Founded in Edinburgh in 2018, BR-DGE is a payment orchestration provider on a mission for hyper-growth. The company enables enterprise merchants, financial institutions, platforms and payment providers access payment tools and products via a single integration.
In this week’s In Profile, we chat with Thomas Gillan, CEO of BR-DGE, to explore the company’s approach to simplifying payment processes for large-scale merchants and to discuss the advancing role of payment orchestration technology.
Tell us more about your company and its purpose
Thomas Gillan, CEO of BR-DGE
Even in today’s digital age, with all the advances that the fintech industry has made, customers are still being frustrated by slow, disjointed payment processes, and a lack of localised payment method options at checkout. This has led to merchants losing transactions, having no visibility over their customers, and getting fragmented, patchy data that clouds their visibility over who their customers are. Equally, payment providers are struggling with the inefficiencies of legacy tech stacks that can’t adapt to new digital demands.
BR-DGE was founded in 2018 with the aim of making paying as seamless as possible, with fewer clicks and less friction. We’re building the modular tech, connections, and relationships that enable enterprise-level merchants and payment providers to optimise, innovate and grow.
BR-DGE offers our clients more than 400 payment methods and partner solutions through one API integration, enabling them to tap into improved transaction conversions and implement value-added services like personalised checkouts and smart transaction routing. With modular connectivity, routing, data analytics and tokenisation solutions, our clients can scale, break into new markets, introduce innovative features, optimise costs, and easily adapt to changing consumer expectations.
BR-DGE differs from other orchestrators because it is independent, modular and scaling at a rapid pace. That being said, we’re not dead set on growth just for the sake of it – we’re considered and thoughtful about how we scale alongside our clients. Another stand-out feature of our business is the interoperability we offer large and complex enterprises who require a solution that can access the entire ecosystem without restriction.
In fact, we’ve already earned the trust of some of the biggest names in payments, including Visa, PayPal, Mastercard and a growing roster of enterprise merchants, who increasingly recognise that payment orchestration is the quickest and most cost-effective way to get game-changing, future-proof paytech to their end users.
What are some of your recent achievements you’d like to highlight?
Since launching the business in 2018, we’re proud to say we’ve scored some incredible client wins and service innovations that are meeting urgent market needs. That’s because we take the time to listen to the market, tune into what customers want, and build ultra-responsive and adaptive technology solutions that deliver against the key challenges that merchants and payment providers are facing.
It would take too much time to list all the stand-out moments we’ve secured along the way to where we are now, but I can certainly highlight that we secured multiple tier one client wins in 2024 in our target verticals, and we also made huge progress towards £100billion of processing value.
These achievements reinforce that we’re earning the trust of the large high-volume enterprises we set out to serve, and delivering on our original vision to make payments as easy as possible. We’ve also grown our team from just 25 people at the start to more than 100 today, and we’ve more recently expanded into the Asia-Pacific region as demand for our services picks up globally.
Launching our white-label offering in 2024 was also a proud moment for us all. Payment providers are struggling with legacy tech that’s hindering their growth, but also realise that building their own in-house solutions are just too risky and costly to undertake. We hadn’t planned to launch our white-label service as soon as we did, but the level of interest from payment providers was such that we strived to get it to market sooner. It’s filling a real urgent need in the market.
Payment providers and acquirers can now offer our connectivity, smart routing, data analytics and tokenisation solutions under their own branding, to create a truly customisable 360-degree tech stack with the best components of their own offerings and BR-DGE’s modular payment services. This is a prime example of how we’re removing barriers to scale, as payment providers can win new business without adding friction to checkout processes, and they won’t need to change from their existing provider or deal with the hassle of doing integrations themselves.
Another huge milestone for BR-DGE was being recently awarded Service Organization Control Type 2, (SOC2) a cybersecurity framework that ensures third-party service providers securely store and process client data, which further solidifies our ability to help merchants easily and securely capture, store and transact.
How did you get into the fintech industry?
I have always been interested in finance, investment, and how to solve businesses’ scaling problems with global solutions. Coming from an entrepreneurial background, and having been involved in various family businesses from an early age, moving into the fintech industry was the logical next step for me.
I started off in corporate finance, then I joined an investment fund, and began investing in a lot of tech companies at various stages, from seed funding through to Series D and beyond.
Then, I made the switch to a B2B software firm with a strong payments team around 10 years ago, and that was my first serious foray into the payments industry. I loved it – it was so rewarding to solve challenges from the inside and to see the team and the product grow. This hands-on experience really opened my eyes to how even the smallest tweaks to processes can generate massive efficiencies and optimisations. In 2021, I found my ideal home at BR-DGE where I lead our teams in cracking the most complex payment puzzles day in, day out.
What’s the best thing about working in the fintech industry?
The pace of change and innovation in payments and fintech means that it never gets boring. But it also means that as the ecosystem expands, and new payment methods emerge, new complexities will rear their ugly heads. There’s always something new to learn in payments, but it all comes back to solving the key problem – how do we make paying as easy as possible for the customer? At the heart of everything BR-DGE does is making paying as seamless as possible with fewer clicks and less friction
We do that by helping enterprise merchants and payment providers tap into popular local payment methods to improve transaction conversions, and implementing value-added services like personalised checkouts, dynamic pricing and smart transaction routing amongst other game-changing benefits. When our clients succeed, we succeed, and we’re relentless in exploring other ways we can add value for them.
To do all of that though, you need to have talented, curious and collaborative teams, and I am grateful that all our people do just that. Our team is one of our main differentiators, and our culture has helped our journey to success. From the developers to our client service teams to our senior management teams, we’re all united in addressing varied and complicated payment challenges for our customers. That’s what BR-DGE was set up to do, and we’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved so far. But we’re certainly not resting on our laurels – we want to do much more, and you can expect more solution innovations like advanced data analytics very soon.
What frustrates you most about the fintech industry?
An ongoing challenge has been to win the trust of our clients to allow a third party to play such an important role in their business operations. The build versus buy conversation is well established, but as a team of 100 people in Scotland, we had to work hard to prove that we were different from other previous payment orchestration solutions.
We’re working to raise awareness of how payment orchestration can help different ecosystem players, and how it could be adapted to meet their own unique needs. Our modular tech means that they can pick and choose the services they need without changing their existing tech stacks or ending relationships with existing providers.
Acquirers in particular have needed some coaxing as some see payment orchestration as a challenge to their businesses, but the reality is they gain a raft of competitive advantages and service strengths in a much more cost-effective way than if they were to build new systems themselves. In its most simple form for acquirers, payment orchestration is not a tool to encourage the race to the bottom, it is a route to value creation.
Businesses around the world have ever-present challenges when it comes to payments, especially if payments isn’t a core competency of their business. They constantly battle to keep customers happy, fend off fraud, improve access to local payment methods, and have better data on customer journeys. We talk about the failings of legacy tech, but businesses are largely unaware of how payment orchestration can help them overcome several pain points.
By integrating multiple payment gateways through a payment orchestrator, businesses can ensure that they always have a failsafe back-up option and benefit from bespoke modular tech that complements their existing tech stacks, without having to switch acquirers or end existing relationships. Most importantly, payment orchestration ensures that customers will always have a hassle-free payment experience, and businesses can maintain that all-important trust they depend on to keep trading.
How have your previous roles influenced your career?
In my role as CEO, I need to have eyes on all aspects and departments of BR-DGE, so my previous roles have all helped me to identify and solve various difficulties, and implement cross-functional synergies for maximum advantage. I’ve always been very hands-on in each of my roles and I’ve been fortunate to witness first-hand how just the slightest change to long-standing processes can make a huge difference to efficiencies, revenues and the customer experience.
It’s my responsibility to ensure that BR-DGE’s key messages and goals are communicated to and understood by everyone in the organisation, and that messages need to land in a different way for different people depending on their role.
One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is to pick your team very carefully, because the people around you will ultimately define both you and your business. If you can build a culture based on people who are fired up and excited about your business, they will become one of your biggest assets, without a doubt. Together, I have every confidence that team BR-DGE will build Scotland’s next great success story.
What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?
It sounds obvious but if you don’t make mistakes, you won’t learn. One of the early lessons I learned in a previous company is that it’s easy to spot a gap in the market, and easy to believe that you’re the one to address it. But when you pitch that vision to early investors, customers, or adopters, you assume they’ll instantly understand or share your ambition and creativity. You need to tell the whole story, not just rush to the last page. If you don’t take your team on the full journey, you can’t expect them to be as instantly excited or as aligned as you are.
The cumulative lesson I’ve learned from my previous experiences is that I encourage people to make their own decisions, take risks, and do it in a way where there’s safety to make mistakes. That’s how you really get boundary-breaking innovation.
What has the future got in store for your company?
This year, we have spent a lot of time on making sure that our company is scalable as we expand into new industry verticals and markets. Our success and growing momentum mean we’ve gone from 25 people to more than 100 in just a couple of years, and any scaling company will have growing pains that need to be managed. We want to keep that close, family feel of a small company as we scale to meet global demand, and we’ve made some senior management hires who will help us with that expansion.
We’re also getting lots of interest and demand for our hybrid tokenisation service BR-DGE Vault, a secure, PCI-compliant hybrid tokenisation solution and payment vault that we launched in 2023. Vault is completely different from any other tokenisation service as we can combine different merchant, acquirer and network tokens into one hybrid BR-DGE token. That’s another way we’re removing friction from payments, and making the ecosystem even more interoperable.
In the near future, you can expect more partnerships to add to the ones already announced, more personalisation in our services, and you’ll see us ramping up our presence in the US as we ready ourselves to tackle major growth. 2025 is sure to hold exciting things for BR-DGE as we breakaway from the pack, so watch this space.
What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?
Artificial intelligence is going to affect the way the world works, and that includes payments. AI is still in its early stage, but I believe we will eventually see things like machine-to-machine payments where the customer doesn’t have to do anything. It could be your electric car handling the charging and payment process by itself, so the customer doesn’t even need to step inside the garage to pay. AI has the potential to remove the friction in payments even further, so that even one click will be too many for the consumer.
Alongside that, biometric authentication and tokenisation will become much more widespread, and there’ll be more work on how they can operate hand-in-hand to reduce friction, protect sensitive customer data and increase innovation in the industry.
There are a lot of fascinating developments happening around financial inclusion, and I think digital wallets will have a much larger role to play in the future. I would love to see a solution that utilises fintech products to encourage financial inclusion regardless of where someone lives in the world.
The post In Profile: Thomas Gillan, CEO of BR-DGE appeared first on The Fintech Times.
