Peter Saxton - Chief Financial Officer

Peter Saxton ACA has extensive experience of mergers and acquisitions, and start-up businesses, and has been Finance Director of a number of technology-based companies, most recently (from start-up in 1996 until 2001) at Pay-Point, the bill payment company.

Among current roles he is responsible for all finance, legal, and commercial functions for a start-up business providing personal identity and communications software, and earlier this year, was appointed by Vitesse Rail Com as their Chief Financial Officer.

At Pay-Point Peter was responsible for all Corporate Finance activity where he undertook a financial reconstruction in 1998 that raised £32m of capital investment, and £5M of lease finance which secured positive cash flow on turnover growth from Nil to £22M per year. The range of investors included BT, London Electricity, the Rothschild Investment Trust, and Lord Weinstock.

The statistics behind the settlement and collection system that Peter implemented are also impressive as £1.1 billion was handled on behalf of 7,500 retailers across the UK. The extremely low bad debt figure of 0.04% was a reflection of the robust processes put in place and delivered by a 24x7 data processing centre handling 2M transactions per week.

As well as holding financial responsibility, human resource and legal functions were managed during a time when there was headcount growth from 10 to 170. Legal activity included client contract negotiation.

A thoroughly innovative and successful financial career is revealed by Peter’s CV. After University, where a BSc (Hons) from UMIST was achieved in management sciences, he qualified as a chartered accountant in 1981 after which he occupied senior financial posts with Sinclair Research and at Price Waterhouse, where he was assigned to assess product and pricing policy for Post Office Counters.

Peter’s subsequent experience includes working to establish the LINK ATM network, and becoming a team member of Nexus Payment Systems where an MBO resulted in a successful expansion of trade with a number of European countries. He was a key player in negotiations to merge Nexus with Sligos, a major French payment system business, which ultimately led to a successful exit strategy.

Subsequent assignments included work with Essex Police to outsource functions, advice to 3i in a business re-structuring requirement, and an interim appointment on behalf of 3i to establish financial controls in a £30M turnover construction company specialising in retail and leisure markets.