Nick Ogden

A serial entrepreneur, Nick Ogden, CEO of Voice Commerce Group, has stood at the forefront of internet commerce since the late 1980s. In 1993 Mr Ogden founded a technology research and development firm that played a key role in bringing the internet to the UK's Channel Islands. It was this early experience building out internet infrastructure that led Mr Ogden to explore the technology's commercial application in the retail realm, leading to the creation of Europe's first online shop in 1994.

Long before the internet had entered the popular lexicon, Mr Ogden went on in 1995 to create the first bank-backed e-commerce platform, BarclaySquare. It was from these early beginnings that one of the world's first and most well-known providers of internet payments, WorldPay, was born.

But WorldPay was not merely or indeed primarily about providing payments: it addressed the fundamental challenges created by the new and transformative phenomenon of immediate cross-border commerce, says Mr Ogden. "The logic behind WorldPay was not about having e-commerce payment processing: e-commerce creates a stateless environment, which assumes the person who arrives at your shop understands the currency that you are advertising your products and services for sale in. WorldPay's rationale was to allow people to make a value-for-money judgement on the cost of the product and allow that transaction to be processed," he says. WorldPay was famously acquired by Royal Bank of Scotland in 2002.

Finding a voice

The following year Mr Ogden went on to found Voice Commerce Group, a Financial Services Authority-regulated payments services provider. Like WorldPay, Mr Ogden's current venture addresses the challenges associated with making payments in the online environment - in this instance the authentication and security of the transaction. As the threat of industrialised online fraud grows and continues to undermine consumer confidence in the internet, the ability to authenticate and secure the online transaction has become a vital enabler of e-commerce. But the prevailing focus on the use of memorised log-ins, passwords and in some instances the complex use of tokens and card-readers to authenticate the online transaction is both clunky and unintuitive. "It is a very unnatural process that we're asking people to go through," says Mr Ogden.

Instead, Voice Commerce envisages an online payment in which the user's own voice provides the primary mechanism by which their identity is verified and the transaction is authenticated. "This is exactly what we do in the real world," says Mr Ogden. By using a so-called voice signature comprising the use of voice biometrics, transactional history, trends and patterns, Voice Commerce allows the user to verify their identity via their mobile phone and authenticate the online payment using two channels: this is what information security pundits call two-factor authentication.

Critically, the use of voice combined with the mobile phone decouples the authentication mechanism from the online channel, making a single authentication mechanism applicable to all banking channels: it is this unique uniformity that excites market-watchers. "Everyone has become fixated by the internet transaction as opposed to saying 'actually, these transactions are all being created by people'," says Mr Ogden. "If we can protect the transaction by using the biometric identity of that person, then it doesn't matter whether they are doing an internet transaction or talking to a call centre or using an ATM."

A welcome directive

For institutions such as Voice Commerce Group, the regulatory and legislative shifts in the European payments landscape in recent years have proved transformative. Historically, Voice Commerce Group would have been nothing more than another technology provider, but the introduction of the Payment Services Directive (PSD) in November 2009 changed all this. "In 2004, everybody started talking about the Payment Services Directive and it was greeted with shock and horror, but not by me," says Mr Ogden. "I thought, 'if this comes off, this will be brilliant'. The most important thing I had to do was to keep the company's cash-flow running until 2009, because if the PSD happened I knew it would be groundbreaking."

The roll-out of the PSD has allowed organisations such as Voice Commerce to apply to the FSA to be authorised as a Payment Institution, a new category of payment service provider. Crucially, Voice Commerce is able to begin operating payment services to merchants and consumers, a function that was previously the exclusive preserve of the banks. "This means that we are in complete control of the business process and can take our own technology and financial services to market, test it and develop it and generate a profit, without having to find a scheme sponsor," says Mr Ogden. "That's a massive change to the way the industry has traditionally worked."

Career history

Nick Ogden

2003 - founded Voice Commerce Group

2002 - WorldPay purchased by RBS

1997 - founded WorldPay

1993 - founded Multi Media Investments Limited