Meet Our Team
Ivan Gowan
Chief Executive Officer
Ivan is a serial entrepreneur and executive leader with 18 years experience in capital markets and 20 years in market leading technology. He is an active Angel Investor, Board Advisor/Observer helping founding teams with strategy, product, marketing and growth in FinTech, Blockchain, MarTech, MedTech and HealthTech. He led rapid growth of Capital.com as CEO from pre-FCA authorisation to profitability over a 30 month period during a period of rapid product and organisational development, international expansion and growth. During this time he co-founded Currency.com the World’s first regulated tokenised securities exchange bringing traditional capital markets to the blockchain.
Prior to leading Capital.com/Currency.com Ivan spent 15 years leading IT development at FTSE 250 listed IG Group (from a £200m to £3bn market cap). Ivan, part of the senior leadership team, with 300 engineers across the UK, India and Eastern Europe, helped to firmly establish IG as a global leader in HNW retail trading on the back of award winning platforms, operational excellence and advanced marketing systems.
With a keen passion for capital markets, macroeconomic trends and ethical leadership he is passionate about helping boards to adopt the latest technology to drive growth. Ivan has always focused on customer centric growth for long term sustainable value creation, building high performing teams to deliver outsize growth.
Ivan holds a BEng in Computer Systems Engineering from UMIST and MSC in Advanced Computer Systems from University of Edinburgh.
Meet Our Team
Ivan Gowan
Chief Executive Officer
Ivan is a serial entrepreneur and executive leader with 18 years experience in capital markets and 20 years in market leading technology. He is an active Angel Investor, Board Advisor/Observer helping founding teams with strategy, product, marketing and growth in FinTech, Blockchain, MarTech, MedTech and HealthTech. He led rapid growth of Capital.com as CEO from pre-FCA authorisation to profitability over a 30 month period during a period of rapid product and organisational development, international expansion and growth. During this time he co-founded Currency.com the World’s first regulated tokenised securities exchange bringing traditional capital markets to the blockchain.
Prior to leading Capital.com/Currency.com Ivan spent 15 years leading IT development at FTSE 250 listed IG Group (from a £200m to £3bn market cap). Ivan, part of the senior leadership team, with 300 engineers across the UK, India and Eastern Europe, helped to firmly establish IG as a global leader in HNW retail trading on the back of award winning platforms, operational excellence and advanced marketing systems.
With a keen passion for capital markets, macroeconomic trends and ethical leadership he is passionate about helping boards to adopt the latest technology to drive growth. Ivan has always focused on customer centric growth for long term sustainable value creation, building high performing teams to deliver outsize growth.
Ivan holds a BEng in Computer Systems Engineering from UMIST and MSC in Advanced Computer Systems from University of Edinburgh.
Tony Hillier
Chief Marketing Officer
Tony has co-created and led marketing teams for a range of innovative FinTech products across different financial markets. These included cross border tax leveraged leasing of ship and aircraft assets, and triple-A default insurance for asset backed securities in the international bond market. For these he has held executive Board positions with N M Rothschild & Sons and GEC Finance and a non-Executive directorship with Financial Security Assurance, a New York based financial guarantee corporation. He delivered insured contingent equity for international utility project financing, and off-balance asset financing for major UK local authorities, as a co-investing entrepreneur.
Tony is co-founder of Operational Agility and is driven to help organisations grow customer and investor value through better operational reporting to help every executive team improve productivity.
Tony holds an MA as a classical scholar of Balliol College, Oxford and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School. His career began with five years international monetary economic analysis at the Bank of England.
David Stroll
Chief Technology Officer
A technical and economics minded strategic leader with 40 years experience in strategy, technical systems delivery, macro-economic theory and research into innovation and productivity. David has worked with a wide range of leading companies including Cisco, SAP, Digital Equipment Corporation, International Computers Ltd, Santander, Cable and Wireless, local authorities as well as co-founding a number of successful businesses in Europe and the US. which include the first business to business internet payments service in the USA (PayMode), which now services 750,000 US firms.
David is co-founder of Operational Agility and is driven to help organisations understand their current productivity and create ways for executive teams to identify opportunities to grow sustainably. David has an MSc with Merit in Innovation from Birkbeck College and is finalising his PhD Thesis on Productivity Measurement and Improvement.
Tony Hillier
Chief Marketing Officer
Tony has co-created and led marketing teams for a range of innovative FinTech products across different financial markets. These included cross border tax leveraged leasing of ship and aircraft assets, and triple-A default insurance for asset backed securities in the international bond market. For these he has held executive Board positions with N M Rothschild & Sons and GEC Finance and a non-Executive directorship with Financial Security Assurance, a New York based financial guarantee corporation. He delivered insured contingent equity for international utility project financing, and off-balance asset financing for major UK local authorities, as a co-investing entrepreneur.
Tony is co-founder of Operational Agility and is driven to help organisations grow customer and investor value through better operational reporting to help every executive team improve productivity.
Tony holds an MA as a classical scholar of Balliol College, Oxford and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School. His career began with five years international monetary economic analysis at the Bank of England.
David Stroll
Chief Technology Officer
A technical and economics minded strategic leader with 40 years experience in strategy, technical systems delivery, macro-economic theory and research into innovation and productivity. David has worked with a wide range of leading companies including Cisco, SAP, Digital Equipment Corporation, International Computers Ltd, Santander, Cable and Wireless, local authorities as well as co-founding a number of successful businesses in Europe and the US. which include the first business to business internet payments service in the USA (PayMode), which now services 750,000 US firms.
David is co-founder of Operational Agility and is driven to help organisations understand their current productivity and create ways for executive teams to identify opportunities to grow sustainably. David has an MSc with Merit in Innovation from Birkbeck College and is finalising his PhD Thesis on Productivity Measurement and Improvement.
Mark Hillier
Sales Director
Mark is a serial entrepreneur having founded a number of property Companies and restaurant brands. His experience in property is extremely diversified and he is the founding partner of DMR Property and has over 25 years’ experience in the commercial property sector. Mark currently manages and leases more than £1million square foot of retail and leisure properties throughout the UK. He has won awards for developments including The Revo Gold Award for Cathedral Square, the £20million development in Worcester which completely transformed the City Centre. He acts for some of the largest and best known leisure property owners including BMO Real Estate, Addington Capital, F&C Reit and NFUM (Salmon Harvester).
Mark’s passion is to create and work closely with restaurants, grow them into successful multi million pound brands. He has successfully worked closely the likes of Prezzo, Nandos, Cinnabon and MAB. He is a Master in the leisure / restaurant sector and is one of the founders of Turquoise (the largest new National Turkish restaurant chain) into 16 restaurants all situated in prime affluent London suburbs and more than 50 restaurants will be trading by end of 2021. He has worked in senior positions at both Cushman & Wakefield and Gerald Eve LLP.
Mark has been a qualified Chartered Surveyor since 1997 and graduated from Oxford Brookes with a BSc (Hons) degree in Estate Management.
Mark Hillier
Sales Director
Mark is a serial entrepreneur having founded a number of property Companies and restaurant brands. His experience in property is extremely diversified and he is the founding partner of DMR Property and has over 25 years’ experience in the commercial property sector. Mark currently manages and leases more than £1million square foot of retail and leisure properties throughout the UK. He has won awards for developments including The Revo Gold Award for Cathedral Square, the £20million development in Worcester which completely transformed the City Centre. He acts for some of the largest and best known leisure property owners including BMO Real Estate, Addington Capital, F&C Reit and NFUM (Salmon Harvester).
Mark’s passion is to create and work closely with restaurants, grow them into successful multi million pound brands. He has successfully worked closely the likes of Prezzo, Nandos, Cinnabon and MAB. He is a Master in the leisure / restaurant sector and is one of the founders of Turquoise (the largest new National Turkish restaurant chain) into 16 restaurants all situated in prime affluent London suburbs and more than 50 restaurants will be trading by end of 2021. He has worked in senior positions at both Cushman & Wakefield and Gerald Eve LLP.
Mark has been a qualified Chartered Surveyor since 1997 and graduated from Oxford Brookes with a BSc (Hons) degree in Estate Management.