Profile: Nicholas Gould

Coventry entrepreneur Nicholas Gould is helping to lead a technical revolution when it comes to the way businesses take payments – and he is doing it by adopting some good old-fashioned industry values.

Nicholas, who grew up in Kent but is now a fullyfledged Coventry kid through marriage, was on the cusp of retirement a decade ago when he came across an opportunity to launch, develop and grow a business of his own.

The company – omnigo – is a partner of Dojo, promoting its services to any business that takes electronic payments and bookings, from local coffee shops and retailers through to pubs, garages, dental surgeries and one the biggest international restaurant chains.

Dojo is a multi-billion-pound fintech (one in eight high street transactions is taken via a Dojo device) whose technology and systems offer a range of services –from bookings to card payments and from funding to compliance.

It works with a range of partner companies and, in just 11 years, omnigo has become one of the top five practices working with the business.

And Nicholas, who runs the business from his Coventry home with staff dotted around the country, has combined the latest technology with values he’s picked up in a career that saw him leave school at 16 to become a draughtsman before cutting his corporate teeth at Cadbury.

“omnigo offers three solutions to business. Anything to do with card payments. Bookings for hospitality businesses. And then business funding for companies too,” he said.

“My clients range from a coffee shop – so someone like Sage Coffee in Earlsdon – right up to large dentists, pharmacy groups, garage groups through to corporate customers such as Caprice Holdings, which operates all of the Ivy Restaurants.

“I also work with restaurant chains Gino D’ACampo, Gusto and San Carlo. So, a lot of the large groups in the UK.

“We offer the Dojo platform for merchant services. Dojo is a direct acquirer so we sit as a platform between Visa and Mastercard and the customer, where we provide all of the devices, card processing, all of the compliance and everything that goes with it that is necessary for our client to take payment from customers into their organisation.

“For a restaurant, we’d supply card machines – in different varieties – they can take payments and also have sim cards built in so it doesn’t rely on the network for the business. We offer that with a whole range of solutions.

“We also offer devices that waiting staff can carry in their pocket to take orders and payment on that device. It helps businesses to turn tables quicker.

“We can also provide their e-commerce systems and all of the background that requires.

“On top of that, we can also look after the bookings platform and we can connect to the restaurant’s EPOS system.

“We’ve built ourselves into a very successful business because we are able to offer a whole range of services in this area to save customers having multiple suppliers and we can build on that by making new and existing customers aware of everything we have to offer. omnigo also advises and shows how to extract data – where the detail can be around user demographic or returning customers, which is the key to success in every business.

“I started it in 2013 when I was at an age where many people might have been thinking of retiring, I bumped into this opportunity and decided to start omnigo. Since then, we’ve now boarded 3,500 businesses over the past 11 years.”

So, in a technological world, what helps omnigo to stand out from the crowd?