Daren
Pickering

I led this project for Worldpay, working with the Royal British Legion and Thyngs. We built the first methods of contactless donation.

A tablet and card terminal provided a donation point, while the contactless tins made a fixed £2 donation simple.

At Proxama, I led work on an early mobile contactless card-acceptance proof of concept for Mastercard. At Worldpay, I later contributed to the security architecture, supplier selection and technical direction for My Business Mobile.

My career includes more than a decade in heavily regulated payments, working with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), EMV payment standards, PSD2-era regulation and FCA-regulated clients.

The Worldpay service was presented publicly as a UK industry first: taking contactless payments directly on an Android phone without separate card-reading hardware.

I led the technical team behind a consortium proposal for digital coupon and loyalty redemption at the point of sale, published as GSMA NFC.15, and contributed to its API specifications. The working group brought together companies including Aimia, Verifone, Escher Group, The Logic Group and WEVE.

We also built the end-to-end proof of concept. The ideas behind that work — keeping and redeeming loyalty offers through a phone — are now familiar parts of modern mobile wallets.

At MWC, the GSMA Pavilion demo brought NFC.15 to life as interoperable mobile couponing, with loyalty apps from several companies working at the same point of sale. It drew press attention, visible in the camera crew filming the demonstration. The three Arm customer-event photographs show a separate concept-stage demo: digital rights management running within a Trusted Execution Environment, built at Proxama for Trustonic and Arm. This was distinct from the GSMA NFC.15 mobile-couponing work. The remaining photographs show demos I built for Trustonic exhibited on Samsung’s stand at MWC.

During my Worldpay years, I was a member of the Samsung Financial Customer Advisory Board alongside ongoing collaboration with Samsung on payment proofs of concept; I personally demonstrated products on Samsung stands at events three times — once with Proxama and twice with Worldpay.

I helped design the payment system for EBar’s first prototype, trialled at Twickenham in 2019. I later returned as software director and now have direct responsibility for the software products, the kiosk and the dashboard.

With no dedicated product managers at EBar, product management sits with me too: defining what the products do, prioritising development and deciding what ships.

The kiosk software controls drink dispensing through a programmable logic controller, working with sensors across the dispense path. I partner directly with the hardware team to continuously improve the solution.

It is a good example of the work I enjoy: payments, embedded control, operational software and a physical product that has to perform under pressure.

I invented ID-Er, a courier app that verifies the recipient’s identity before a parcel is released. The courier scans the recipient’s ID card using NFC, and the app returns a clear authorised or not-authorised verdict.

If the check fails, the courier can report suspicion instead of completing the delivery. The concept led directly to Drone Pay, carrying the same identity-first thinking into an unattended drone delivery system.

I created AirPIN: a way to authenticate a payment in virtual reality using a three-dimensional gesture instead of exposing a conventional PIN pad. I was the inventor and user-experience designer.

Worldpay demonstrated the prototype publicly and it attracted international technology and payments coverage. The work is backed by patent families covering secure authentication in virtual and augmented reality, movement signatures in three-dimensional space and the generation of authentication interfaces.

My wider identity work also included Yoti age-verification, strengthening the same child-safety-by-design thread.

I designed and built Worldpay’s IoT house by taking existing toys and computer-controlling them. I used Raspberry Pi computers, modified the toys and drove them through relay boards so that a payment could activate them.

That same payments-activating-things thread ran through an arcade-payments prototype: I started with toy Earth Defenders cabinets wired to Raspberry Pi computers and relay boards, then graduated it to a real Worldpay-branded arcade machine. I also conceived and designed Worldpay’s smart parking demonstration using a LEGO roadway system, turning another complex idea into something people could understand by interacting with it.

I spent 17 years at LJ Create, where I was product owner, designer and creator of CARA — the eLearning development platform used by our own teams and sold directly as a product. I also created ST200 and ST220, alongside a broad range of educational software.

I designed, built and managed the company’s e-commerce and licensing systems as well. It was a long apprenticeship in the full product lifecycle: software, content, customers, sales, support and the practical work of keeping products useful.

I have led technical programmes and product teams across social media, business travel, booking and payments. That has meant joining up engineering, design, product, legal, policy, marketing and operations across countries and time zones.

At Meta, my two engagements amount to around four FTE years in the same Product TPM role. At that scale, the work means leading contributor networks numbering in the thousands through influence and negotiation rather than direct authority, and shaping roadmaps and priorities across teams that do not report to me. Programme detail is confidential.

I led programme delivery for zero-to-one creator marketing products taken through to production, including the Affiliated project and branded-content projects. I also acted as payments product manager during a staffing gap in the Creator Commerce programme.

The details change. The job does not: make the outcome clear, expose the hard decisions early and keep delivery moving without losing the reason for doing the work.

Working with my brothers through Omatic, I built user-interface systems used by installation and operations teams supporting the UK’s digital terrestrial television infrastructure.

Carl worked deep in the embedded firmware, protocols and remote management. I worked at the human end of the same system. Together, that is a useful summary of what Omatic does: from hardware to screen.