Andrew, let's start with you as a person. Who are you outside of payments and consultancy - and what does a typical day look like for you?
Outside of work, I'm married and have been for 33 years, with three children and two dogs who keep us all busy. I'm passionately Welsh and a big sports fan, particularly rugby and golf.
A lot of my time at the moment is focused on charity work with Prostate Cymru. This summer, I'll be taking part in a 44-day challenge where a team of eight of us will walk the entire circumference of Wales - around 1,900 kilometres in total, which works out at roughly a marathon a day. It's a huge challenge, both physically and mentally, but it's for a cause that's very close to my heart.
As for a typical day, there really isn't one. Most mornings start around 5.30am. I'll sort the dogs out, fit in some training and then be at work for around 8.30am. At the moment, because of the Wales challenge, there's usually more training in the evening as well. Once the walk is over and the training eases off, you'll hopefully find me spending a bit more time back on the golf course.
The variety is one of the things I've always enjoyed, both in life and in business. No two days are ever quite the same.
You spent a significant part of your career at Midland/HSBC, Egg and Barclays. What did that experience teach you and what made you decide to leave and build something of your own?
Looking back, each stage of my career taught me something different and played an important role in shaping how I think about business, leadership and innovation.
I often describe my time at Midland and HSBC as my apprenticeship. I spent many years learning the banking industry from the ground up, doing just about every role in branch banking before moving into business and corporate banking. From there, I progressed into product and marketing roles at head office. It gave me a deep understanding of how banks operate, how customers think and what it takes to build successful products and services.
My time at Egg was transformational. It was an organisation that challenged conventional thinking and taught me that impossible is often just a state of mind. If you're prepared to challenge assumptions and change the narrative, almost anything becomes possible. It was an exciting period that really opened my eyes to what innovation could achieve.
Barclays was where it all came together. I was fortunate to be part of the Retail Bank Executive Team and had the opportunity to work on some fantastic initiatives. I genuinely loved my time there and learned a tremendous amount about leadership, strategy and large-scale transformation.
After five years at Barclays, however, I felt it was time for a new challenge. I wanted something more entrepreneurial and less corporate. I wanted the opportunity to devote all my energy to building something of my own and doing things differently.
That decision led to the creation of ChilliMint, where I've now spent the last 17 years as Co-Founder and Managing Director. Looking back, every stage of my career contributed something valuable, but founding ChilliMint gave me the opportunity to bring all of those experiences together and apply them in a completely different way.
When you and Santosh founded ChilliMint, what problem were you specifically trying to solve? What was the industry missing that you felt you could provide?
After spending nearly 12 years working with agencies and consultancies and often being the person they were pitching to, I developed a strong sense of what they were doing well and, just as importantly, where they were falling short.
One of the biggest issues was the reliance on turnkey solutions. Consulting firms naturally commoditise their services to make them scalable and repeatable, which makes perfect business sense. The problem is that clients aren't looking to be the same as everyone else. They want to differentiate themselves, solve specific challenges and create competitive advantage. Too often, the advice being offered wasn't tailored to the reality of their situation.
When Santosh and I founded ChilliMint, we set out to do things differently. We had a deep understanding of how banks operated, what their challenges were and where meaningful improvements could be made. Rather than focusing solely on the C-suite, we spent a lot of time working with heads of departments and the people responsible for delivering change on the ground. We offered insights and solutions tailored to their specific needs, with a commitment that our recommendations would be pragmatic, implementable and capable of delivering measurable performance improvements.
It was a bold promise, but we backed it up with results. In some cases, we were even prepared to work on a pro-bono basis or offer significant discounts if we didn't deliver what we said we would.
Our approach was different. We moved quickly, challenged conventional thinking and made sure clients enjoyed working with us. We always tried to go the extra mile and exceed expectations. Perhaps some of that came from being a start-up, but nearly 20 years later it's become part of our DNA.
What became increasingly clear as we worked with banks, fintechs, merchants, payment providers and other players across the ecosystem was that there was another gap emerging: communication. Many organisations build genuinely innovative products, but they often struggle to articulate exactly what they do, why it matters and how their solution solves a real business problem. The technology is often excellent, but the way they talk about it is simply too technical. In many cases, only the nerds can understand what they're actually trying to say. That creates a real challenge when you're trying to engage customers, partners, investors or other stakeholders who don't live and breathe payments every day.
That's where ChilliMint has developed a unique position. We don't just help clients shape products and strategies; we help them shape the narrative around those products. We combine deep payments expertise with an understanding of customer needs, market dynamics, marketing strategy and messaging, enabling companies to communicate more effectively with the audiences they want to reach.
In an industry that's becoming increasingly crowded and competitive, storytelling has never been more important. The best technology doesn't always win; often it's the companies that can clearly explain their value, build trust and connect with customers that stand out. Helping clients bridge the gap between innovation and communication has become a significant part of what we do today.
For readers who are new to this space - how would you explain the difference between "banking" and "payments" in plain terms, and why does that distinction matter so much to the work you do?
Banking is about storing, managing and lending money. Payments are about moving money between people, businesses, organisations and governments.
The distinction matters because, in many ways, banking is relatively static. A loan might have one monthly interaction. Savings accounts often involve putting money away and leaving it there. Many traditional banking products have limited customer contact points, which makes it harder to build a regular, front-of-mind relationship with customers.
Payments are completely different. They're part of everyday life. Most people interact with payments multiple times a day, often without even thinking about it. Whether you're buying a coffee, paying a bill, receiving your salary or shopping online, payments are constantly connecting people, businesses and communities.
I've always viewed payments as the ultimate connector and the ultimate relationship tool. Everybody, everywhere, has a need to pay and get paid. It's one of the few industries that touches virtually every person, every business and every economy on the planet.
That's what makes it such a fascinating space to work in. Once you understand how important payments are to the world and to everyday life, it's hard not to be excited by the opportunities they create. Why wouldn't you want to be involved in an industry that connects everyone?
You've advised fintechs, merchants, banks and card schemes. From where you sit, which side of that ecosystem tends to have the biggest blind spots when it comes to payments strategy?
The reality is that every part of the ecosystem has blind spots, but they're different depending on where you sit.
For banks, people often assume the biggest challenges are legacy systems or the fact they're naturally more risk-averse and slower moving. Those are certainly factors, but I think the bigger issue is that banks do so many different things. They offer current accounts, savings, mortgages, loans, investments, insurance and much more. Payments are incredibly important, but they're just one part of a much larger organisation.
As a result, relatively few people within a bank truly understand payments. That can make it difficult for payments teams to get their priorities higher up the agenda, even when those issues are strategically important.
Card schemes have almost the opposite challenge. They know payments inside out because that's their entire world. Their blind spot can sometimes be everything outside of payments. They may not always fully appreciate other payment types, such as ACH and account-to-account payments, or understand the wider operational, regulatory and commercial pressures that banks have to balance every day.
Fintechs are slightly different. Most fintechs are focused on solving a specific problem for a specific market. They're typically targeting a niche with a niche product, so they don't tend to have the same institutional blind spots. If anything, they're often forgiven for weaknesses elsewhere because they're bringing fresh thinking and challenging the status quo.
Let's talk about AI. "Agentic AI" is a phrase getting a lot of attention right now. What does that mean for the payments industry, and how should banks be preparing for it?
Agentic AI represents a significant shift because we're moving from systems that simply provide information to systems that can actually take action on our behalf.
Imagine an AI assistant that notices you're running low on household essentials and automatically places an order. Or one that monitors your utility bills and switches suppliers when it finds a better deal, handling the payment process for you. It could manage business expenses, book travel, renew subscriptions or make routine purchases without requiring a person to manually complete every transaction.
In many ways, this feels inevitable. As AI becomes more capable and trusted, consumers and businesses will increasingly expect these kinds of experiences.
The real challenge for banks isn't the happy path. It's the unhappy path.
What happens when an AI agent buys the wrong product? What happens if a transaction is disputed? What happens if there's fraud involving an agentic payment? Who authorised the transaction? Who is liable if something goes wrong? How do you prove consent?
These are the questions banks need to be thinking about now. The technology itself will evolve quickly, but trust remains the foundation of financial services. Customers will still expect someone to help when things go wrong, and they'll still expect their money to be protected.
There's a growing conversation around "payments sovereignty". Can you break that down for us, and why should everyday consumers care about it?
National payments sovereignty is essentially about a country's ability to control the infrastructure, rules and strategic direction of how payments are made and how money moves within its economy.
Every economy depends on payment rails. They are the critical infrastructure that allows individuals, businesses and governments to exchange money and keep economic activity flowing. The question many governments and regulators are increasingly asking is: how much control do we actually have over those systems?
If a country relies heavily on payment infrastructure that is owned, operated or controlled elsewhere, it can create strategic vulnerabilities. Governments want confidence that the systems their economies depend on will remain available, affordable and aligned with national interests. Too much reliance on external providers can raise concerns around resilience, pricing, access and influence. In extreme circumstances, countries worry about the possibility of critical payment infrastructure being disrupted, restricted or becoming significantly more expensive.
That's why we're seeing increased interest in domestic payment schemes, account-to-account payment networks, central bank initiatives and greater regulatory involvement in payments infrastructure around the world.
For everyday consumers, payments sovereignty is one of those topics that rarely gets much attention until something goes wrong. Most people don't think about the payment systems behind their card transaction or bank transfer because they simply expect them to work. The reality is that consumers only tend to notice payment infrastructure when the wheels come off and payments stop working. That's when the importance of resilience, control and ownership suddenly becomes very visible.
At the same time, there is a balance to be struck. More government involvement can bring greater control and resilience, but it doesn't automatically guarantee better outcomes for consumers. In some cases, increased intervention can lead to less competition, fewer choices and slower innovation. The challenge is finding the right balance between national control and maintaining a vibrant, competitive payments ecosystem that continues to deliver great customer experiences.
In your experience, what is the single biggest mistake banks make when they try to innovate in payments and why does it keep happening across the industry?
In my view, the biggest issue with innovation in banks is risk aversion.
Banks are, by their nature, designed to manage risk. That means when they look at innovation, they tend to be very thorough, very structured and very focused on making sure everything is fully covered before anything goes to market. That approach reduces the chance of failure, but it also slows things down significantly. As a result, innovation often takes longer to reach customers than it should. By the time something is ready to launch, the market may already have moved on or been reshaped by faster-moving competitors.
It’s worth saying that banks have absolutely led the way in payments innovation in the past. Institutions like Barclays, for example, were responsible for many of the early card and payments innovations that shaped the industry. But that was largely in a different era, before fintechs emerged at scale and changed expectations around speed, agility and customer experience.
Today, the pace of change is much faster and fintechs have set a new benchmark for how quickly products can be brought to market. That doesn’t mean banks can’t innovate but it does mean the bar has shifted and the traditional approach to managing risk and delivery can sometimes hold them back from keeping pace.
Fintechs have been disrupting traditional banking for well over a decade now. In your assessment, have banks genuinely caught up or are they still playing catch-up?
No, banks haven’t caught up and arguably they shouldn’t try to in the same way.
Fintechs are, by definition, focused on niche propositions designed to solve specific problems for specific customer groups. That focus allows them to move quickly, test ideas and iterate at pace. Banks, on the other hand, have to serve millions of customers across a wide range of products and services, which naturally brings more complexity and constraints.
So while banks are undoubtedly becoming faster and more agile, they will almost always lag fintechs when it comes to speed of innovation. That’s simply the reality of their scale and structure.
In my view, the role of banks is not to try and outpace fintechs, but to become excellent at observing the market and identifying what actually works. Fintechs often act as the industry’s test lab - proving concepts, refining propositions and showing what customers respond to in practice.
Banks can then act as fast followers, adopting and scaling the innovations that have been proven to work.
The critical point, however, is that any innovation still needs to fit within the bank’s broader strategy and overall customer proposition. It’s not just about adopting what’s new, it’s about ensuring it aligns with the wider business, integrates properly and ultimately enhances the customer experience at scale.
ChilliMint doesn't just advise on product and strategy - you also help companies shape how they talk about what they do. How much of a payments company's success comes down to messaging and communication, versus the strength of the product itself?
You need both. It’s non-negotiable.
A brilliant product with poor communication often struggles because customers don't understand the value being offered. Equally, strong marketing cannot compensate for a weak product over the long term.
One of the recurring challenges in payments is that companies frequently communicate features rather than outcomes. Customers don't buy technology. They buy solutions to problems.
Good messaging translates complexity into relevance. It helps customers understand not what a product does, but why it matters to them.
Looking at the next five years, what shift in payments or retail banking do you think most people in the industry are seriously underestimating right now?
It’s very easy to default to talking about AI, but I think the biggest thing the industry is underestimating is the importance of trust and the risk of that trust gradually eroding if we’re not careful.
At the moment, a huge amount of investment is going into making payments faster, simpler and more seamless. That's important, of course, but the industry sometimes assumes that trust will simply come along for the ride. I don't think that's necessarily true.
The reality is that trust is the foundation of every payment. Both payers and payees need to believe that money will move quickly and safely and that if something goes wrong, the issue will be resolved fairly. If either side starts to lose confidence in that process, the whole ecosystem becomes weaker.
Take card payments as an example. Many merchants feel that dispute and chargeback processes don't work in their favour. In fact, it's often one of the biggest frustrations retailers talk about. At the same time, consumers value the protections those processes provide. The challenge is that both perspectives are valid. If merchants feel the system is unfair, they'll naturally look for alternative payment methods that give them greater control and protection. But if those alternatives reduce customer protections too far, consumer trust starts to weaken. Neither outcome is good for the long-term health of the payments ecosystem.
That's why I think the industry needs to spend more time focusing on what I call the "unhappy paths" - disputes, fraud, exceptions and resolution processes. Today, most investment is directed towards improving the experience when everything goes right. Far less attention is paid to what happens when things go wrong.
Nearly 20 years is a long time in any industry. What has kept ChilliMint relevant, and what have you personally had to unlearn along the way?
I’d say the last 20 years have probably been the most fast-moving period in the history of payments.
When we started out, digital payments barely existed in any meaningful way. MOTO payments were a small fraction of what they are today, contactless was still being explored and a lot of transactions were still very card-present and manual. Fast forward to today and NFC and digital payments are now the primary way people pay in most markets. The change has been huge.
For ChilliMint, what’s kept us relevant is pretty simple - we’ve stayed close to what actually matters in the industry and we’ve been willing to change as the market changes.
Payments has gone through fintech, open banking, real-time payments, embedded finance and now AI, but underneath all of that the fundamentals haven’t changed. You still need to understand the customer, solve real problems and make sure what you’re building actually works in the real world.
We’ve also never stayed in one lane. We started out focused on payments strategy, but over time we realised a lot of clients didn’t just need help building products - they needed help explaining them. So we naturally moved into helping with messaging, positioning and storytelling as well. In a market that’s as crowded as this one, being able to clearly explain what you do and why it matters is often just as important as the product itself.
On a personal level, one of the biggest things I’ve had to unlearn is that being the “expert in the room” is enough. It isn’t anymore. Information is everywhere now. The value is in judgement, experience and being able to connect the dots properly.
I’ve also learned not to assume that the loudest trends are always the ones that last. Payments has a habit of humbling people. Some things that looked certain never materialised and other things that seemed small at the time ended up changing everything.
If there’s one thing that’s stayed constant, it’s curiosity. If you keep asking questions, keep watching what’s actually happening in the market rather than what people say is happening, you stay relevant.
Last question - what's something about you that might surprise people who only know you through your professional work?
I’m a beekeeper and I love it.
It’s one of the few things I do where you genuinely have to be fully focused. When you’re opening up a hive, you can’t be thinking about emails or meetings. If your mind is elsewhere, you’ll get caught out pretty quickly.
For me, it’s a great way of stepping away from work and switching off properly. It clears the head completely and gives you a different kind of perspective.
That said, when you make a mistake, you know about it straight away. If you get stung, or you forget something simple like zipping up properly, the enjoyment disappears very quickly. But the upside is you only tend to make that mistake once.
It’s a good reminder that focus matters - whatever you’re doing.
About the author
Andrew Jones is the co-founder and Managing Director of ChilliMint (Europe) Limited, a specialist consultancy and marketing agency focused on payments, fintech, retail banking and financial services.
With more than 35 years of experience across banking, payments and financial services, Andrew is a recognised industry expert and trusted advisor to fintechs, banks, merchants, and payment providers. He works with organisations on business, product and commercial strategy, customer propositions, thought leadership and marketing strategy, helping them navigate emerging trends and opportunities across the rapidly evolving financial services landscape.
Before co-founding ChilliMint, Andrew spent more than two decades in senior leadership roles across the banking and payments sector. He was a member of the UK Retail Banking Executive at Barclays, where he led the Product Management business for over five years, with responsibility for product strategy, proposition development and portfolio performance across the retail bank. Prior to Barclays, he held senior leadership, product and marketing positions at Egg and HSBC, developing deep expertise in retail banking, payments, customer engagement, product innovation and commercial strategy.
His experience spans both traditional banking and the evolution of modern payments, giving him a unique perspective on the opportunities and challenges shaping financial services today.
About ChilliMint
ChilliMint is a specialist consultancy and marketing agency focused on payments, fintech, retail banking and financial services.
Founded by former banking and payments professionals, the company helps fintechs, banks, merchants and payment providers turn complex products, technologies and industry developments into clear, compelling stories that drive commercial results.
What makes ChilliMint different is the deep understanding of the payments industry. They are fluent across the full payments ecosystem, including card issuing and acquiring, merchant payments, digital wallets, open banking, embedded finance, payment orchestration, fraud and identity, digital commerce, stablecoins and emerging payment technologies. This allows their team to work confidently with product, commercial and leadership teams, creating marketing and thought leadership that is both technically credible and commercially relevant.
With more than 17 years of experience across payments, banking and B2B marketing, they support clients with marketing strategy, proposition development, thought leadership, content creation, customer engagement and campaign delivery. By combining industry expertise, strategic thinking and creative execution, they help organisations strengthen their market position, accelerate growth and communicate with greater clarity and impact.
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ChilliMint (Europe) Limited
