Five minutes with Andrew Pigott | Incentive & Motivation

Q. How did you come to provide recruitment services to payments/prepaid companies?

A. I’ve been in the payments market a long time now. I knew Tony Craddock of Gx and got to know other figures in the industry. I saw that there was an opportunity to offer specialist recruitment services. I made a point of immersing myself in the industry and still do to this day by supporting industry events and associations that are promoting all the good technological changes that are happening in this fast-moving market and the great people behind them. 

If you’re going to use a recruitment business, use one that understands your business, industry and products, and has access to the people you’re looking to recruit. I often have people that aren’t actively looking for new roles approaching me to ask if I know of any vacancies to suit them.

Q. What areas do you cover?

A. We work with everyone from payment service providers to issuing banks, card schemes and retailers. We also cover all disciplines including fraud prevention, finance, marketing and technology. Any recruitment business has a candidate database, but ours is payments-specific and has been carefully grown over the years to ensure only the highest-quality, relevant candidates are put before our clients.

Q. Have you been able to influence the markets – using your expertise to make them rethink recruitment? 

A. A lot of companies in the prepaid space want people who are doing the same role they want to fill, but in a different company. But when you take this approach, you limit the number (and quality) of people you can choose from, as essentially, you end up taking from competitors and vice versa. My advice is to broaden your horizons – look for people who sit outside payment and prepaid companies but have transferrable skills, such as business development and project managers. You can quickly train the right person to become a payments industry specialist. 

I have also found that many companies can be quite reactive in their recruitment needs. They win a new piece of business and suddenly they need x number of new people quickly, which can be quite a challenge. I have tried, where possible, to make them think about planning ahead a little more, so that at least some of the people are in place and ready to start whenever new business is won.

Q. How are you reacting to the latest industry changes?

A. In response to market demand we’ve launched Bandwidth Associates. It’s been set up to focus on using our network of technical individuals in the payments industry to deliver associates to provide a range of IT services. This is a core industry need and will help us deliver expertise to our clients.