CIO interview - Dwaine Thomas sets secure pace of change in FinTech PXP

We are hearing a great deal about orchestration layers at present as vendors push their agentic AI technologies, but for orchestration to succeed, organizations need a technology infrastructure to underpin it. Fintech CIO Dwaine Thomas has modernized the infrastructure of PXP to ensure the firm’s payments orchestration technology meets the needs of its customers. 

UK-based PXP processes upwards of €30 billion of payments a year. Clients in retail, hospitality, online gaming and other sectors that require payment processing in physical and digital environments work with PXP to manage e-commerce, point of sale (POS), cross-border trades, conversions, risk management, and business insight. 

PXP began 2025 with the launch of a major new platform, Unity, which Thomas describes as an orchestration platform that allows customers, from small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) through to large enterprises, to select the tools they need for their payment needs. Unity includes POS, online retail, transaction data, payment routing, and a catalogue of services for customers to integrate. 

Salvatore Cicero, Group Chief Technology Officer of PXP, led the development of Unity, CIO Thomas says: 

Unity is central to our technology strategy and was designed from the ground up. It is an orchestration platform that is fully API driven and modular, so you can consume everything integrated or access the modules individually, so it is inherently flexible.

The company also launched a new onboarding technology, LaunchPad. These developments needed an infrastructure that was equally modern, which Thomas has been implementing in tandem with the creation of Unity and LaunchPad. Thomas says: 

Unity is important to us as it is a greenfield development. We didn’t just want to bolt new features onto the existing technology. We had traditionally run on VMware servers, Windows, and Linux, but we wanted to run in a containerized environment, as the automation and scaling techniques we use are best run on containers. In addition, portability was really important.

Thomas wanted portability so that PXP had the option of moving workloads to the cloud when necessary for resilience or availability. With many customers in peaky retail businesses, this ensures that PXP can use the increased computing power of the cloud for times like Black Friday and Christmas. He says: 

We wanted the ability to burst to the cloud where and when we need to, but we run the core environment on-premise. We now have the ability to branch out to Microsoft Azure when we need to. The reality is we have more than enough processing power on-premise, but we have the capability to move if we need to.

A real saving

PXP has 95% of its services being delivered by on-premise services located across four Co-Lo datacentres, one in the US, three in Europe. Thomas says he was frustrated by the previous infrastructure’s inability to move rapidly to the cloud if required. With the development of the Unity platform, Thomas used this as an opportunity to rationalize an infrastructure made up of multiple platforms, to build a single unified hybrid cloud infrastructure. This rationalization included moving from a three-tier VMware and Nutanix mixed environment to the Nutanix AHV platform and from a Cisco firewall to Fortinet. 

Thomas had been working with Nutanix since 2015, when it was first deployed to replace a Storage Area Network (SAN) that had failed. PXP could have moved away from VMWare in 2015, but at the time, the CIO said this was too big a leap for the firm. As time passed, the burden of two environments and multiple upgrades to both the VMware and Nutanix platforms meant a decision had to be made, especially with Unity on the horizon. He says: 

For managing container and data environments, we realized there was a strong alignment between the Nutanix AHV architecture and how we were architecting Unity.

And then the now well-publicized VMware price increases began following the Broadcom acquisition:

The price increase framed things. Over the next three years, our licensing costs would have gone up by 30-40%. For us, that was tolerable, but it was also painful to see that money wasted when we could use it for further product development. So we modeled the cost of operating VMware and the updates, including time and resources, and saw a real saving in moving to Nutanix.

The migration away from the legacy architecture was decided upon and completed in readiness to support the launch of Unity, with the corresponding modernization of existing platforms delivered as part of the new model, additionally enabling new capabilities to support agentic AI workloads.

Business outcomes

Thomas says not only is the new infrastructure reducing costs, but the CIO has greater visibility of the performance of the infrastructure and how this is impacting the customers. He says: 

It has allowed us to align our infrastructure to the Unity platform, streamline our applications, reduce vendor dependency, and accelerate the adoption of containers, all of which swung the decision-making process and outweighed staying put with VMware.

A simplified infrastructure benefits the CIO, who operates with a lean team. They can focus on the issues that matter, which in online commerce includes cybersecurity. He says: 

We are a payments business, so we are inherently handling sensitive data that is of interest to criminals and fraudsters. We have to adhere to very strict regulatory and compliance frameworks, one of the key technologies we are providing is  a point-to-point encryption (P2PE) compliant solution that means that when a cardholder taps a device, that transaction is immediately encrypted and then comes to our gateway, and only then is it unencrypted for processing.

My take

PXP handles significant payment volumes and is a vital utility to its customers in retail and other sectors. As Thomas outlines, having an infrastructure that supports careful modernization is central to customer success. Choosing the pace of modernization is also important. Vendors, investors, and some analysts would have you believe you are at risk if you are not rushing to agentic AI. The role of a CIO is to understand the customer, the business, and the landscape it operates within, and set the pace accordingly. Something PXP and Thomas have achieved.