A telephone call reaches a familiar moment. The order is agreed, the question answered, the customer ready to pay. Now someone needs a card number. James Barham has spent much of his working life building a business around what happens next - and, more particularly, around who should never receive those digits.
His company, PCI Pal, supplies software that helps businesses take payments during customer conversations while keeping sensitive card details away from their agents and systems. Its work belongs to the uncelebrated infrastructure of commerce. Nobody rings a retailer hoping to admire its payment architecture. The compliment is to finish the purchase without thinking about it.
Barham’s route into this work ran through an existing business, a change of corporate direction and a temporary move across the Atlantic. He helped create PCI Pal inside its former parent group, took responsibility for its early commercial functions and became group chief executive in October 2018. The small problem at the end of a phone call had become his main occupation.
The opportunity inside the switchboard
He graduated from Bath Spa University and worked at Hiscox and Call Connection before joining IPPlus in 2008. The sequence placed him close to the everyday business of customer contact: software, services, calls and the organisations paying to make them work. His eventual opportunity grew within that setting. PCI Pal began as an incubated venture inside the group.
That origin gives his founder story a particular texture. He was developing a specialist business among established operations, with existing customers and practical constraints. Sales, marketing and operations all became part of his remit. The attraction was a specific need inside customer communications: businesses wanted to collect money without acquiring an unnecessary collection of sensitive payment data.
In September 2016, the group completed the disposal of its call centre and CallScripter businesses. The following month, IPPlus adopted the PCI-PAL name. Barham joined the listed company’s board as commercial director on 30 September. Secure payments, previously one part of the organisation, became its sole focus. The company name now advertised the decision.
Seven people in Charlotte
The American expansion required more than a new name on an office door. PCI Pal established its North American operation in May 2017; its first employee there joined that July. The regional Amazon Web Services platform went live in February 2018. Each step supplied another piece of the machinery needed to sell and deliver in a new market.
In April 2018, Barham moved with his family to Charlotte, North Carolina, to lead the operation as chief operating officer for North America. By the June financial year end, the regional team numbered seven. He had previously run the UK operation from its 2012 launch. Now the experience had to travel with him.
There is a pleasing corrective in that number seven. International expansion can sound like something accomplished with arrows on a map. Here it meant a small group of colleagues, a recently launched cloud platform and a founder living in the market he was trying to build. The scale makes the decision easier to understand, and the personal commitment harder to overlook.
That October, he became group CEO. He returned to the United Kingdom in April 2019. His time in Charlotte was therefore a chapter with a beginning and an end, while the business it helped establish continued. The move had put him directly inside the practical work of taking a British operation abroad.
Let someone else open the door
One of the people who joined that American effort was Darren Gill, recruited from Genesys in July 2018 as vice president of channels for North America. Barham welcomed the appointment with a concise statement of commercial intent: “Channel is key to our focus as a business”. It was a useful sentence to keep.
The approach depended on working with businesses already supplying communications technology to customers. PCI Pal could make its payment capabilities part of those offerings. A partner brought relationships and distribution; the specialist brought a product that fitted a particular gap. For Barham, whose early responsibilities included both sales and operations, the arrangement joined commercial reach to the work of integration.
The arithmetic eventually became visible. In the first half of FY2026, partners secured 83% of new contracts. Those contracts contributed 71% of total new business signed. The distinction matters: counting contracts and measuring their value answer different questions. Both figures show how deeply other companies’ sales routes were involved in PCI Pal’s progress.
of new contracts secured through partners
In September 2026, PCI Pal confirmed BT as a reseller partner. The agreement had been signed in March after a procurement process, followed by onboarding and enablement. Initial customers had already been acquired. The interval is revealing. A signed partnership still needs to become something another organisation can explain, implement and sell. A handshake has a surprisingly long to-do list.
The reward for being overlooked
The product underneath those relationships solves a fairly awkward social problem. A helpful agent needs to guide a customer through paying. The customer has information the agent ought not to see. PCI Pal’s keypad payment technology lets the customer enter card details while the agent stays available to assist, with sensitive digits concealed from the agent.
It is a small rearrangement of an ordinary interaction, with consequences for how a business handles payment data. The customer still wants the order completed. The agent still wants to finish the call successfully. The system has to protect the information without turning the purchase into an obstacle course. Good payment software has little opportunity for a curtain call.
An early example came from fashion retailer AllSaints. In January 2018, PCI Pal received a PCI Awards for Excellence award for its implementation there. Barham, then chief commercial officer, highlighted a reported two-thirds reduction in the time taken to process phone sales after the introduction of Agent Assist. The project also reduced the retailer’s contact centre exposure to card-data handling.
For a commercial operator, that is a useful combination of outcomes to explain. Security projects can be hard to love when their benefits arrive mainly as troubles avoided. A shorter payment process offers something observable in the working day. The AllSaints example tied the underlying security proposition to the experience of actually serving a customer.
An ambition with a payroll
As the company grew, Barham also had to account for the people doing the work. In 2021, PCI Pal received three WorkL Workplace of the Year accolades, including recognition for staff engagement and a 92% workplace happiness score. His response credited the people behind the business, then added a qualification about the work still ahead.
“And we never forget that there is always room for improvement.”
James Barham · 2021 workplace awards
The next year brought another kind of public recognition: PCI Pal ranked 56th in the Growth Index of UK businesses, a list based on compound annual revenue growth over two years. Barham credited the team and investors. The business had travelled from a division in Suffolk to an organisation serving customers internationally, while retaining the practical problem that had given it a reason to exist.
By FY2025, annual revenue was £22.48 million, up from £17.96 million a year earlier. Annual recurring revenue reached £19.26 million. The company reported more than 700 customers across Europe, North America and Australia and New Zealand. Those figures put a scale on the operation Barham had once helped sell and organise from within its parent group.
The following half year supplied a more complicated picture. Annual recurring revenue rose 21% to £20.33 million, while revenue increased 7% to £11.31 million. Adjusted EBITDA fell from £0.95 million to £0.20 million as the company increased investment. Expansion brings a bill. Any account of Barham’s progress needs room for that bill alongside the growth figures.
When the other voice is a machine
In October 2026, PCI Pal introduced a new brand identity built around secure customer interactions involving both people and AI. Barham described an ambition to support transactions across conversational channels. The vocabulary had widened considerably since the early UK operation, but the company was still working at the point where a conversation becomes a payment.
That continuity gives the AI chapter some substance. A change in who conducts the conversation creates fresh integration work, while leaving the sensitivity of the transaction intact. Barham’s established route to market puts PCI Pal alongside communications vendors and their customers as those interactions change. It also asks the business to keep its products useful in environments that are still developing.
His public career contains a succession of such practical transitions: an internal venture becomes the group’s focus; a UK operator moves to Charlotte; a commercial director becomes chief executive; partner relationships turn into deployed customer contracts. Each transition requires the business to work somewhere new. None is completed simply by announcing that it will.
The idea at the centre remains agreeably plain. A customer should be able to complete a transaction without giving every participant access to the information that makes it possible. Barham has built a career around arranging that smaller audience. As the conversation acquires new voices, he has more places to make the arrangement work.