Interviews  >  Nick Ogden: Making his voice heard

As someone who's credited with creating what we now call ‘e-commerce', it might have been easy for Nick Ogden to rest on his laurels, put his feet up and watch the money roll in. Of course, like most entrepreneurs, he is not one to sit still. So it's no surprise that the man who helped launch the first-ever online shop, Wine Warehouse, who went on to launch shopping portal Barclays Square, and who helped create WorldPay, one of the largest payments services companies in the world, has gone on to explore new territories.

His current venture, Voice Commerce Group, which he founded in 2003, is not only involved in payments solutions, but is a world leader in voice-recognition biometrics for authentication over mobile phones. It also has a finger in the near-field communication technology pie and is making its mark in the e-money market.

As a man with his eye very firmly on the future, Nick kindly took some time out of the present to speak with businesslife.co about the changing face of global payments, the potential for the mobile market and much more.

From a wine website to a global payments system and then voice signatures… It seems a rather curious journey. Can you tell us how it all started?

I was living in Jersey, working on a number of projects, when I had to go to a conference at the Novotel in Hammersmith. While there, I stumbled on some people talking about Mosaic [the first mainstream web browser], which I found fascinating.

Coming back to Jersey, my partners at the time and I were talking to the IT guy at Le Riche [which merged to become part of CI Traders, now SandpiperCI] and the subject of the internet came up. We were explaining how you can build an online shop, they had the Wine Warehouse in Guernsey, and so we decided to bring the two together.

The challenge of course was that of the seven consumers we had in Guernsey who were willing to suffer the cost of making a trans-ocean call from Guernsey to Jersey to get onto our internet port, most of them were Methodists and didn't drink wine! So as a commercial enterprise it was useless. However, as an enterprise to demonstrate how the system would work – and one that we then showed Barclays in November 1994, which then became Barclays Square – it was highly successful.

And was that the big break for you?

Yes it was. When we launched Barclays Square in June 1995, there were three of us in the office in Jersey and the whole of Barclays Bank in Northampton who had the Barclays Merchant Services customer base. So they went out and got the customers, such as Sainsburys, Argos and Interflora – major brands who were willing to step into the unknown and open e-commerce shops.

At the time of the launch, we got massive publicity and it generated huge interest in what we were doing. Ironically it didn't produce many retail sales for the people trying to sell on Barclays Square as there were so few people with an internet connection at that time.

So how did WorldPay come out of that?

WorldPay was essentially a development of the e-commerce system that was up and running on the Wine Warehouse site in 1994 – it's actually the basis of e-commerce. A lot of people may have claimed that they were the first to come up with such a system, but it was working in Jersey in 1994.

And you were at WorldPay for quite a while. What made you move on, and was there much time between jobs?

About 12 weeks! There were a number of things that happened. Tragically my eldest son died in October 2002, which was six months after the RBS deal to acquire WorldPay had gone through. Having taken a break, we decided we wanted to carry on what we had been doing before, but look at the next wave, which was clearly what was going to happen in the mobile payment space. I was convinced that mobile would work, and decided to focus on that. And that's what Voice Commerce Group has been doing for the last nine years.

So, tell us a little about Voice Commerce.

We operate in two key areas. VoicePay is a biometric system that allows people to sign for payments using their mobile phone and their voice. And CashFlows is a merchant acquiring system similar to WorldPay. It's been an interesting journey because we have faced a number of regulatory challenges since we started. In 2008, we acquired a business called Perpetual Payments together with some previous WorldPay colleagues. That gave us a business base in Cambridge, and from that we could make an application to the UK FSA to be considered as a payment institution. We couldn't do that from Jersey as it's not in the EEA and is outside of the European regulations for this.

Long story short, we became principal members of Visa and MasterCard in 2010, and in 2011 we changed our regulatory status from a payments institution to an electronic money institution, which incorporates everything we had before plus the ability to effectively issue electronic money right through the EEA. And we've just become a principal member of Swift. While wrangling with the regulators we have constantly been working on R&D to make our products the best we can.

What are the practical applications?

Imagine you're a plumber. You do some work for someone in St Helier: they have to pay you, and you'd like the money but don't want to do the admin. It's easier to hand over your iPhone or iPad and they enter their debit-card details for the amount you are charging them and the money goes straight into your account. That is e-money at its simplest.

The other option for you is you get your electricity bill from the JEC. Your bill arrives as a PDF on your smartphone and on the bottom of the bill is a ‘pay this now' button. If you have a VoicePay account, you click on that and your phone rings and it says ‘You are paying a bill of £93.50 to the JEC, please say your name or enter your PIN' and you sign your transaction by simply saying ‘Nick Ogden' or entering your PIN.

So why has this technology not taken off yet?

These things always take time. You have to get the technology right, and customers have to feel confident using it. We've got more than 1,000 customers accepting VoicePay, and during 2012 a number of developments will enhance that VoicePay experience for people with mobile phones – for instance, we will be adding integrated near-field communication (NF C) capability [see page 64]. Effectively, you'll be able to load your mobile phone up with cash, and so won't have to worry about finding an AT M or foreign currency when travelling. With 5.6bn people with mobile handsets, this technology could be huge.

Given your background in technology, do you see yourself as a geek or a mainstream entrepreneur who uses technology as a tool?

I'm definitely not a geek – there are some really clever people who are geeks, and I don't have an anorak! I think that I just found the ability to use technology in financial services to do new and quite fascinating things, and luckily the market has accepted some of these ideas. In 2010, I was the UK Entrepreneur of the Year, and last year we won the Cambridge Innovation Award. I was absolutely amazed that we won that one, considering the high-tech companies we were up against. I'm a Technical Marketeer perhaps, but that's about as far as I go.

We recently ran an article on whether Jersey could become a centre of IT excellence. What is your take on that?

They won't like me bringing this up, but if you look in the Financial Times supplement for 1999 for Jersey, there is a feature in there saying that IT will be the fourth pillar of the economy. It was talking about some of the stuff we were doing and what other companies were doing. But nothing's changed. Because of the current regulatory environment we can't operate our business in the way we want to from Jersey. But there are other jurisdictions that are starting to wake up to some of the changes. I can go to Malta tomorrow and open a bank there, I can go to Cyprus and do the same. And I know that the UK FSA will give me a banking license.

Doesn't this go to Jersey's rule that a bank has to be in the top 500 to be admitted?

Yes, and that's complete crap. What basis of judgement do they take for that? In relation to capital adequacy, if everything goes wrong and we have to shut the shop, can the customers get paid? The regulatory environment that we operate under means we maintain 102 per cent capital adequacy, which means that if we failed operationally as a company, all our customers would get paid in full, on time. I argue there's not a bank in the Channel Islands that could make that claim. That said, we're working closely with the JFSC and political representatives over how some of the stuff we are currently working on, specifically in the areas of e-money, can operate from Jersey.

So what's next for the company and for you?

We've recently completed a private equity investment and are looking at a number of acquisitions. We have a significant war chest at our disposal to grow our business and we'll extend our activities across Europe in the next two years, along with some further international expansion. There will be some major announcements made this year, so watch this space!

As for me, I'm very excited by what we are doing. I'm very fortunate in having built one very successful payment company that is still in operation and to have another one that seems to be forging ahead as well.

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