I’m not just grabbing the money – I’ve already made £32m

British tech triumph Worldpay is about to be sold to foreign buyers – making boss Philip Jansen £34m. But, he protests...

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FOR the second time in a matter of minutes, the private equity entrepreneur who runs Britain’s most valuable financial technology group, Worldpay, explodes with rage. Philip Jansen ( pictured) is furious at any suggestion the takeover of his firm by an American rival is anything to do with money. The 50-year- old could make as much as £34m from the deal with Vantiv, which is set to be confirmed this week.

In an instant, his calm demeanour disappears, his voice rises in pitch. ‘The money is not important to me. Honestly, I find it amazing that you take that view.

‘I own a lot of shares in the company. I’ve taken out £32m so far, but I have been in private equity for a long time. The financials are not an issue for me. There is no grabbing the money. Who grabs the money? All the managers have made a fortune – tens of millions. They’re not doing it for the money.’

As someone who has often worked behind the scenes in private equity, the bespectacled and besuited Worldpay chief seems unused to public challenge.

Despite his protest, the speed with which Worldpay – which processes billions of card payments for retailers and banks – has accepted that it has little choice but to accept a £9bn offer from Vantiv represents a retreat at the first smell of Brexit cordite.

There is no doubting the enormous skill which Jansen and his team have shown in taking a ramshackle mixture of technology platforms, bought out of Royal Bank of Scotland, and turned them into a world-beater.

I first met Jansen over morning coffee when Worldpay was being floated on the stock market in 2015, after it had been rehabilitated by private equity firm Bain Capital, and he was all sweetness and light, wallowing in data about the new investments made, the great software it was building and a transformed enterprise.

WORLDPAY has become a technological triumph. And Jansen has been well rewarded. He made an estimated £50m from the initial float, and is in line for a £9m pay deal.

Jansen says: ‘ Worldpay had a series of technology platforms that weren’t necessarily connected. Bain Capital had to put together a new company. It built an HR function. A legal function from scratch. It had the benefit of all the RBS corporate activity but really it was a customer list with some salespeople.’

Critically, the Worldpay bought from RBS had two huge Silicon Valley customers in Google and Apple. Since escaping RBS in 2013, investors have ploughed £1.5bn into the enterprise, creating a global leader in payments processing which operates in 146 countries and 126 currencies. It has a customer list to die for, providing the payment technology for Tesco, Google, Airbnb, Visa and Mastercard as well as the local hairdressing salons.

For this stellar growth, Jansen has become a man used to justifiable praise for his accomplishments

So why, as Britain heads for Brexit and the nation’s horizons become more global, is Worldpay selling up? Why isn’t he trying to build a business in the US?

He says: ‘Everyone knows we lack scale in the US. We are the market leader outside the US for what we do. We’re the biggest in online payment execution. What this deal allows us to do is deliver for well-known digital clients in the US.’

Over the decades, British companies – from tobacco giant BAT to oil major BP, and BA on Atlantic routes – have a tremendous history of doing well in the US. yet Jansen seems to find it inconceivable that Worldpay as a standalone firm could crack the US – even though some 27pc of turnover already comes from across the pond. It’s at this suggestion that his outer calmness vanishes for the first time, to be replaced with petulance.

‘Do you really think we would spend whatever amounts of money and suddenly compete with them on a level playing field, when they are ten, 15, 20 times bigger, and scale matters? We’ll never get to the scale to have the cost line that they do,’ he argues.

His view is that bringing the firms together gives it a unique global strength. But as with so many takeovers, the locus of operations is likely to move from the UK to the US.

‘But it doesn’t mean that would be negative impact for the UK,’ he protests.

So would this be detrimental for london as the heart of the fintech industry? Jansen interrupts before I can finish my sentence: ‘It mat- ters to you. Does it matter to shareholders and does it matter to customers and does it matter to employees?’

HOWEVER, he also indicates that, when the takeover prospectus is published, he expects Vantiv will be prepared to make commitments about the future of Worldpay operations in the UK.

These pledges could include development centres in Cambridge and london as well as maintaining some kind of HQ in london. It’s a similar deal that Japan’s Softbank made when it took over Britain’s ARM Holdings last year.

A challenge lurks for Worldpay, as big tech customers such as Apple, Google and Amazon are likely to put their engineers to work to create their own copycat technologies. ‘These massive companies are in very strong market positions. So even with us bulking up and being larger, it becomes harder,’ says Jansen

By selling at an opportune time, Jansen and his boardroom cohorts may more easily navigate the big challenges which lie ahead.