"Having our clients being able to pay people within seconds is the golden position you want to be in," Paul Townsend told The Fintech Times in 2021. He is co-founder of Vitesse, the London, England, payments and treasury company that now serves insurers, and was its executive chairman when he spoke. Before Vitesse he had spent more than 20 years in mainstream banking and 15 in electronic payments. Read our review of Vitesse.
Banking, Envoy Services, and Worldpay
His 20-plus years in mainstream banking were with Warburgs and Bank of New York, and his 15 years in electronic payments with Earthport, Neteller, Envoy, and Worldpay, according to an Angel Insights podcast listing from November 2015. He founded Envoy Services and was its chief operating officer, and Worldpay acquired the payments business in 2011.
At Worldpay he became chief strategy officer and was responsible for geographic expansion from the London operation, as described in a November 2015 announcement.
That announcement said Saxo Payments had appointed him as a non-executive director. On that appointment he said Saxo Payments was "offering a genuine alternative to traditional payment solutions."
Alongside his operating roles he invested as an angel. The podcast listing mentions Kwanji, veridu, and proxama among his investments.
Starting Vitesse With Phil McGriskin
He started Vitesse with Phil McGriskin, who had built Envoy Services alongside him. In the 2021 Fintech Times interview he described the goal as a network of local banks and payment methods connected through a treasury platform, serving corporates, with insurance and payroll as target markets. Insurance came through early users from the Envoy days. Some of those clients asked to use the platform as early adopters, and one was a third-party claims handler in India, whose international needs led him to the wider market of insurers and claims handlers. Vitesse moved its focus to insurance in 2021, according to its own history.
"Before we were involved insurers tended to have quite manual processes around the flow of funds or the reconciliation of those funds," he said, describing what Vitesse automated by connecting insurers to their claims handlers on one platform where both see payments and balances in real time. He put the design rule for payments plainly: "We will always connect to the fastest method we can within a given country."
Running a Regulated Payments Business
He told The Fintech Times that the regulatory environment had "gotten tougher" and that Vitesse safeguards client money by keeping client funds and corporate funds on separate platforms, holding most funds with its main treasury bank, and funding local accounts only as payments require. "I really don't think you can run a payments business without being pretty solid on all of the regulatory elements," he said. He added that the constant challenge beside regulation is people, solved by hiring the right ones.
