He brings extensive experience in building strategic partnerships and understands how to bring value to both partners and their clients.

Having made the transition from management consulting to direct sales and later sales operations, Roberts realised there was an opportunity to drive significant growth through partnerships. Primarily, through empowering partners with value-added payment products which they can offer into their merchant base - a scalable and profitable commercial model for all parties involved.

Roberts’ experience in sales positions in finance companies such as Payworks, Visa, and Volt.io afforded him an insight into smart routing payment gateways, which led him to realise Deko was serving its market in a unique way.

“Deko ticks all the boxes,” shared Roberts ``It offers the most comprehensive embedded checkout finance solution through its unique multi-lender aggregator and switch model. Buy Now Pay Later as a Service (BNPLaaS) is an area of business that remains relatively unexplored, and Deko is in a unique position to take advantage of its leading position as a first-mover.”

“By building out strategic partnerships” continues Roberts, “ I aim to further strengthen and solidify Deko’s role in this space. My main focus will be to connect potential partners and subsequently their merchants with our embedded checkout finance solution. These partners can be anything from payment gateways to acquirers to Payfacs - essentially, any type of merchant service provider. Deko also provides an opportunity for B2B SaaS platforms who want to add value to their merchant’s checkout. Existing BNPLs can see merchant sales increase by up to 30%, and Deko improves this by up to a further 15%. So we’re able to provide partners with a real competitive advantage.

BNPL is a well-established payment method, currently accounting for 6.2% of basket share in the UK and projected to almost double to 12.1% by 2025. This growth will be partly fueled by younger generations favouring digital forms of credit over traditional credit cards. We’re enabling partners to capitalise on this shift.”

Roberts completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and Politics at the University of Sussex, before venturing into a sales-focused career. His path then took him into payments. It’s here that his interest in the applications of payments infrastructure and finance solutions inspired a more specific route.

Rob Fernandes, CPO, Deko, commented: “We are delighted to welcome John to the Deko team. His wealth of experience in partnerships and payments is ideal for driving further industry demand to use our unique multi-lender embedded finance platform to launch relevant in-house ‘pay later’ propositions. His operational knowledge has informed our approach to maximise impact for partners seeking an integrated offer to merchants. John will be key to positioning Deko at the centre of a new ‘BNPL as a service’ category within the established payments and software ecosystems.