The Board
Ian Price – Chief Executive
Ian brings to the Broca Group an extensive career in payments and telecommunications. He was previously Managing Director of Digital Payments Limited, a joint venture led by Voca Limited, providing pre-pay top-up solutions to mobile operators and whose customers included Carphone Warehouse and Vodafone. Before this he had a lengthy career with BT Group, including acting as founding Chief Executive Officer of BT click&buy, BT Retail’s successful online payment venture, launching BT Answer 1571 and leading the co-marketing agreement with BSkyB.
Michael Hawkes – Research & Technology Director
Mike is the inventor of Broca’s patented protocol and has a strong technical and commercial background. He started his career within the nuclear defence sector working on real-time life-critical command and control systems. Mike moved on to developing broadcast systems and was involved with the production of video transmission of broadcast quality television via the Internet. Mike subsequently developed a series of secure technologies for the protection of online users. He is a member of numerous industry panels and is an active contributor to government working groups including the Technology Strategy Board and the Committee for Advertising Practice. Mike is also the Mcommerce director for the Mobile Data Association.
Peter Harvey - Independent Non-executive Chairman
Peter was formerly Chief Executive of UK Business Banking at Barclays Bank PLC and Vice Chairman of UK Banking at Barclays. Prior to these roles, Peter held a number of senior management positions during his 33 years with Barclays, including Group Customer Services Director and Managing Director of Larger Businesses where he was responsible for relationship management of Barclays Customers across Europe.
Roger Alexander - Non-executive Director
Roger has held senior roles in the financial services and payment industry and most recently was Chief Executive Officer of Elavon, formerly euroConex Technologies Ltd, a European Acquirer. Prior to leading Elavon, Roger was Chief Executive Officer of S2 Card Services Limited, which operates the UK’s major debit card scheme ‘Maestro’ (formerly known as ‘Switch’). Roger’s other roles have included three years as a partner with Edgar Dunn & Company and Managing Director of Emerging Markets at Barclays, where he spent 31 years. His career at Barclays also included six years as a Director of Barclaycard.
Neale Graham – Non-executive Director
Neale has an extensive background in running telecommunication, software development and marketing organisations. He has run his own companies within the wireless and mobile phone sector for over 20 years. He was also a joint founder of the Telecoms Industry Association (TIA) representing the interests of the private telecommunication dealers and launched one of the UK’s first telecom industry trade magazines ‘‘Communication Trade News’’. Neale is currently an executive director of 2ergo.
Barry Sharples – Non-executive Director
After earning professional qualifications as a mechanical and production engineer, Barry’s management experiences are in IT and communications and span engineering, product development, sales and marketing. He and Neale Graham have managed their own communications companies together for over 18 years. Barry is currently an executive director of 2ergo.
Key Personnel
Brendan Burke – Senior VP, Sales
Brendan has over 17 years of new business sales and sales management experience with blue chip companies and new start-ups in the technology and telecommunications sectors. He has a wide range of product sales knowledge including M-commerce, digital content, billing, one number services, payment, rating, voice/fax messaging, unified messaging, pre-paid mobile, WAP/ SMS servers and instant messaging to enterprises. He has sales experience across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and North America.
Craig Hutchinson – Chief Operating Officer
After 12 years in the retail banking card industry working for Abbey National and National Westminster Bank, Craig became Head of M-commerce at LogicaCMG which also included managing the Vodafone M-commerce technology programme through to the launch of Vodafone’s ‘‘mPay’’ system. He went on to become Chief Technology Officer at Simpay (a joint venture of European cell phone companies that was created to facilitate M-commerce), responsible for security and complete scheme design and implementation. He has previously worked with Ian Price as Chief Operating Officer of Digital Payments Limited where he helped steer the company to its launch in 2006.
James Esson – Acting Head of Finance
James qualified as a chartered accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2001 before spending 6 years with United Utilities. He held several positions there and was involved in the two part rights issue in 2003 and 2005 and the disposal of the electricity distribution business in 2007. James has spent the last 9 months as the Financial Reporting Manager of 2ergo.