Myles Stephenson and the business of making money move

Before Myles Stephenson could make business payments easier for anyone else, he had to discover how awkward they were for himself. While building CorporatePay, he and his colleagues struggled to get the accounts and technology connections they needed. Here was a payments business having difficulty obtaining payment services. The irony came with paperwork.

CorporatePay was sold in 2012. The problem stayed with him. Four years later, Stephenson launched Modulr to market, returning to the business of moving money with a different starting point: the work a company must do before, during and after a payment. His second venture would grow out of the inconveniences his first had taught him to recognise.

The biochemist at the till

Stephenson had originally imagined a different working life. He studied biochemistry at Oxford, attending Christ Church. A research project in Italy helped him weigh academic research against industry. He chose industry. The young scientist’s next laboratory, in a loose sense, was Marks & Spencer.

He joined its graduate training scheme and spent five years with the retailer. Work involving its Irish operation brought responsibilities he felt might have been less accessible in the larger UK business. Point-of-sale systems and financial products drew him towards the mechanisms behind a transaction.

A shop makes those mechanisms easy to overlook. The customer remembers the purchase; the business must also make the payment work. Stephenson’s career would move progressively further behind that apparently simple exchange.

At Retail Decisions, he worked on product development, partnerships and acquisitions. The company’s payments and fraud-prevention work offered another view of the industry. A relationship with NetDecisions, a business associated with venture builder Blenheim Chalcot, also introduced a connection that would outlast the immediate project.

A sale, and an unfinished problem

In 2008, Stephenson founded CorporatePay with Blenheim Chalcot’s backing. Its territory included prepaid and virtual-card payments for businesses, particularly in travel. By 2011, it had £248 million in load volume. A travel booking may occupy a few clicks for the passenger, but the companies behind it still have suppliers to pay and transactions to account for.

On 11 May 2012, Wright Express announced that it had acquired CorporatePay. The stated price was approximately £17 million, net of cash assumed, with a potential additional earn-out of up to £5.5 million. Stephenson became managing director of WEX Europe. His team helped integrate the business and expand the product offering locally and across Europe.

That sequence gave him experience of both building a company and operating within a larger one. It also supplied the background for his next question. What if businesses could obtain the payment services they needed through technology that fitted their own processes?

“Opening bank accounts was a significant challenge”

Myles Stephenson, reflecting on CorporatePay, 2017

The complaint sounds modest alongside the language usually attached to founding a financial technology company. Its usefulness lies in its precision. He could point to work his own team had wanted to automate and services it had struggled to access. Modulr began with a customer problem the founder had already inhabited.

The button and the machinery

Modulr’s work sits in the gap between deciding to pay and completing all the work associated with paying. Its platform supports accounts, outgoing payments, collections and other capabilities that businesses can connect to their software. An API gives one system a way to request an action from another; here, the action concerns money.

That distinction becomes clearer in payroll. Calculating what people should receive is one task. Executing the payments is another. When those steps live in separate systems, someone has to manage the connection between them. Embedding payments brings execution into the software workflow.

Supplier payments have their own version of the problem. Finance teams need to know what was approved, what was sent and what belongs in the accounts. A payment’s speed matters, but so does the work surrounding it. A fast transfer attached to a laborious process still leaves somebody with a laborious process.

In a 2023 interview, Stephenson described a focus on particular industries and the problems within them. Sage was an example of a client using Modulr for payroll and accounts payable. Travel and payroll platforms represented other routes into the daily operations of businesses.

There is a practical restraint in that approach. A payment company could describe a vast market and leave the reader to supply the details. Stephenson keeps returning to particular jobs: paying a supplier, running payroll, connecting a platform. The work has a recognisable owner, usually somebody who would appreciate having fewer things to check twice.

A direct line to the rails

Software is one part of this story. Access to the systems that actually move money is another. Modulr invested in direct connections to payment schemes, reducing its dependence on intermediary bank systems. By 2019, it had become a direct participant in Faster Payments.

In August 2026, the company added direct participation in CHAPS, settling at the Bank of England. CHAPS handles high-value, same-day payments. Modulr’s name now appears among its direct participants, alongside the banks and other institutions connected to that system.

The phrase “direct participant” has little natural sparkle. Its significance is operational. Where a payment service depends on another institution to reach a scheme, that relationship becomes part of the delivery chain. Direct access changes the company’s control over that chain.

That responsibility comes with obligations. The Bank of England requires CHAPS participants to meet technical and operational conditions, hold an appropriate settlement account and maintain compliance. Joining the system involves much more than adding another option to a screen.

For Stephenson, this fits the original ambition to simplify the customer’s work. The provider takes on difficult connections so the business using its service can concentrate on its own payments. Much of the effort is meant to disappear from the customer’s view. Financial plumbing has a demanding audience: people tend to notice it when something goes wrong.

There is a regulatory relationship to build as well. On 10 August 2026, Modulr announced its selection for the first cohort of the Financial Conduct Authority’s Scale-up Unit for firms regulated solely by the FCA. The programme offers growing regulated businesses a dedicated contact and practical support, alongside opportunities to inform policy. Stephenson welcomed the chance to work with the regulator and other participating firms. It was another setting in which his job involved the institutions around the technology: explaining what a growing payments provider needs, understanding the framework it operates within and maintaining a working conversation as the business expands. For a founder selling simpler payment operations, those conversations belong to the work too.

The company he keeps

Stephenson’s account of building Modulr also makes room for the people around the founder. After CorporatePay, he returned to Blenheim Chalcot. He valued the venture builder’s services, capabilities, networks and peer group of CEOs encountering similar decisions.

His explanation included a plain observation about how isolating starting a company can be. Experience had given him reasons to seek support again. The choice complicates the familiar portrait of an entrepreneur whose principal ambition is to answer to nobody. Stephenson’s published reasoning put considerable value on having useful people to turn to.

In July 2026, he described another set of relationships: Jakub Zmuda’s appointment as managing director for Europe and Mark Buitenhek’s arrival as independent chair of the European supervisory board. Zmuda had been with Modulr since 2016; Buitenhek brought experience from ING and payments-industry boards.

The European strategy also returned Stephenson to travel. Intermediaries must settle suppliers across currencies while managing the complications of the business around those payments. CorporatePay had given him an earlier education in that world. Years later, it remained a concrete place to apply the platform.

Across the Atlantic, with the same complaint

Modulr’s tenth-anniversary year brought a financial milestone. In February 2026, Stephenson reported that the company had delivered net profit for the full year in 2025. He described profitability as a basis for further investment and expansion.

The US chapter had already opened. On 7 January 2026, Modulr announced a partnership with FIS, supplying technology for the payment execution layer of its Money Movement Hub. That relationship introduced another route for financial institutions to connect with payment systems through a common interface.

In September, Modulr announced a partnership with Florida-based Cogent Bank. Existing and new customers would be able to open US accounts and make payouts through an integrated platform. The initial plans included piloting with customers in earned wage access, lending and merchant services.

The geography had expanded, but the complaint sounded familiar: fragmented systems, complicated connections and too much effort to get money where it needed to go. Stephenson was taking a problem he had encountered in one business into another market.

His public discussion of AI follows a similarly practical direction, including operational tasks such as payment repair and invoice processing. These are places to examine what automation can actually remove from a working day. The test remains a specific job getting done with less intervention.

There is a long distance between studying biochemistry and operating payment infrastructure across markets. Stephenson travelled it through a retailer, a payments provider, a venture of his own and a corporate acquisition. The useful knowledge accumulated along the way was often knowledge of what made work difficult.

At the beginning of Modulr’s story sits that oddly revealing predicament: a payments entrepreneur trying to get payment services. A decade later, the business still has to answer the question it raised. Can the next customer spend less time wrestling with the machinery? It is a good question to carry across an ocean.