Phillip McGriskin came to London for a few weeks’ holiday and found a job. He had been working in personal-lines underwriting in Sydney. A chance encounter with somebody in insurance produced an offer; he returned and stayed. A trip with a return ticket became a life with a Welsh wife, three children and an office in the orbit of Lloyd’s. As origin stories go, it has rather less strategic planning than the average investor presentation.
Years later, describing the family he had made in Britain, he said his children sounded like little Lord Fauntleroy. Their father retained his Australian accent. The detail is pleasing because it introduces somebody whose professional life can otherwise disappear under an avalanche of payments terminology. Before there were treasury platforms and international expansion plans, there was a young insurance worker who took a holiday and changed his address.
His career subsequently travelled a much longer route: insurance, financial technology, a payments company sold to Worldpay, then another company with his co-founder Paul Townsend. That second business, Vitesse, eventually brought him back to the industry where he had started. This time he was interested in what happened after an insurer agreed to pay. Agreement, it turned out, could leave the recipient with quite a wait.
First, learn to collect
McGriskin and Townsend founded Envoy Services in 2006. Its business addressed the awkwardness of collecting payments across countries and payment methods. International commerce looks remarkably tidy on a website. Behind the purchase button sit local preferences, banking relationships and systems that do not necessarily speak fluently to one another. Envoy worked on that less photogenic part of the transaction.
Worldpay acquired Envoy in 2011. McGriskin went on to hold senior positions there, including chief product officer and managing director of Worldpay Futures. The experience gave him a view of payments at the scale of a large processor, after building a business around the practical difficulties of getting money across borders.
The partnership with Townsend survived the sale. In 2014 they founded Vitesse, initially pursuing cross-border business payments. They had spent years helping companies receive money. Now they were considering the other direction, where businesses had obligations to employees, suppliers and customers, and where an instruction to pay could still become an administrative expedition.
The claim was approved. Where was the cash?
Insurance gave that question particular urgency. The industry distributes responsibility among carriers, brokers and specialists authorised to handle business on their behalf. One organisation may supply the capital while another manages the claim. Money has to be available at the point of payment, but its owner still needs to know where it is and what has happened to it.
Vitesse’s history dates its focused turn toward insurance to 2021. Conversations with customers had exposed a problem larger than transferring money: funds could be scattered among accounts, with limited visibility across the whole arrangement. A quicker payment mechanism would be useful. A clearer view of the money, and control over it before the payment, could change the economics of the operation.
That discovery helps explain McGriskin’s return. His earlier insurance experience supplied familiarity; payments supplied a different set of questions. The product grew around treasury as well as disbursement. In ordinary language, insurers needed to see their funds, manage them and have them ready when a legitimate claim required payment. The claimant should not have to develop an interest in banking operations to receive the money.
Who owns it?→Control
Where is it?→Payment
Can it move?
Approval and available funds have to meet.
There is a person at the end of the transfer
The human reason for working on this plumbing is easy to understand. An insurance payment often follows a disruption to somebody’s home or business. Every extra administrative step belongs to an organisation; the delay belongs to a person. McGriskin’s interest in payment speed makes more sense against that imbalance than it does against a screen full of transaction statistics.
Parametric insurance offered one expression of the idea. These policies pay when a specified trigger is verified, allowing a different route through the claims process. Vitesse partnered with FloodFlash and Yokahu in December 2022. For McGriskin, the attraction included fewer administrative steps and the prospect of getting funds to people sooner. A carefully designed policy still needs an effective way to deliver its promise.
A later example came from California. After the January 2025 Palisades wildfire, coverholder LSI and claims administrator Hausch used Vitesse’s Faster Claims Payment infrastructure for some claims. The company’s account of that work recorded more than $8.9 million paid through FCP, with settlement completed in 16 days. A comparable claim dependent on conventional cash calls was still receiving funding months later.
Those figures describe a particular case, rather than a timetable every claimant can expect. Their significance is the mechanism. With funding already accessible, teams could issue advances after approval. Elsewhere they had to request money, wait for it and reconcile it before paying. The difference became visible in the policyholder’s bank account, far from the machinery that created it.
An introduction can travel further than a pitch
Selling a new financial system to insurance companies requires patience. McGriskin has described the inertia involved, the lengthy sales cycle and the need to find somebody inside a prospective customer who has a reason to change. A regulated institution has a substantial past attached to its present operations. Replacing a process means bringing its people along.
He pays attention to time to revenue and staff engagement, and to whether teams understand the objectives they are being asked to deliver. Those concerns belong together. A product can be ready while the organisation selling it, or the organisation buying it, still has work to do. Technical readiness does not automatically produce a customer with a signed contract.
Relationships provide another route. McGriskin has described Brit adopting Vitesse and introducing it to Sedgwick, which then brought other carriers into the network. Each introduction gave the next conversation some history. Insurance’s interconnections, often blamed for complexity, could also help a service spread once somebody trusted it enough to recommend it.
“Insurance is still a big people business.”Phillip McGriskin
His investment relationships show a similar continuity. Robin Tombs, the Gamesys and Yoti co-founder, had known him since the Envoy years. Tombs and Noel Hayden backed Vitesse in 2014. That same year, McGriskin and Townsend invested in Yoti. Capital travelled in both directions between people who had seen one another work. The exchange says something about the small circles behind businesses serving very large markets.
A bigger cheque, a longer commitment
In May 2024, Vitesse announced a $93 million Series C led by KKR, with existing investors including Hannover Digital Investments participating. The intended uses were specific: US expansion, product development and more connections across insurance’s payment network. Curt Hess joined as US executive president, bringing experience from 10x Banking and Barclays.
The investment gave McGriskin’s next phase a different scale. It also brought the practical obligation to turn an established London proposition into a working American operation. Hiring somebody familiar with the market was part of that work. Money on the balance sheet could fund the expansion; customers still had to decide that the service would improve their own operations.
Back in London, the Faster Claims Payment service secured a further commitment in November 2025. The Lloyd’s Market Association, LIMOSS and Vitesse announced a contract for at least another three years. All managing agents had signed up to access the service, with more than 700 live binders managed through it. Access across the market and use on individual contracts are different measures, but both matter to a network business.
The following month’s Wakam UK announcement supplied a more intimate measure of the proposition. Wakam reported operating with six to seven weeks of reserves through the centralised model, compared with the 16 to 24-plus weeks of expected paid losses frequently held in industry loss funds. More than 50 MGA and TPA partners had been brought onto the platform. Faster movement and less idle capital could be pursued together.
The windsurfing school will have to wait
McGriskin’s accounts of entrepreneurship leave room for failure. A dot-com business he had worked with collapsed before he started his first company. Without a degree, he found the prospect of returning to a crowded employment market daunting. He has also acknowledged investing too little in marketing and building sales capability too slowly. An exit makes a tidy milestone; the decisions preceding it rarely arrange themselves so neatly.
His prescription inside the office is direct: “I don’t believe in silos. I don’t believe in blame games.” He argues that people need to admit mistakes quickly and feel able to describe a problem while it can still be solved. Employee share options help the company compete for talent. Shared ownership and permission to speak plainly are practical parts of his approach to building a team.
By June 2026, the business had appointed Richard Reggel as European chief commercial officer and reported nearly 600 active customers, with customer growth of 40% year on year. The job ahead remains recognisable from the early days: persuade more organisations to trust a shared financial system, then make that trust useful every time money needs to move.
Asked about a different life, McGriskin offered teaching or running a windsurfing school somewhere hot. Both involve persuading people to try something unfamiliar, although one has a more attractive dress code. For now, his work keeps returning to a less picturesque destination: the space between a promise to pay and the arrival of the payment. He has spent a career learning how much can happen in that gap.