In March 2014, Nick Williams took a break from moving money around the world to move rather quickly around a London dock. His IFX powerboat, with Martin Robinson navigating, won at Royal Victoria Dock. The company name was painted on the hull. For once, the speed of an international payments business could be judged without opening a spreadsheet.
Williams was already running the foreign exchange company he had co-founded in 2005. Racing required a second working calendar, with training occupying alternate weekends. He described the commitment with the cheerful understatement of someone who had voluntarily added a very loud machine to his diary: “I end up in the boat every other weekend but it’s definitely worth it.”
The image is tempting: the entrepreneur at the controls, charging ahead. His business career eventually supplied a more interesting picture. After sixteen years as chief executive, Williams handed the job to somebody else. A few years later, he left the chairmanship too. Between the family farm where IFX began and those two departures sits a story about building something large enough to require a different arrangement of people.
A farm with an overseas outlook
IFX started at Shardeloes Farm in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. Williams and Tom Greenwood founded it in 2005; the company marked that shared beginning in its fifteenth-anniversary celebration. A farm is a pleasantly literal place to grow a business, although there is no evidence that the exchange rates were improved by the setting.
The original trade was foreign exchange brokerage. Customers needed currencies bought, sold and delivered; IFX arranged the transaction. The early business served corporate and private clients. Williams later described its birthplace simply as “on my family’s farm in Amersham”. The detail gives the operation a human scale before the offices, payment networks and software enter the frame.
Greenwood was an important part of that development. As co-founder and chief operating officer, he took responsibility for operations, regulation, legal matters and product strategy. His later account places his interest in embedded finance as early as 2013, before he helped build ibanq. IFX’s eventual change of direction had several authors. Williams’s long tenure at the top ran alongside other people doing consequential work.
A beginner with a familiar surname
Powerboat racing offered Williams a different sort of inheritance. His father, Tony, had been a title-winning racer. Nick entered the 2012 P1 SuperStock season with considerably less experience: a few small club events when younger, plus karting and off-road motorcycling on land. A family connection supplied familiarity with the sport. It did not supply a completed apprenticeship.
The route into the championship came through business. IFX handled currency exchange for P1; conversations with the organisers led to an invitation to consider racing. Williams readily agreed to try. He entered with his friend Aaron Emmett as navigator, in a 250-horsepower Panther 28SS.
That willingness to begin is a useful counterweight to the polished founder biography. Williams was running a company, yet in the boat he could still describe himself as new. The race record gives that admission substance. At Plymouth in 2012, the rookie pair finished sixth overall and took third in the final race. There was something to build on, along with plenty still to learn.
The second person in the boat
By 2013, Williams was racing with Martin Robinson. Their Oval team finished fourth in the P1 SuperStock UK season, taking three podium finishes at the Torquay finale. The result matters partly because it resists an easy legend: this was competitive racing with a season’s standings, other crews and positions that had to be earned.
The following spring brought the Royal Victoria Dock win. Robinson worked in risk consulting, an occupation that makes an agreeable companion to powerboat navigation. Williams was the driver, but the result belonged to a pairing. Even the most photogenic seat in a racing boat leaves room for somebody else to do essential work.
For Williams, the venue had an additional pull. He had watched his father race there in the 1980s. Returning as a competitor joined a childhood memory to an adult achievement. The dock was already part of the family story before IFX’s colours arrived on the water. That makes the victory more personal than a corporate sponsorship photograph can quite convey.
“I said of course I would like a go.”
Nick Williams, on entering P1 SuperStock in 2012
When the product changes the company
Back at IFX, the business was developing beyond the transaction arranged by a broker. The distinction sounds technical until you think about a customer’s working day. Agreeing an exchange rate is one task. Keeping track of accounts, preparing batches of payments and matching money to the right records are others. Software can bring more of that work into one place.
By the 2021 leadership announcement, IFX described ibanq as its multi-currency virtual IBAN account, connected to the firm’s foreign exchange infrastructure and international payments network. It had been added to the product range in January 2020. The company said its client base had doubled over the following twelve months.
The accompanying numbers explain the pressure on management. IFX reported 150,000 payments a month and turnover of £20 million, twice the previous figure. These are historical measurements from the handover period. They describe the business Williams was leaving to his successor, rather than a claim about its size today.
Company-reported figures accompanying the 2021 CEO transition.
Making room at the controls
Will Marwick had joined IFX as general counsel in 2018 and moved into the chief operating officer role before becoming chief executive in 2021. It was an internal succession, with a lawyer turned operator taking charge of day-to-day business. Williams became executive chairman, concentrating on governance and regulatory adherence.
That division of labour is less cinematic than a founder opening the office for the first time. It also tells you something about the enterprise’s maturity. Payments companies need people to manage permissions, responsibilities and controls alongside the commercial work. Growth adds decisions that cannot all remain on the founder’s desk.
Williams publicly supported the change. His explanation was that the management structure should adjust to the company’s expansion. Read beside the farm beginning, the decision gives the story a useful second act: building an institution includes changing your own place inside it. Keeping the original job title forever is only one possible ambition.
A deal he was glad to decline
One of Williams’s more revealing business anecdotes concerns an offer that did not become a sale. In a testimonial for private investment office Roycian, he recalled advisers persuading IFX’s management shareholders to reject a proposed deal. His point was that the advisers stood to benefit financially if it closed, yet believed the terms did not serve the shareholders.
Williams praised that choice as evidence of integrity. The episode does not establish the value of the offer, a date or a subsequent outcome. Its interest is narrower and rather better: here was a founder choosing to celebrate restraint. In business, the transaction that never happens can occasionally tell you more about someone’s standards than the one that earns an announcement.
It also adds another register to the racing photograph. A person can enjoy a fast boat and still appreciate an adviser asking him to slow down. There is room in the same career for enthusiasm about starting something and gratitude for being talked out of something else.
A football allegiance survives the sponsorship
There is one detail that brings the corporate partnerships back down to earth. IFX worked with Brentford Football Club, helping with overseas payments, and Williams welcomed its cup run in early 2021. His own allegiance belonged to Arsenal. Asked about Brentford facing Tottenham, he made clear that he had an extra reason to support the Bees that evening.
Football supplied the enthusiasm; foreign exchange supplied the practical connection. International player transfers are among the occasions when the distant business of currencies becomes very immediate to a club. Williams could discuss the commercial relationship and still sound like a supporter. Even a carefully arranged sponsorship leaves room for the ordinary pleasure of wanting Tottenham to lose.
What people remembered when he left
In February 2025, IFX announced that Williams had stepped down as chairman after almost twenty years with the business. The farewell stressed his generosity and his concern for people. Former colleague Simon Hughes remembered the early Amersham operation with six staff and trade sheets, then its later growth beyond 200 people.
Those recollections are personal assessments, and they sound like them. Their emphasis is nevertheless striking. Alongside the business’s expansion, colleagues remembered how Williams treated staff and encouraged a shared sense of purpose. A founder’s legacy is partly the product that carries on operating and partly the memories held by those who helped operate it.
The farm remains in his professional life. Under his full name, Nicholas Anthony Williams, he has been a director of Shardeloes Farm Limited since March 2021. His resignation as a director of IFX (UK) Ltd is recorded on 28 January 2025. The paperwork provides two precise markers for a career otherwise told through growth and departures.
The story ends with the company carrying on under other leadership, and with Williams still connected to the name of the place where it began. The boat photograph has him associated with a machine bearing IFX’s name. The more durable achievement was helping build a business that could keep moving once he had stepped away from the controls.