How do you build the future of payments with a cable, a box of fuses and a lot of nerve?

In this episode of The Big Bets, Alessandro Hatami and David Birch sit down with Nick Ogden, the serial entrepreneur behind WorldPay, Cashflows and ClearBank, to talk about the big decisions that shaped modern fintech, and the bet he is making now.

Nick takes us back to 1994, when a makeshift connection between a Mosaic browser and Barclays' card processing systems in a Jersey office produced one of the world's first e-commerce transactions (nine bottles of wine sold!). From there came Barclay Square, the first bank-endorsed online shopping mall, and the realisation that global commerce needed multi-currency payments, which became WorldPay.

He shares the stories behind WorldPay's first ever client, the Diana Memorial Fund, launched overnight on a NatWest web address the bank knew nothing about, and how he walked into Lloyd's of London to buy £100 million of credit insurance so WorldPay could have a "balance sheet". David also recalls his own part in the story as a young NatWest strategist who told the bank it could build WorldPay itself in five minutes.

Nick explains how a conversation at a conference led to ClearBank, the UK's first new clearing bank in 250 years, built in the cloud on Microsoft Azure at a time when regulators literally looked out of the window when he said "cloud".

Today, Nick is betting on asset intelligence: using AI to value assets in real time, turning centuries-old accounting into a live system, unlocking SME lending and giving banks a balance sheet that updates continuously rather than quarterly.

In this episode of The Big Bets podcast, hosts David Birch and Alessandro Hatami sit down with Paulette Rowe, former CEO of Stax and Paysafe, who's also held senior roles at Facebook, Barclaycard, and RBS. The show's format has guests reflect on two bets: the one that made their career, and one they're making now.

Rowe walks through her jump from banking into payments at Barclaycard around 2012 (right as contactless was taking off), her stint at Facebook during its commerce and Libra push, and her later moves into PE-backed payments firms.

Most of the conversation digs into how AI is upending both payments and the private equity playbook. They talk about why PE firms are so hungry for payments companies right now (the data is gold for AI and embedded finance), whether old-school PE strategy can keep up with how fast AI moves, and how "agentic commerce" — AI agents doing the shopping and choosing where to spend — could blow up things like credit card rewards programs entirely.

They wrap up on payments as critical infrastructure: resilience in a messier geopolitical world, alternatives like stablecoins and Europe's push for payment sovereignty, fraud as a real threat to trust in the system, and the still-open question of who's actually going to regulate AI in finance.

What does it take to walk away from a business that is doubling every few months to chase something bigger? In this episode of The Big Bets, David Birch and Alessandro Hatami sit down with serial fintech entrepreneur Alex Mifsud, co-founder of Ixaris and Weavr, to unpack the defining bet of his career and the even bigger one he is making now.

Alex tells the story of building Ixaris into a pioneer of virtual cards for commercial payments, finding product-market fit in the global travel value chain, and then making a counterintuitive call. Instead of simply scaling a profitable business, he carved out the IP behind a new embedded finance stack (built with a four million euro Horizon 2020 grant on a project called the Open Payment Ecosystem), went against his own board, and spun it out into what became Weavr. Ixaris was later sold to Nium. It is a candid look at the innovator's dilemma in practice, choosing transformation over growth, and why solving hard problems beats sitting on a yacht in the South of France.

In the second half, the conversation turns to Alex's next big bet: what happens when AI meets digital money. As stablecoins go mainstream and AI agents become capable of managing money for ordinary consumers and small businesses, who is accountable when things go wrong? The three explore recourse and responsibility, the layered liability between the company that builds an agent, the company that deploys it and the customer who uses it, why banks and regulated entities remain the locus of trust, and how the banking stack might be reimagined for a world of agentic, embedded finance.

Timestamps:
00:10 Introduction
01:25 Alex's first Big Bet
09:26 The innovators dilemma
10:07 The second bet

Find us -
Dave Birch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dgwbirch/
Alessandro Hatami: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aehatami/
Alex Mifsud: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-mifsud/

#fintech #embeddedfinance #ai #thebigbets