2008 WAS PROBABLY the worst year in Irish history in which to be a banker. September 2008 was probably the worst month in Irish history in which to be a newly promoted banker.
Brian Cleary was one of the unlucky few who ticked both boxes. The Dublin native found himself thrust into the role of head of sales at Bank of Ireland days before the government was to effectively write a blank cheque in an effort to keep several of his rivals in business.
“I remember the Troika walking past the Shelbourne, people talking about the euro, saying that it would collapse. It was when the world started to fall in,” he tells Fora.
Although Cleary now heads up contactless payments firm Evo Payments, the 45-year-old spent more than half of his life with Bank of Ireland, starting at 18 as a cashier and working his way up.
“I never envisaged working at a bank as a teen. Everyone at my age applied to the guards, I did and I wasn’t successful,” he says.
“I left school at 18 and was working in a bar when I saw an ad for the bank in the paper and applied. I was one of the youngest people to get in at the time.”
Cleary spent two decades climbing the ladder with stints as a manager in a slew of different branches including Terenure as well as College Green in Dublin city centre, before taking on the sales role just before the most of the country’s banking system was to collapse.
While Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide sank never to rise again, Bank of Ireland managed to keep its head above water. Although it still needed to be bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of €4.7 billion, it managed to trade its way out of the mess rather than face insolvency and has since fully repaid the state.
“The key things for a retail bank are deposits and mortgage growth and we worked hard to support the banks and the balance sheet,” Cleary says.
“People worked hard, practically seven days a week, and my role was to drive the sales agenda; business still had to be done.”
Working in the same position until 2012, arguably the worst year of the recession, Cleary then got moved to the position of ‘head of cards’ at the lender. Now married with three children, the move would bring Cleary into contact with Evo Payments and give the 25-year-lifer a shot at running his own business.
What do you do and how long have you done it for?
The Irish arm of Evo Payments provides the technology that Bank of Ireland uses for its contactless card payments.
For people who are not familiar with contactless payments, it is where people can pay for goods by briefly touching their card against a machine, saving the hassle of entering in a PIN. The spending limit on the service was lifted from €15 to €30 in the most recent budget, and it is generally used for relatively small payments.
Founded in 1989, New York-based Evo Payments is one of the largest payments-processing companies in the world. The firm, which employs about 2,000 staff internationally, looked to push out of North America in 2012 and in 2014 struck a deal with Bank of Ireland to establish a presence in Europe.
“Before, Bank of Ireland didn’t have contactless payments and the (Irish) market used to be very underserved,” Cleary says. “When I was on the cards portfolio the bank started to invest in contactless but the terminals it was using were outdated.”
The bank and Evo decided to team up, with the payments firm asking Cleary to swap sides and establish the company’s new Irish operation.
When the two sides signed the deal in August, there were three people on the new Evo Ireland team. By the end of the year there would be more than 30 in the new Dublin base, including Cleary, as the company went on a hiring blitz.
The company expanded quickly and now employs about 75 people, most of whom are focused on either sales or training businesses up in how to use their new technology.
Evo says it now powers the contactless payments in about 10,000 outlets, with Cleary saying that the company is aiming to nearly quadruple the size of its business over the next year.
What are your costs and how do you make money?
Evo and Bank of Ireland together created a brand called ‘BOI payment acceptance’, which is the name that Evo sells its product under.
Evo Payments Ireland offers its technology to businesses to allow them to process contactless payments. For many customers, such as shops, this would come in the form of small card terminals that Evo buys from a third-party supplier and then software to process the contactless payments.
Evo supplies and manages the software, while the companies that use it pay the payments firm a monthly fee on top of the normal charges that apply for card transactions – such as fees that are paid to banks.
The amount Evo charges varies. As with most businesses, it’s likely that the more you use, the more of a discount you will get. Cleary says that the firm tends to negotiate a lot of its deals.
A shop that has a monthly card turnover of €2,000 would pay €40 per month to use the service, rising to €55 per month for turnover up to €4,000 and €80 for €8,000. Above this level is where the firm begins to negotiate prices.
The bulk of the company’s customers come from the lender due to a referrals system, where Bank of Ireland will recommend that any of its customers who may want to bring contactless payments into their business use Evo.
However, Evo also deals with many businesses that use other banks. “We have lots of customers that aren’t Bank of Ireland, I would say about 25% of them,” Cleary says.
In this case, although the normal bank fees go to whatever bank the customer is using, such as AIB, when the customer or consumer uses Evo’s software it is branded as ‘BOI payment acceptance’.
Staff are the company’s biggest cost. The 75 people who work for Evo Payments Ireland are mostly focused on selling the product, while the bulk of the technical support is carried out by Evo’s Polish arm.
Cleary says that the firm is due to move office soon – at “significant cost” – and adds that buying terminals is also a big expense.
Although there are accounts filed for a company called Evo Payments International GmbH, which is based in Ireland, showing a loss of €10 million on revenue of about €70 million, Cleary says that the firm takes into account both Evo’s German and Irish operations.
Cleary says that Evo Ireland has turnover in the “double-digit millions”, adding that the firm has recently become profitable ahead of schedule.
What is your market?
Unsurprisingly given its main partnership, Evo Ireland is entirely focused on the Irish market, leaving different countries to the other arms of its parent company.
As stated above, the bulk of its customers so far has been drawn from referrals of Bank of Ireland clients, something that Cleary doesn’t envisage will change.
“It is hard to know what the split will be exactly, we want to grow as quickly as we can and Bank of Ireland is a key channel for us, but we would expect to continue getting about 75-80% of our business from them,” Cleary says.
When Evo was establishing itself, its initial customers were mainly made up of businesses in the hospitality sector, such as pubs, hotels or restaurants.
This still makes up a large portion of its user base, with the firm recently partnering with the famous Dublin nightclub Copper Face Jacks. However, Cleary says its customers are now more widespread.
“We are serving a full market, and while we are in more segments than others, we have multiple customers across the country,” Clearys says.
Contactless payments have also become much more popular in Ireland recently, broadening Evo’s potential user base.
Research from card provider Visa showed that weekly transactions with Visa debit cards doubled to 1.3 million in the space of six months to the end of March, meaning that there was one carried out every two seconds in Ireland.
What is your competition?
A handful of big companies provide similar services to Evo. Perhaps the biggest one is Elavon, which has its European headquarters in Dublin – where it employs about 400 people.
The firm is one of the largest card processors in the US and has had a presence in the Irish market since the turn of the millennium, giving it a head start on Evo and many of its other rivals. Elavon also provides the technology for contactless payments.
Bank of Ireland’s main rival, AIB, also formed a payments partnership before BoI, striking an agreement with US giant First Data, which claims that it processes nearly $2 trillion of payments a year.
However Cleary says that Evo “worries about ourselves and not the competition”.
“I might have one eye over my shoulder looking at the other guys like Elavon, but our first focus is on what we’re doing and how we motivate our people,” he says.
When asked what sets the company apart, Cleary prefaces his answer with the warning that the answer might sound a bit clichéd.
“We have better value for money than the other companies and are transparent,” he says. “We have built good relationships with networks, and we have a relentless focus on growing our customer base and keeping them happy.”
What is your vision for the company?
Cleary also has to give a health warning on his answer when he is asked about his goals for the company. Rather than focus on financials, Cleary’s sales background shines through as he insists that Evo has ‘customer-focused’ goals.
“When other people say they want to be number one, I often say, what does number one look like? My ambition is to have a customer base that speaks highly of us and to have more people that want to work here,” he says.
“Of course we have financial targets, but those are my two main measures outside of the financial ones.”
Although at one point it looked likely that he would spend the rest of his working life as a Bank of Ireland employee, Cleary says he is not in any rush to return to the fold.
“I don’t even know if they would take me back!” he says. “I’m happy here now, I’m happy in the role that I have.”
Cleary shows a surprising appetite to scale up Evo and for the risk that goes with rapid expansion – at least for someone who spent much of their life as a bank manager. The Dún Laoghaire native credits working through the recession for his outlook, claiming a ‘get up and go’ attitude.
“We are only at base camp in terms of my ambition for the business, we have significant growth plans cooking at the moment,” he says.
“There are two things that you can choose every day, your attitude and your energy. (During the recession) it was hard and frustrating but I chose my energy and my attitude, and that is what has kept me going.”
Written by Paul O’Donoghue. This article originally appeared as part of the Fora.ie How My Business Works series.
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