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Craig Dewar
global Processing Services
companies & people
Top Payments Tech Gurus
6
Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” For Craig Dewar, chief in-
formation o cer, Global Processing Services (GPS), it was necessity and a bit of aggravation. After a frustrated Dewar was unable to purchase an online gift voucher from Marks & Spencer for his mother one Christmas, he decided to start a business to solve that problem. Flex-e-vouchers Limited was born in 2000.
The company quickly became a prominent online seller of gift vouchers and in 2003, branched out into o ering shopping center gift vouchers. Two years later, the company launched the Bullring gift card, which was the rst of its kind in the U.K., enabling consumers to use the card at myriad merchants.
Again, it was aggravation that led Dewar to build a better processing platform, which would become GPS. Leaning heavily on what he de- scribes as invaluable experience designing and building transaction processing and trading systems
for some of the biggest banks in the world during the 1990s, Dewar built the processing plat- form from scratch.
Flexible Speed
“The platform itself is special be- cause it was built by a program
manager to solve real problems, and not by a bank or other organi- zation, which tends to build to solve perceived problems, Dewar says. “And I knew how important exibility and speed are to clients.”
Those two qualities would be- come the hallmarks of GPS, helping it attract customers in more than 30 countries. In the last two years, the company has grown 152 percent and 166 percent, respectively, and it expects similar results this year based on its pipeline. “I think any metric that you use—whether it be signed clients, pro t or settlement vol- ume—will show the same levels
of growth,” Dewar says.
Flex-e-vouchers, where Dewar
also serves as chief information o cer, is still going strong too.
The company, also known as Flex-e-card, went from selling
1.5 million cards in 2011 to 2.5 million cards in 2016. That growth has come from launching programs across Europe and beyond, includ- ing Dubai, where the company runs the gift card program for
the largest shopping center in the world, the Dubai Mall.
Under Dewar’s stewardship, both companies are constantly enhanc- ing technology to o er new prod- ucts, such as a mobile POS tablet
What technologies Will change payments most?
“Wearable technology is the most interesting thing going on ... and it’s only people’s imaginations that will be the limiting factor on where and how it can be used.”
enabling merchants to sell gift cards from anywhere.
Dewar, who oversees GPS’s tech- nology, security and operations, spends more time on making strategic decisions for the business and acting as a sounding board for everyone to bounce o ideas. “I am a big believer in hiring great people and then getting the hell out of their way,” he says. This approach enables him to maintain a healthy work/life balance. “I am de nitely guided by a desire to be successful,” Dewar says. “But more than that, I love to build things, whether it’s a global processing platform or a Lego house with my daughter Chloe.”