Myles Stephenson

When Myles Stephenson founded Modulr Finance in September 2015, he had investors ready to commit capital. Venture builder Blenheim Chalcot was poised to allocate the funds Myles needed to issue share capital and employ the founding team he had lined up.

But for five months, not a single bank let them set up an account. 

“It was an absolute nightmare,” Myles says. “We had to go around bank to bank, being told no. Sometimes we had to wait weeks for a risk committee decision which then came back as ‘no’.” 

The banks were worried about regulatory risk. It wasn’t until February 2016 that Modulr’s first account went live with Handelsbanken. Only then could the company start enacting its vision of, ironically, making financial services easier to access.

Today, Modulr employs more than 400 people and counts companies like Sage, Revolut and Wagestream as customers. It is one of just a handful of non-banks with a settlement account at the Bank of England. 

“I’ve been in payments, or touching payments, for all of my career,” Myles says. With an MA in biochemistry from Oxford, he spent his early career in Marks and Spencer’s financial products team, before working in fraud prevention and payments at London-listed Retail Decisions, where he led investments into two mobile payments joint ventures.

In 2008, he founded CorporatePay, in partnership with Blenheim Chalcot. CorporatePay focussed on prepaid and corporate cards which were taking off in the US but had not yet been replicated elsewhere in the world. The service was not dissimilar from what Ramp and Brex do today.

As CEO, Myles scaled the company to 40 people. Then one day in late 2010, he received a phone call from WEX (then called Wright Express), a listed American corporate payments group. They were interested in acquiring the business. Myles told WEX he wasn’t interested and went back to work. But a year later when they called again, the offer and market conditions made more sense. CorporatePay was acquired within six months for a significant sum.

Myles spent a few years working at WEX, running its European arm and leading a joint venture with ExxonMobil. But eventually he decided to jump back into company-building.

“There was a bit of unfinished business from what we’d started with CorporatePay before we sold it,” he says. “We didn’t really get to finish the journey.”

Myles thinks Modulr would have struggled to exist a few years earlier. In hindsight, he says, it was “probably wise to sit on the sidelines a bit” in the years after the financial crisis. This was a period of radical flux for his industry, with the term ‘fintech’ changing from niche portmanteau into one of technology’s most lucrative sub-categories.

Engaging with the rules, from navigating regulatory hurdles to spotting opportunities as legislation evolves, is a consistent theme of Myles’ entrepreneurial journey. 

After all, it started with the company being denied accounts by every major provider. Modulr had been rejected because if something went wrong at a bank’s regulated customer, the regulator would hold the bank to account too. In effect this made the banks import their customers’ risk. Myles doesn’t consider this to have been malevolent, but more an example of how payment services for businesses have been broken.

Regulation, and its associated complexity, is a major cause of silos and opacity within financial institutions. 

“You might find credit card issuing over here, real-time payments here, something else over there, those different parts of the bank not talking, let alone the technology not talking,” he says.

Modulr provides regulated infrastructure that other companies build on. It holds the licences and the direct connections to the payment networks, then exposes them through an API, so a lender, a payroll provider or a travel platform can open accounts, take money in and pay money out from inside its own software.

According to Myles, “The concept of modules, and the reason behind it, was about giving clients choice… A lot of our early conceptual branding had Lego in it.”

Modulr brings all this complexity together into one unified platform, and removes as much friction as possible for the customer. Much of the company’s growth is attributed to sectors where payment complexity and operational risk are high, such as travel, lending, accounting and payroll.

One of Myles’ main learnings from his career is to be open with candidates about how hard the work is at Modulr.

“We’ve gone back to just being really honest… to say that this is complex, this is tough,” he says. “The fundamental skills are that people need to be driven, smart enough, and have a desire to understand the complexity. That’s for everyone. And then we do need a healthy mix of people from the industry, and people who can and really do want to learn the business.”

He feels that if complacency creeps in, this commitment to understanding complexity can be easy to lose sight of. 

“I’m sure all businesses have their levels of complexity but what we’re doing with the technology, the regulation, and the handling of money is fundamentally complicated. If you’re not into understanding how all this works, you’re just not going to make it, even in sales and marketing.” 

Another insight Myles has around building culture is knowing which team members are suitable for which stage. He acknowledges that the people who suit a 50-person company aren’t necessarily the ones for 500.

“It’s not wrong or bad. It’s different,” he says. 

Myles remembers a conversation with one of his senior technical colleagues, who reached that conclusion about himself before anyone else. He recognised that running a much larger technical function wasn’t the job he wanted. That team member is still involved in Modulr to this day, in a different role.

Myles credits one-to-one leadership coaching for helping to elevate his thinking in this regard and providing the mental distance from his organisation. He works with Rob Bier, author of Smooth Scaling. “I wish I’d met Rob a long time ago,” he says.

While Modulr was raising its Series B, Highland Europe Partner Laurence Garrett reached out to Myles on LinkedIn. He had heard they were in the market and was monitoring Modulr’s category.

“We had a typical pitch deck and I remember we didn’t even open my laptop,” Myles recalls. “The three of us [Myles, Laurence, and Rob Devey, Modulr’s Chair] just talked for an hour and a half. It was probably the only first meeting like that. All of the others were a bit more formulaic.”

From this initial session, chemistry was built. As many Highland Europe founders will relate to, Myles remembers the entire partnership coming to visit him and his team. Term sheets were soon drawn up.

Everything was agreed and ready to be signed, just as the COVID-19 pandemic started changing society forever.

“We were all done, ready to go, literally ready to sign, and COVID hit,” Myles says. “So we actually signed the week of the first lockdown in the UK. And Highland remained absolutely committed and carried on, despite the world being in chaos.”

By Myles’ own admission, Modulr had no major pandemic-related tailwind. Yet the Highland team didn’t flinch in the face of the uncertainty of the moment. They went ahead with the deal and the team, led by Laurence and Helena Richardson, have supported Modulr ever since, including by participating in the company’s Series C in 2022.

Modulr this year announced net profitability on a full-year basis for 2025, with the company handling more than 200 million transactions and £180bn in annualised payment value for thousands of its business customers. The company has also launched in the US to build on this momentum.

In a nostalgic moment, Myles and his team recently revisited an early Modulr business plan, from around the time they were unable to set up a bank account. 

A decade later, the business they have built today is remarkably similar to what they set down on that piece of paper. Although the current company is structured on a vertical basis, the core concept of API enterprise and SME-through-partners platforms has endured.

“The thinking was not from 2016 onwards,” Myles says. “It was from that entire journey, including 2008 to 2016. You could argue it goes even further back.”