Our Board Members
Russell Saunders
Chair-UK
Russell, with 30 years C suite experience in Global Banking also served as a NED on SWIFT, Pay.UK and Bank of England committees. Leadership roles included being part of the exec team, successfully executing one of largest banking mergers globally. Russell’s current Non Executive portfolio includes the role of SID and Risk Chair of a UK Licensed Global Bank, Chair of a Payment’s start up and advising global firms including Accenture.
Dave has over 25 years’ business and IT experience, having worked with most of the major UK banks and many other financial institutions in both business development and delivery roles.
His track record is heavily focused on payments, mostly from a vendor perspective. Dave has held senior posts in equensWorldline, VocaLink, Coopers and Lybrand, Logica, Wincor Nixdorf and other IT consulting companies.
Dave has also been heavily Involved in payments industry discussions and initiatives on Digital Identity and served as a member of the Participants Advisory Council from 2018-2022.
Dave Allen
Non-Executive Director
Dave Allen
Non-Executive Director
Dave has over 25 years’ business and IT experience, having worked with most of the major UK banks and many other financial institutions in both business development and delivery roles.
His track record is heavily focused on payments, mostly from a vendor perspective. Dave has held senior posts in equensWorldline, VocaLink, Coopers and Lybrand, Logica, Wincor Nixdorf and other IT consulting companies.
Dave has also been heavily Involved in payments industry discussions and initiatives on Digital Identity and served as a member of the Participants Advisory Council from 2018-2022.
Ummair Butt
Chief Executive Officer
Ummair has over 23 years of experience working in and managing various businesses. He started off as accountant for a London-based buying group where he contributed towards the Bacstel-IP platform from an industry perspective in early 2000.
Ummair started Direct Debit System LLC in UAE in 2017, with the innovative idea that a new direct debit service in the UAE must be aggregated & that APIs must be standardised. The fintech was listed in top 24 most innovative start-ups in the UAE Government-run Innovation Fund, competing against over 800 competing pitches from around the world
Ummair Butt
Chief Executive Officer
Ummair has over 23 years of experience working in and managing various businesses. He started off as accountant for a London-based buying group where he contributed towards the Bacstel-IP platform from an industry perspective in early 2000.
Ummair started Direct Debit System LLC in UAE in 2017, with the innovative idea that a new direct debit service in the UAE must be aggregated & that APIs must be standardised. The fintech was listed in top 24 most innovative start-ups in the UAE Government-run Innovation Fund, competing against over 800 competing pitches from around the world
Alistair is a highly experienced CIO commanding over 20 years’ experience in leading major architectural design across Banking, specialising in Payments.
Banking Clients include Deutsche Bank, UBS, HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group as well as regulatory interaction with the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority.
Architecture experience includes leading the New Payments Architecture design for Pay.UK, establishing and leading architecture functions from greenfield to execution, front to back functional design, strategic technology roadmaps, end to end process transformation.
Alistair Davis
Chief Information Officer
Alistair Davis
Chief Information Officer
Alistair is a highly experienced CIO commanding over 20 years’ experience in leading major architectural design across Banking, specialising in Payments.
Banking Clients include Deutsche Bank, UBS, HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group as well as regulatory interaction with the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority.
Architecture experience includes leading the New Payments Architecture design for Pay.UK, establishing and leading architecture functions from greenfield to execution, front to back functional design, strategic technology roadmaps, end to end process transformation.
Nick Masterson-Jones
Advisor to the Board
Nick Masterson-Jones brings some 38 years of experience in the financial sector to DDSL, having worked at a range of institutions, including JP Morgan, UBS, Deloitte, VocaLink, Travelex, Western Union and Monzo.
At VocaLink, Nick led the award-winning NewBacs programme that replaced the UK Bacs infrastructure in a seamless big-bang implementation. He also ran the the Faster Payments programme, a world-first for retail account-to-account payments. He went on to run the UK transaction processing business.
Nick’s payments expertise is also international, having been CIO at Travelex Global Business Solutions and subsequently Western Union Business Solutions where he served on the board. At Monzo he established the payments infrastructure and has continued to be active in the UK payments arena, serving on Pay.UK’s Participants Advisory Council.
Nick is Head of Consulting at Charteris where he undertakes a range of activities including advising clients on payments technology, market entry strategy, due diligence for P.E. firms, performing interim roles for start-ups and acting as an expert witness in legal disputes.
He is passionate about operational resilience and leveraging new technologies to enable innovation.
Our Management Team
Ummair Butt
Chief Executive Officer
Ummair has over 23 years of experience working in and managing various businesses. He started off as accountant for a London-based buying group where he contributed towards the Bacstel-IP platform from an industry perspective in early 2000.
Ummair started Direct Debit System LLC in UAE in 2017, with the innovative idea that a new direct debit service in the UAE must be aggregated & that APIs must be standardised. The fintech was listed in top 24 most innovative start-ups in the UAE Government-run Innovation Fund, competing against over 800 competing pitches from around the world
Ummair has over 23 years of experience working in and managing various businesses. He started off as accountant for a London-based buying group where he contributed towards the Bacstel-IP platform from an industry perspective in early 2000.
Ummair started Direct Debit System LLC in UAE in 2017, with the innovative idea that a new direct debit service in the UAE must be aggregated & that APIs must be standardised. The fintech was listed in top 24 most innovative start-ups in the UAE Government-run Innovation Fund, competing against over 800 competing pitches from around the world
Ummair Butt
Chief Executive Officer
Imdad Sarwar
Chief Technical Officer
Imdad has some 17 years of experience in Software Development, System Integrations and Information Security, which are all for the Banking and Financial sector.
At Direct Debit System FZ LLC, working with the UAE’S Central Bank, he played a key role as Software Architect and System Integration Specialist to bring up the first Direct Debit Marketplace that’s hosted on Dubai’s Government Private Cloud and integrates with the country’s identity provider UAEPASS to digitally sign direct debit mandates.
He also undertook the first system integration project for the company that was to plug in the native, uaedds scheme in to the SAP system for UAE’s reputed corporation Esa Saleh Al Gurg’s private cloud infrastructure.
He has strong background in both Java and .NET frameworks the prominent technologies to develop ICT Solutions. Currently, leading a team of software engineers, he is working with full focus on the latest and emerging payment technologies in Banking & FinTech industry.
Alistair is a highly experienced CIO commanding over 20 years’ experience in leading major architectural design across Banking, specialising in Payments.
Banking Clients include Deutsche Bank, UBS, HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group as well as regulatory interaction with the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority.
Architecture experience includes leading the New Payments Architecture design for Pay.UK, establishing and leading architecture functions from greenfield to execution, front to back functional design, strategic technology roadmaps, end to end process transformation.
Alistair Davis
Chief Information Officer
Alistair Davis
Chief Information Officer
Alistair is a highly experienced CIO commanding over 20 years’ experience in leading major architectural design across Banking, specialising in Payments.
Banking Clients include Deutsche Bank, UBS, HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group as well as regulatory interaction with the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority.
Architecture experience includes leading the New Payments Architecture design for Pay.UK, establishing and leading architecture functions from greenfield to execution, front to back functional design, strategic technology roadmaps, end to end process transformation.