The team

Built by payments operators, not newcomers.

VerticalStack is led by a senior team that has spent decades building, scaling, and selling payments and software businesses, running acquiring portfolios, launching embedded payments products, architecting regulated platforms, and executing M&A across the UK, US, and Irish payments markets. That foundation in payments is what positions the team to build the wider financial infrastructure layer.

2 decades+
Working together across the payments industry
UK · US · Ireland
Payments ecosystems the team operates across
Acquiring to PayFac
Hands-on across the full payments value chain
Multiple exits
Businesses founded, scaled, and sold by the team

Experience reflects the collective background of the VerticalStack senior team and advisers.

Track record

Experience built at the companies that shaped modern payments.

Collectively, the team has held senior roles across many of the most established names in payments and financial technology. That experience spans merchant acquiring, ISO and PayFac operations, embedded payments, gateway infrastructure, and the regulated platforms beneath them.

Trust PaymentsFiservFirst DataPaysafeSynovusMastercardVerifoneSageVerusiPayment
Capability

The experience this business needs, already in the room.

Merchant acquiring and PayFac

Decades of hands-on experience running ISO and acquiring portfolios, managing sponsor-bank and processor relationships, and launching Payment Facilitator and embedded-payments products.

Vertical software and product

Senior product leadership that has built and scaled payments and software platforms, including cloud-native architecture, embedded payments, and merchant-facing technology.

M&A and capital

A long record of founding, scaling, and selling businesses, executing acquisitions, and raising capital, the exact skill set a buy-and-build payments roll-up depends on.

Regulation and risk

Direct experience of regulated payments operations and the financial-crime, safeguarding, and authorisation requirements an FCA-authorised platform must meet, supported by specialist external advisers.

How the team is built

A focused senior team, structured for execution.

Founder & CEO
Three-time payments founder with over 35 years in merchant acquiring and ISO operations. Built and exited three ISOs from minimal capital, returning roughly 1,680% to founding investors on one and over 200x on personal capital invested in another.
Non-Executive Director, Payments
A 30-year payments leader and former acquiring chief executive who led a business to a near billion-dollar exit and oversaw more than $25bn in annual processing volume across 137,000-plus US SMB merchants, bringing regulatory relationships and M&A expertise.
CTO
A commercial product executive with 20-plus years in payments who has architected a cloud-native US payment platform and driven measurable results, including a 140% improvement in merchant margin, 27% year-on-year merchant revenue growth, and an 80% reduction in compliance-platform operating cost.
VP, Acquisitions & Commercial
30-plus years in card payments and acquiring, having built an ISO partner book from zero to £1.4bn in volume and £28m in revenue, onboarded 30-plus ISO partners and integrated five PayFacs, while managing P&Ls above £40m and leading ISV deal execution across each acquired business.
Senior Advisers
Veteran operators across payments, fintech, and M&A, including a serial founder with over 35 years of experience who has created more than $2.1bn of enterprise value for shareholders, led 19 M&A engagements and 50-plus asset purchases, raised over $172m in capital across two dozen companies, and negotiated the $325m sale of a US payments company to a UK accounting software group.
Lead Engineer
25 years of technical experience in the payments industry, spanning eCommerce, POS, mobile, and alternative payments from concept and solution design through to rollout, with deep expertise in microservices architectures across the AWS and GCP stacks, delivering the Managed and Sponsored PayFac build.
MLRO & Regulatory Lead
Owns the FCA authorisation pathway and financial-crime framework, working alongside specialist regulatory counsel.
Why now

A rare moment for payments talent.

The recent consolidation of UK ISO and merchant-services businesses has freed an unusual concentration of senior payments operators. VerticalStack has brought that talent together at exactly the point in the cycle when high-quality vertical SaaS businesses are reachable through off-market acquisition. The team is the foundation of the thesis.

Get in touch

Talk to the team.

For investor materials and a conversation about VerticalStack, we would be glad to hear from you.

Get in Touch with VerticalStack