About us - Board of Directors

Nick Ogden – Chairman and Chief Executive

As founder and CEO of The Voice Commerce Group, Nick is primarily responsible for the company’s overall corporate strategy and business development.

A serial entrepreneur Nick has consistently been at the forefront of innovation in technology since 1985. In 1993, he founded Multi Media Investments Limited, a technology research and development company that brought the Internet to the Channel Islands through Interactive Telephony Ltd. This led to the construction of Europe's first on-line store, Wine Warehouse, in October 1994 and the development of one of the first bank-endorsed e-commerce initiatives in the form of the UK’s first electronic shopping mall, ‘BarclaySquare’, in 1995.

In 1997 Nick founded WorldPay, which guarantees internet transactions worldwide, and led the company through its growth to over 270 employees with 20,000 merchants in 120 countries and processing transactions in excess of $2bn per annum. WorldPay was acquired by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2002.

In 2003 Nick, together with several former colleagues from WorldPay, formed the Voice Commerce Group to develop systems which allow individuals to identify themselves using a voice signature.

Nick has been recognised by a number of industry awards including the UK Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the Computer World Global IT Leaders award and more recently the ID People Awards 2009.

Jo Ogden - Director

Jo is the cofounder of the company. After graduating in 1993 from University she worked in sales for a Japanese manufacturing company in the UK . In early 1996 she joined corporate sales at a subsidiary of Demon Internet and then moved to a web development company, Motiv Systems. In 1998 she joined WorldPay as Sales Manager based in Cambridge, UK. After 18 months in Europe she became key in WorldPay's global expansion taking on full responsibility for the Asia Pacific region. Jo opened the WorldPay Centre in Singapore in June 2000 with a multi-lingual call centre, technical support, sales and marketing, administration and finance functions.

Dr. Gisli Hjalmtysson - Director

Dr. Gísli Hjálmtýsson has over 20 years of experience as an innovator, entrepreneur and manager. He joins Thule Investments from Reykjavík University where he was Dean of Computer Science and Engineering. Prior to that Dr. Hjálmtýsson was a Chief Technology Officer and fund manager at AVX-e.com, a PA based venture capital group focusing on Internet related opportunities. Before joining AVX, Dr. Hjálmtýsson conducted research on the Internet and novel network services, joining AT&T Research at Bell Laboratories in 1995, later AT&T Research at AT&T Shannon Laboratories most recently promoted to a Technology Consultant. Dr. Hjálmtýsson has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Santa Barbara. He has held positions on the faculty of Columbia University, University of Iceland and Reykjavík University. In 1993 Dr. Hjálmtýsson was a visiting research scientist at Telecom Research Laboratories, in Melbourne Australia for six months. He has been a co-recipient on significant grants from EC, NSF, DARPA, with leading researchers from MIT, Dartmouth College, Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton and more.

Dr. Gísli Hjálmtýsson has a BS degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Rochester, (NY) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Hjálmtýsson has been an invited speaker at numerous symposia, universities and leading companies. He has published over eighty papers, holds over twenty patents, and is a voting member of IEEE and ACM, and active in organizing professional conferences and serving on program committees.