He’s not a transaction banker but he plays an integral role in the industry, working for the company that underpins the bulk of retail payment flows in the UK. Chris Dunne, payment services director at VocaLink, could be described as a plumber of the transaction banking industry, overseeing the pipes for inter-bank payments. Excluding high-value payments – which run over CHAPS (a same-day automated payment system) – and the card transactions that run on networks such as Visa and MasterCard, VocaLink provides the plumbing for the other flows on the bank-to-bank networks of Bankers' Automated Clearing Services (BACS) and Faster Payments as well as the ATM network LiNK.
Mr Dunne has had a career in connecting the pipes between banks. He previously worked for Reuters, where he was head of strategy for treasury services, a role in which he connected banks for foreign exchange and money market transactions. He then worked for what was then known as BACS, which became Voca and then VocaLink. He worked on re-architecting the BACS platform and, more recently, has been working on Faster Payments, which was launched in the UK in May 2008. The international version of Faster Payments has now gone live in Singapore, and VocaLink has been in the bidding process to do the same in Australia.
