As trouble-plagued EML Payments embarks on significant changes to its business, flowing from last year’s strategic review, it has parted company with its chief financial officer Robert Shore.
The company announced last week that Shore, who has been at the company for more than six years, will leave in April. European CFO Jonathan Gatt has been appointed interim CFO.
Shore’s departure follows the resignation of chief executive Tom Cregan last July. Cregan had failed to deal effectively with regulatory issues in the company’s Irish and UK businesses.
In November, chair Peter Martin was voted off the board. Like Cregan, Martin was paying the price for the company’s failure to effectively address compliance issues, poor financial performance and a collapse in the share price over the past 18 months.
Emma Shand, who was appointed CEO following Cregan departure, outlined the results of the strategic review at the company’s annual general meeting.
She said the company’s problems go back to a period of rapid growth between 2015 and 2021, when it made seven acquisitions. The acquired businesses were left to operate largely on their own, “missing an opportunity to integrate, extract synergies and align culturally”.
Shand said: “Unintegrated acquisitions bring with it fragmented technology and processes, many of which are manual. Data is also fragmented, impacting operational efficiency.
“Today we start a three-year transformation to focus the business for responsible growth.”
The company will “elevate” its European and UK remediation work, automate more of its business processes (such as customer onboarding), consolidate business units, modernise core technology and create a single source of data.
She said the company, which does a lot of business selling prepaid and reloadable payments cards, also needed to be ready to operate in a market where open banking, digital wallets and embedded payments will change the landscape.
It will narrow its focus to four market segments: financial services with embedded payments; human capital management, with a focus on payment and rewards; retail, with an extension beyond gift cards; and government payments, where it sees a drive to replace cash and paper-based payments with digital alternatives.