Melanie Mills, Chief Growth Officer, PayCaptain

Today we're delighted to speak with Melanie Mills, Chief Growth Officer at PayCaptain and Founder of Connexion Career Collective. With a fascinating non-linear career spanning fashion, EdTech and FinTech, Mel brings a unique perspective on growth, diversity and why payroll deserves far more attention than it typically receives. In this interview, she shares how PayCaptain is tackling a payroll problem that 91% of businesses admit to, and why getting paid accurately should be a meaningful event for every employee.

My questions are in bold - over to you Mel:

Who are you and what's your background?

My career has been non-linear. I started out in fashion, makeup and retail, working for the likes of Harvey Nichols and Hourglass Cosmetics. I set up my first venture in my early twenties with some funding from The Prince's Trust. My first major pivot was into EdTech, selling global training programmes for creatives - designers, hairstylists, makeup artists and photographers, working with some big names in the market, a bit like an early version of Masterclass. From there I moved into fintech - I was Director of Revenue for PayDashboard, which was later acquired by Experian, and CEO of its sister company, Moneysmart, a financial wellbeing marketplace. I then spent time as Chief Revenue Officer at Caxton Payments, flipping a transactional model to MRR, driving its B2B division through enterprise partnerships and launching Faster Payroll Payments and an M&A payment distribution with a focus on Professional Services, building out the internal team and processes to scale, before joining PayCaptain. I joined six months ago as a fractional appointment to work alongside our CEO, Simon Bocca, and the team to drive enterprise growth. Before moving into the full-time CGO role last month as part of the exciting acquisition by The Citation Group.

What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?

I wear a few different hats. At PayCaptain, I'm Chief Growth Officer, driving our growth alongside our CEO, Simon Bocca. I'm also Founder and CEO of Connexion Career Collective (CCC), a cross-industry, cross-generational network that enables women and allies through strategic connections, commercial opportunities and a pay-it-forward culture. In practice, it is a very active online and offline community running 20 in-person events across the year. I am privileged to have a strong team, in fact one of whom I worked with eight years ago at Mastered. They manage the day-to-day whilst I focus my time on PayCaptain.

No two days are the same - one day I might be in a high-level conversation with an enterprise team about why their existing payroll technology isn't fit for purpose and how PayCaptain offers something better; the next I could be coaching an internal go-to-market team, or touring the UK with CCC, bringing hundreds of people together to drive career success. I was drawn to PayCaptain's 70% female leadership and diversity within the organisation as a whole. I deliberately seek out organisations like these that also reflect the payroll customer base. It's a fantastic team that understands the psyche of our clients and their employees in a really unique way.

Can you give us an overview of your business?

PayCaptain is best-of-breed payroll technology that runs payroll more accurately, more efficiently, and with better service than legacy providers, whilst also making every payslip a meaningful financial event and payday experience for employees. Our proprietary technology has an API orchestration layer, which means we integrate with the full HR tech stack, eliminating manual data entry, and is built to be future-proof as legislation and technology change.

Payroll is the most financially consequential process most organisations run every month, and it's widely mismanaged - legacy software, manual data entry, and poor or missing integrations mean over 91% of businesses admit to monthly payroll errors. For enterprise businesses, that's a reputational or legal problem as much as a cost and time issue. National Minimum Wage enforcement has sharpened - as of March 2026, 389 employers had been publicly named, covering 60,000 affected workers, £7.3 million in arrears, and £12.6 million in penalties and the launch of the Fair Work Agency in April 2026 raises the stakes further.

We built PayCaptain to solve that. Native integrations with over 20 systems, including BambooHR, RotaReady and Deputy, mean data flows straight into payroll without manual re-keying. An automated validation layer runs pre-payroll exception flagging, anomaly detection, and compliance checks so that problems surface before pay runs, not after. We also publish payslips one to two days before payday so employees can flag discrepancies in advance. If something does go wrong, it's dealt with the same day, not queued for up to a week.

That approach is delivering results for our clients - Roadchef now runs at 99.98% payroll accuracy, up from 80% with their previous provider, and TGI Fridays moved their entire payroll across to us in under two weeks with 100% accuracy from day one.

On top of the technology, our employee app turns payroll into a genuinely useful financial experience. Employees can see earnings accrue in real time, access emergency cash at no cost to them, set up salary savings, and understand their pay in plain language.

Tell us how you are funded?

This year, PayCaptain became part of The Citation Group, one of the UK's leading providers of compliance software and services for SMEs, when they acquired PayCaptain. We now operate as a dedicated Payroll Division within the Group, with Simon remaining as Managing Director. It's business as usual for our clients - same service, platform and support, but being part of Citation gives us the scale and resources to pursue our mission faster than we could have done independently.

What's the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?

PayCaptain was founded by Simon Bocca in 2020 to fix a problem that's been accepted as normal for too long - payroll is the most financially consequential process most organisations run every month, and it's routinely mismanaged. Legacy software, manual data entry and poor integrations mean errors are common rather than exceptional, with over 91% of businesses admitting to monthly payroll errors. Simon set out to build technology that could bring that down to close to zero, while also turning every payslip into a meaningful moment for the employee receiving it, not just a formality.

Who are your target customers? What's your revenue model?

We already work with over 260 brands across the UK, with a strong presence in hospitality and retail due to the complexity of variable pay, including TGI Fridays, Dishoom, Roadchef, NEOM, Charlie Bigham's, and Monica Vinader, and process up to 55,000 payslips per month. We grew new customers by 73% in 2025, with average year-on-year revenue growth of 70% over the past two consecutive years, and have a customer retention rate of 98%. Increasingly, we are seeing an appetite among large enterprise businesses, especially where there is a complex structure, for example, PE-backed, to have strong financial visibility and reporting, and also adopt best-in-class payroll technology to support employees' financial well-being and ensure full compliance from a governance perspective.

If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?

More inclusivity across the sector; I believe diversity of thought drives better outcomes and higher performance. My concern is that a lot of what we do is gatekeeping: "Have you worked in the sector or industry before?" "Do you have a degree?" but fundamentally, a lot of this can be learnt on the job if you have the right attitude and behaviours. It's why I rate the likes of CIPP and the apprenticeship and open job learning that can be done. I only got access to this industry because I was given a chance and haven't looked back.

What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?

My message to leaders across Financial Services, as in any other industry, is simple - get payroll on the board agenda before it becomes a headline risk. No matter how much your employees love their job or buy into your culture, people work to get paid. It's a highly emotive subject and it's an accident waiting to happen in many organisations. Make sure they are paid accurately and on time, and that being paid is a meaningful event for all the right reasons!

Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?

I am a big user of LinkedIn, so I get a lot of my news and views from there and my other half is great at giving me the headlines, knowing I struggle to read a lot of text and find the news depressing!

Can you list 3 people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?

My CCC Co-Founder Becky Glover - she has had an incredible career and came up through the ranks via an apprenticeship scheme via Price Bailey - she is currently CFO of Mazuma - accountants for small and micro businesses. She also sits on the board of ATT - the Association of Accounting Technicians and is Vice Chair of the ACCA.

CEO of Clearbank, Emma Hagen. We are their first corporate partner, and I love a female CEO, especially with cool branding! I'm creative at heart.

Go Henry Founder and CEO Louise Hill, I'm a big believer in financial education, and there's a real lack of it in our educational system. I'm lucky my dad was an IFA, not that I took much notice at a young age as I was too busy rebelling, but there was an understanding of investment, pensions and all the things that too many people are unaware of until it's too late. I have an 8-year-old daughter and it means the world to me that money matters to her!

What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?

I'm a fan of Starling Bank for both my foreign travel and my business banking

My daughter Millie uses a Nimble card by Caxton for her savings/pocket money, which I rate as she can do jobs and get paid for it.

What's the best new FinTech product or service you've seen recently?

Aside from the obvious, PayCaptain. As an employee, I just went through the onboarding and love the financial fitness assessment. Plus, whilst in my previous role I pushed us to onboard as a client, mainly because my team, some who were grads, were struggling with finances at month end and asked the Head of Department for cash. To stop him giving this out of his own pocket, the emergency cash feature was a sustainable and responsible way to help them out.

HumanOS - not necessarily a Fintech service exclusively, but more related to my passion around high performance and how we best achieve that without burnout, which is what many are trying to achieve in Fintech as a sector. We all have different stresses and strains at different times. Financial wellness weighs heavily on many, and I love how Bianca Errigo has blended both mental and physical coaching to become accessible to all.

Penfold - pensions that are genuinely a benefit; our partner who ensures this is really as simple as possible to understand and manage.

Finally, let's talk about predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?

Two things will define the next few years - AI and regulation. On AI, back-office functions like payroll are already seeing smart automation move in - our own AI assistant, Florence, automates period-on-period validation and anomaly detection in real time, but the core, rules-based work (payroll calculations, HMRC submissions, payment processing) should stay exactly that - rules-based, with no AI involvement.

On regulation, enforcement is only getting tighter. The launch of the Fair Work Agency in April 2026 and stricter enforcement of the National Minimum Wage are early signals of a trend that will continue to accelerate, and businesses that don't future-proof their payroll now will find themselves exposed.

Many thanks to Melanie Mills for taking the time to share her insights with FinTech Profile. You can learn more about PayCaptain and Connexion Career Collective at their websites.