acquisition decisions before they were made.
Advisory clients, 2019 to presentInterim Head of PaymentsAI analytics
10 to 15% lower cost in the first month, and a monitoring layer the client keeps
Situation. Across more than 115 advisory clients, from venture-backed start-ups to unicorns and listed groups, the same pattern recurs: processing agreements never benchmarked, acceptance drifting without an owner, and reporting assembled by hand from processor portals.
What I did. As interim or fractional Head of Payments, reviewed and renegotiated supplier agreements, rebuilt acceptance and cost analysis from raw data, and set market-entry and supplier strategy. Built AI-assisted analytics tooling on the client's own data: real-time monitors, historical performance analysis and on-demand reporting that explains processing performance, cost and failure reasons in plain language. Coached the teams who now run it.
Outcome. Typically 10 to 15% lower processing cost within the first month and 10 to 15% higher acceptance across markets. The client keeps the data, the supplier relationships and the tooling.