Payments Operations expert, Gavin Roberts joins from J.P. Morgan as Head of Payments and Trade Finance specialist Gareth Watts joins as TradeScope™Product Manager after nearly 3 years at RBS

Lacuna Solutions, the creators of ClientScope™, a platform that delivers to banks and financial institutions a complete 360° view of their clients, today announces two more senior hires and also the opening of its Bournemouth office. Both Mr Roberts and Mr Watts will be located in Lacuna’s Bournemouth office which opened at the beginning of May. They will report to Diana Downing, Lacuna’s CEO.

“It’s fantastic to have two people of such high calibre heading such highly demanding product management roles and to be able to have them in our new Bournemouth office. We see Bournemouth as one of the most exciting digital hubs outside of London and have plans to expand our technical and data analysis teams by recruiting in the area. Lacuna is growing fast and we hope to become one of the most notable additions to the tech scene in Bournemouth,” said Diana Downing, CEO of Lacuna Solutions.

Gavin Roberts brings 30 years experience in the banking world and will be responsible for Lacuna’s Payments Efficiency Gateway, delivering improved operational efficiency and data management in the client payments space. Over the last 23 years Mr Roberts has worked in various Payments Operations roles at J.P. Morgan. Most recently he was the Regional Executive for Payment Operations responsible for a global workforce of over 600 people and managing operations in cities including Frankfurt, Mumbai, Bangalore, Riyadh, Manilla and Johannesburg.

“It’s very exciting to work within an early stage company, with a diverse expert team and to see how other banks work, the common problems they share and have the subsequent opportunity to make some industry-wide change. The power of Lacuna will come from how good a job we do of bringing the FIs together as a community. I see our role as not just improving and enhancing payments, onboarding and KYC/ AML but having a leadership opportunity to making a positive change for the industry as a whole,” said Mr Roberts.

“The power of Lacuna’s approach to data and technology is also very exciting, and seeing how it can counter all the legacy structures that exist across data and technology. I’m looking forward to leveraging the Lacuna approach to solve client issues in the payments space.”

Gareth Watts brings 37 years of experience in banking having started his career at Midland Bank. Mr Watts has held various senior operations and product management roles at J.P. Morgan and Bank of America  Merrill Lynch, specialising in Trade Finance. Most recently he was the Director and Global Head of Trade Services Product, Corporate and Institutional Banking at Royal Bank of Scotland.

Mr Watts will be responsible for control, management and governance in the development of TradeScope™, part of the ClientScope™platform, that will be available later this year. TradeScope™ will act as a facilitation tool for corporates and banks to automate process flows around Trade Finance. It will help exporters and importers with the process flows that they have around payments, exchange of documentation and validation of documentation.

“I’m excited to be able to leverage the data and information we currently have available and the potential data we can gather by utilising our existing tools to enhance the experience for people using the TradeScope™ platform.” said Mr Watts. “Most current service providers in this area handle the creation and management of documentation, and other logistical aspects of transactions, and then hand off to 3rd parties. With TradeScope™ we are providing a more end to end solution connecting all relevant parties,” he adds.