Our collective expertise helps investor portfolios achieve their full potential. Our success is predicated on the success of each business within your portfolio – providing their management teams with best-in-class resources acting as a fractional executive management team - an essential element of the private equity ecosystem.
We offer deep capabilities in areas with the greatest potential for preserving and creating value. We’ve worked together for many years and we deliver results based on a multi-disciplinary view, not siloed expertise.
Meet the team
Erla Kristjansdottir
Adrian Cannon
Scott Lanphere
Gudmundur Ingolfsson
Lindsay Robertson
Vaughan Collie
Graham Peacop
Adrian Cannon
I am a business leader and management consultant with a passion for problem solving and bringing out the best in teams. I have held senior corporate positions in banking and led start-ups from pre-funding to exit.
I founded Witstock in the belief that consulting skills are most valuable when the team are hands-on. I wanted to build an advisory firm that would “get its hands dirty” and deliver results for its clients and share the risks and upsides of doing so. I wanted to work with other professionals that worked as a team and not siloed experts defending their positions. Witstock is now 10 years old and has proven the value of the approach.
Today, I am a non-executive director of Planet Payment Systems Limited and its French regulated payments subsidiary of the Advent backed Planet Payments.
I recently completed a 3 year role as Group CEO of Omnio, the payments and banking tech platform based in London. Prior to this, I designed, built and led Markadis Limited, a pioneering marketing and financial services company, on behalf of Valitor h.f..
I was a partner at Edgar, Dunn & Company and served as the Director of the London office specializing in payments services and innovation. During this period, I was seconded to become the first independent Managing Director of Faster Payments Scheme Limited in the UK.
I joined Elavon as Director of Strategy and M&A and helped form a pan-European merchant acquiring bank from a range of assets purchased as part of a buy-and-build strategy.
Prior to this I founded Accourt Consulting where, for five years, I led a successful management consulting firm serving major financial services and payments clients in North America, UK, Europe and Middle East.
I have held other leadership roles and assignments with OSI, Bull Information Systems and Datacard.
Erla Kristjansdottir
I enjoy demanding C-suite roles in complex and rapidly changing business environments in the payments and banking sectors.
As a Product SME with over 14 years of experience in both industry roles and strategy consulting, I have developed a keen understanding of the intricacies of product development and launch. As a Chief Product Officer, I have used my passion for effective leadership, selecting and leading teams to implement product-led change. My successful track record of developing and launching innovative products has been achieved through a combination of strategic planning, team collaboration, and a strong focus on customer needs. I am passionate about driving growth and revenue through effective product led vision, delivering value to customers and shareholders.
In my most recent role as Chief Product Officer at Omnio my task was to help move the company from its legacy technology position sitting across multiple platforms with high costs, to being product led on a single low-cost platform. Restructuring the product and technology teams to create a single unit, I also established a product led approach across the whole group with a unified product roadmap aligned with the group’s strategy.
Prior to Omnio I was part of the Senior Leadership team at Pollinate as Product Delivery Director, helping it on a journey to become product led, building products that can be deployed across continents with tier 1 banks. I led the move to a true platform model, working cross functionally with our research, design and engineering teams, instilling the methodology of “build once, deploy many times” through configurable build of its products.
Before Omnio and Pollinate, I began my senior career at Valitor, working with partners including Stripe & Klarna, integrating them into its platform. I then moved into product, progressing quickly to become Head of Product, before leading Valitor’s successful efforts to enter the payments market in the UK by understanding localization requirements for UK & Ireland and ensuring a strategic fit with Valitor’s vision. This success led to a move into consulting when I joined First Annapolis in Amsterdam as a Senior Strategy Consultant, later becoming part of Accenture Strategy as it acquired FA. There I worked on and led a diverse range of assignments, advising and supporting major European acquirers, retailers, banks and card schemes. In 2020 I led a major change programme in the Middle East for Witstock Limited.
I have a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Iceland focused in Business, Management, Marketing, and Related Support Services.
Scott Lanphere
I am a serial private equity professional, even paying my way through university working for a local venture capital fund which was part of a large regional bank.
I later joined Advent International in Boston and then joined them to Europe to help open the European operation. All in, I spent a decade with this fine firm and invested as lead or co-lead in 10 deals across industrial, media and retail sectors. Returns were 3.4x EUR 346m (58.7% IRR) which I invested on behalf of the firm’s various partnerships.
Deutsche Bank’s asset management private equity unit called Morgan Grenfell Private Equity recruited me near the end of the 1990s. My directly attributed investments for this buyout-oriented fund returned 2.2x on EUR 674m invested (67% IRR).
After 9/11, I set out on my own, assembling teams to invest on a deal-by-deal basis (fundless sponsor) as part of Eaton Gate Capital Partners Ltd.. We raised EUR 31.6m and returned 3.4x for investors on those funds.
In 2017, while helping restructure a series of investments for a family office, I helped turn-around what in retrospect was a badly-structured deal and used this as the basis to co-found a new fintech in London called OmniOne. My team and I raised over £35m for this venture and helped arrange a highly lucrative merger that our shareholders declined to embrace, it was time to focus elsewhere. This led to the buy-in opportunity at Talenthouse, a creative media industry deal that I restructured and that ultimately listed on the Swiss stock exchange as part of a larger consolidation of similar assets in Europe.
Over the past decade, I advised a number of blue-chip clients on their acquisition and fundraising requirements with assignments in excess of EUR 7.7bn. I supported my deals with over EUR 5bn in debt across the capital structure, including senior equity pieces. I have presided over 5 IPOs and 2 fully-financed tender offers.
I have also been in executive roles, typically where change management was a factor and continue to found business opportunities with my close associates where and when ever possible. My track record is built on teamwork and future endeavours will be more of the same.
Gudmundur Ingolfsson
I am an attorney, licensed to practise in both New York and Iceland, in addition to acting as a small scale private investor.
I began my career in government service but later pivoted to private practise where I have worked both as outsourced “in-house” as well as taken on full time roles in-house, in recent years predominantly within fintech as well as within the regulated payments, e-money and banking space. Amongst other helping clients manage their regulatory authorisations and licences by advising and managing everything from applications for new, changes to current as well as some “hail Mary” passes to keep authorisations after having gotten on the wrong side of a regulator. Both in the UK and across Europe.
In parallel, almost as a hobby, I have invested both time and money in start-up´s and some slightly more developed enterprises ranging from online retail to real estate. But such experience coupled with the ability to apply an “ownership” mentality to in-house work for clients, applying a practical business approach into the legal, governance, risk, compliance and regulatory side, is what clients say makes me different.
Having worked with Adrian at Valitor and Markadis, I accepted his invitation to join him at Omnio, where I was appointed as a member of the Board of Directors across several of the Omnio group entities and acted as an EMD approved individual and director of the FCA regulated Omnio EMI Limited. I also worked as an Executive Director across the Omnio group of companies, including as Group General Counsel and Chief Risk & Compliance Officer.
Examples of previous experience include serving as a Member of the Board of Directors at NEXUS: Research forum for Security and Defence, serving as deputy member of the NSPA (formerly NAMSA) supervisory board, acting as deputy director general of the Icelandic defence agency, as well more recent corporate experiences such as acting as General Counsel and Chief Compliance Office of Valitor (regulated as a type of bank at the time), and executive director (GC and CCO), MLRO and EMD approved individual by the FCA for Valitor Payment Service Limited (regulated as an EMI at the time), and as CCO and PSD approved individual by the FCA for Markadis Limited (regulated as a PI at the time).
Vaughan Collie
My career started in tech and I now have more than two decades of experience in technology, financial services, including fintech and payments; from P&L responsibility through to UK-wide and global consulting roles for start-ups, scale-ups and major blue chip organisations.
Prior to specialising in payments and fintech, I held various senior technology and risk strategy roles for a large, diversified Blue Chip retail group. My subsequent roles have utilised my extensive and diverse experience, particularly in omni-channel international payments, fraud and risk management. Additionally, I lead buy- and sell-side commercial and tech due diligence for trade and Private Equity clients.
My strategic and in-depth knowledge and experience is the foundation upon which my clients across the finance, banking, fintech and regulatory ecosystems rely to build market-leading products and services within highly regulated industries. In-depth industry and technology knowledge across a broad range of relevant initiatives enables me to deploy my well-developed problem-solving skills. I am able to rapidly understand, manage and communicate at all levels, including senior management and board levels.
My background includes consultancy with Private Equity, industry trade bodies, regulators and major industry players such as Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, American Express, Skype/Microsoft, Barclaycard, Boku, Faster Payments Scheme, Experian, GB Group, GSMA, FCA, Lloyds Banking Group, Nuvei, NTT Data, UK Open Banking Implementation Entity, Valitor, Deloitte, PwC, OC&C, El Corte Ingles, Network International, National Bank of Greece, Travelex, UK Finance, Pay.UK, PayPoint Plc, Vocalink and a number of top- and mid-tier international retail banks and financial services institutions across the following geographies: UK, Europe, USA, Canada, Middle East, Africa, APAC and LATAM.
For 12 years, I have been a managing partner at Accourt, a leading provider of strategic and operational consultancy services to the payments industry worldwide. Our consultants are all experienced practitioners with front-line P&L experience, combining unrivalled strategic expertise with operational know-how.
I have a Bachelor of Commerce in Finance and Information Systems and a Masters Degree in Information Systems from the University of Cape Town.
