Hi, I’m James the Founder and Principal Consultant
I started Payment Unlocked to help merchants, ISVs, SaaS platforms and scaling payment businesses unlock growth, reduce costs, and monetize payments faster. Most organisations have the customers and the vision—but struggle to connect payments to product strategy, engineering, and delivery.
The result? Stalled roadmaps, drawn-out timelines, and revenue left on the table.
At the same time, more SaaS and platform businesses want to monetise payments, yet true expertise is hard to find. Without specialist guidance, teams spend months (sometimes years) trying to navigate the complexity on their own—often delivering solutions with blind spots, compliance gaps, or commercial structures that simply don’t perform.
Payment Unlocked exists to solve that.
If you're a business, investor or founder that needs payments expertise without the cost of a full-time hire—or a scaling business that needs to reach the next level quickly without big-four consultancy fees—I can help.
I’m have over two decades of experience across Fintech, SaaS, and global payment platforms. I’ve worked at the intersection of product, engineering, commercial and strategy, giving me a rare end-to-end view of how payments drive real business outcomes.
My network spans the globe and industry—from acquirers, PSPs, PayFac platforms—to compliance experts and technical execution partners—so when you need to move fast, you have an ecosystem behind you.
I support organisations from investor-level business cases all the way through to strategy, design, build, launch and optimization. Every engagement is tailored.
My Approach
Think of our journey together as a collaborative partnership. You can be totally honest and open even when you can’t always share the whole picture with your own team, I am more than a payments consultant, I am a coach to your executive leadership team.
It all starts with a relaxed 30-minute discovery call. We'll chat about your ideas, whether it's establishing a payments function, reducing costs, building a payments stack or scaling up to the next level of growth, and really dig into the "why" behind your plans.
Next, we'll dive deeper into your vision and mission to paint a clear picture of what success looks like for you. Together, we'll outline an engagement model that fits your unique needs and style.
We'll then validate the problems you're trying to solve, both from your business perspective and that of your customers. We'll crunch the numbers to ensure our strategy will drive the revenue and growth you're aiming for.
From there, we'll transform our discussions into a practical engagement roadmap and delivery plan. And don't worry, we’ll be with you every step of the way, working closely alongside you to bring your vision to life.
Dream it
You already have an idea, but maybe your not sure its the right one, or maybe it’s not big enough, sometimes it just helps to have someone to bounce off, who has been there, done it and got the scars to prove it, whether you want to reduce your payment costs or you want to build out a complete payment platform from scratch I can help you do it.
Build it
Unlike most consultants who are good at one or the other, I have spent 2 decades in payments learning the industry from issuing to acquiring and everything in between. I have experience across commercial, marketing, product and engineering roles which gives me a unique set of skills and the capability to take you from an idea all the way through to launch