James Barham is a founder of PCI-PAL and has been group chief executive since October 2018. He spent his career in B2B technology, helped turn a contact-centre payments idea into an AIM-listed cloud company, and temporarily moved to the United States to open the North American operation before taking the top job.
Early career
He holds a BSc with honours in business management and communications from Bath Spa University. He was commercial director at IPPlus, where he built a telephony business selling cloud voice and customer-experience tools into contact centres. The PCI Pal concept began as a division of that AIM-listed group, focused on taking card details out of the contact-centre environment.
Founding and leading PCI-PAL
From 2011 he helped establish sales, marketing, and operations for the payments product. He joined the company board in September 2016, relocated with his family to the US in 2018 to set up North America, and became group CEO that October after the parent sold other interests and renamed itself PCI-PAL PLC. Under his watch the firm pushed a partner-led model, an AWS-hosted cloud platform, and successive funding rounds while expanding in EMEA, North America, and ANZ.
"It is an honour for me to lead this business that I have been a part of since the very beginning in 2011," he said when appointed CEO. "As CEO, I am now even more excited at the prospect of accelerating our global growth while at the same time meeting the challenges of scaling this growing business going forwards."