Greg Watson is chief executive of Napier AI, the London RegTech that sells AI-enhanced anti-money-laundering and financial-crime software. He moved to the United Kingdom from New Zealand about twenty years ago, spent years running large compliance programmes inside banks, and joined Napier as chief operating officer in 2020 before taking the CEO seat in September 2022.
Banking and RegTech career
He studied at the University of Waikato and built an operations career that ran through ASB Bank, Thomson Reuters, Centrica, UBS, and Coller Capital. At HSBC he was a managing director and global head of the banking middle office, and he has described about seven years there leading large-scale financial-crime compliance programmes during a heavy regulatory period. He later joined Fenergo as head of sales and head of strategy and alliances before Napier recruited him.
Leading Napier
He joined Napier in November 2020 as COO and board member, working with founder Julian Dixon on the operating model behind a period of rapid client growth. When Dixon moved to a full-time founder and board role, Watson became CEO on 13 September 2022. The company team page credits him with operational management, business strategy, client lifecycle management, and sales leadership. In a January 2026 Fintech Profile interview he framed the job as applying a practitioner's view of compliance operations to product and change.
"Filling Julian's boots will be no easy task, but this change is very much about evolution, rather than revolution. My job now is to take Napier to even greater heights, as we continue to innovate and to deliver increasingly higher levels of customer satisfaction," he said when he became CEO.