About PayCaptain

Simon Bocca is founder and CEO of PayCaptain. He has over 18 years’ experience in the payroll industry and prior to launching PayCaptain, he was Chief Operating Officer for a payroll service provider that grew from five to 1,200 employees. The company expanded from the UK to include operations in the USA and UAE during his tenure.

Simon is passionate about improving the financial well-being of employees and delivering a solution that makes payroll easy for PayCaptain’s customers. He believes it’s imperative that people are paid on time with no errors because payroll is such a business and life-critical function.

Simon is responsible for driving change and ensuring his team deliver first class service to PayCaptain’s customers. An innovator in the industry, Simon is constantly looking at new technological advances that can improve both the customer and employee payroll experience.

“The really exciting thing for me, when I launched PayCaptain, was putting employees front and centre. To me that meant providing a simple multi-lingual app for with super-helpful features for every employee to better manage and control their hard-earned money and avoid problems associated with debt.”

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Stacey Heathcote is Head of Payroll for PayCaptain. She has 23 years’ experience in payroll and has a Diploma in Payroll Management and MSc in Payroll and Business Management. Prior to joining PayCaptain, Stacey was Director of Payroll Operations for an international payroll service provider. She headed up a team of 70 payroll professionals and had responsibility for over 400 customer, processing around 350,000 payslips every month.

Stacey loves working in a customer-facing payroll department. She really enjoys working with different customers and building strong relationships with them. She gains great satisfaction when her team becomes an extension of the customer teams and the collaborative relationships that are built.

Stacey is responsible for delivering amazing service to PayCaptain’s customers. This includes making sure the team is fully trained, qualified and happy and that all payroll processes and procedures are documented, up to date and being followed.

“I genuinely care about each of our customers and I'm very passionate about delivering an outstanding, professional and knowledgeable payroll service.”

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Michael Taylor is PayCaptain’s Head of Engineering and has been with PayCaptain since April 2021. Prior to that, he was Salesforce Administration Lead for the John Lewis Partnership for 30 years.

Michael is passionate about making processes as automated as possible. This means the team can then focus on the more complex tasks that add real value to PayCaptain’s customer-base. This also gives customers the answers they need at their fingertips as well as exciting features in the mobile app to help employees with their financial well-being.

Michael is responsible for everything product-related. His role involves building new features and working with the team to implement new ideas and developing customer requests to deliver the best service to PayCaptain’s customers.

“I love working with the amazing and inspiring people in the PayCaptain team and we really bring out the best in each other. We work so well as a team. If someone needs a hand, we all help out to make sure the job gets done so we deliver an exceptional level of service for our customers.”

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Mike Fisher is PayCaptain’s Head of Sales & Partnerships with more than five years of expertise in the payroll sector and an impressive background spanning over 12 years in Sales & Account Management. Prior to joining the PayCaptain team, he held a key position at another HRIS solution provider.

In his role, Mike is responsible for collaborating closely with clients as they navigate their business transformation journey, exploring various payroll solutions and ultimately implementing PayCaptain across their organisation. He serves as a dedicated resource, offering answers to queries, valuable insights, and trusted advice, ensuring transparency at every stage of the process.

Furthermore, Mike manages PayCaptain's partnerships with third-party solutions that seamlessly integrate with our platform. The primary focus here is to deliver a 'Best-in-Class' experience to all of our clients. With the power of modern API integrations and Mike’s support, both PayCaptain and our partners collaborate closely to ensure a smooth flow of data, resulting in heightened accuracy and significant time and cost savings for our customers.

In addition to these responsibilities, Mike collaborates closely with his colleagues across the organisation, contributing to the enhancement of PayCaptain's brand, marketing efforts, newsletters, and product development.

"Payroll plays a pivotal role in a business's operations. I find great fulfilment in being a part of this commercially critical element, with the opportunity to enhance the experience for all those involved."

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Sarah Rayment is Head of Operations at PayCaptain. She has over 16 years’ experience in the payroll industry and previously worked as an Enablement Manager at an international payroll service provider.

Sarah loves working for a payroll company that's so invested in improving the financial well-being of employees, as well as making the Payroll process much easier for the Payroll and Finance Teams. She enjoys seeing the features of the mobile app being used and seeing the results of how this benefits employees and customers.

Sarah has responsibility for the implementation and delivery of projects for new and existing customers and is one of the main points of contact throughout implementation. Sarah also manages internal projects and processes.

“Being in operations, I'm lucky to work closely with all departments within PayCaptain as well as our customers and partners. I love being involved in projects from the moment a contract's signed and I take pride in ensuring everything is configured perfectly, so we deliver a great solution for the benefit of our customers and their employees.”

Sheryl Steele is PayCaptain’s Bureau Performance Specialist. She has 27 years’ experience in the payroll industry. In her previous role, she was VP Payroll Operations US/EMEA and brings a plethora of operational expertise with her.

Sheryl loves nothing more than getting payroll right for employees. Payroll, she says, is one of the most important aspects of working for any employee, so it’s imperative it’s right first time, every time.

Sheryl has responsibility for the launch and support of PayCaptain’s Payroll Service Provider offering. She works with payroll providers, accountancy practices and bureaus. On hand to share her extensive knowledge and expertise, she’s delivering a hugely successful solution that streamlines working practices to make payroll more efficient and cost-effective for our service delivery partners.

“I love PayCaptain. It’s fantastic to be part of a team that is so passionate about a delivering payroll solution that’s so focused on both the employee and customer experience.”

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Anna Buckle is PayCaptain’s Head of Employee Experience and Financial Well-being and has 20 years’ experience in the payroll and financial wellbeing industry. Prior to joining PayCaptain, she was Director of Customer Success for a payroll service provider with 1200 customers operating across the UK, USA and UAE.

A certified Plain Numbers Practitioner who advocates for users first, Anna is dedicated to ensuring that PayCaptain remains on track with their mission to provide a payroll solution that helps users increase their financial capability and resilience, whilst improving their overall well-being.Anna believes that payroll has enormous potential as a form of engaging employees and providing them with access to tools and resources to support them building financial resilience.

Anna is responsible for ensuring that each PayCaptain user can benefit as much as possible by using the PayCaptain app. Her main area of focus is exploring ways PayCaptain can develop the functionality to enable everyone to make great decisions about how to make the most of their hard-earned money.

“I’m totally committed to understanding the challenges and situations that employees using PayCaptain face day-to-day. This then gets fed back in to the team so we can develop functionality to address those challenges. I love knowing what I’m working on will genuinely make a difference to people’s lives.”

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Val Ellis is Payroll Manager at PayCaptain and she has 24 years’ experience in payroll. She is ITIL v3 Foundation certified and a member of the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (‘MCIPP’). Prior to joining PayCaptain, Val was Payroll Manager for an international payroll service provider for nearly eight years.

Val finds that payroll is a constantly changing environment with no two days ever being the same. She says she loves this part of her role as it keeps her brain active, she’s always learning new things and enjoys putting them in to practice in her day-to-day activities.

Val’s responsibility is to ensure delivery of a compliant and accurate payroll. With extensive experience in payroll for all sectors of business, Val has expert knowledge on both employment law and payroll legislation. This means she can ensure that employees are paid correctly, but also that the employer is complaint with all relevant legislation.

“For me, when it comes to payday and there are no queries raised, it’s a perfect indicator that we’ve completed our job well and that everyone has been paid correctly!”

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Johnny Rafferty is Data & Quality Manager for PayCaptain. Prior to joining the company, he spent over 11 years working for the John Lewis Partnership, where he was Planning Manager in the Customer Contact estate. In this role, he used data to build long-term contact volume forecasts and build staffing and recruitment plans to create budget plans.

Johnny is inspired by the depth of knowledge and passion displayed by the payroll team and loves how much everyone genuinely cares about PayCaptain’s customers. He plays a key role in PayCaptain’s ambition to offer customers a world-class product and service.

Johnny is responsible for ensuring that the data produced is accurate and compliant. He works alongside Michael, using the latest technology to automate as much data as possible. He recognises the importance of the system being set up to produce data and results which are correct and accurate. His efforts ensure that PayCaptain’s customers always receive their hard-earned pay exactly as they should – correct on time, every time.

“Payroll is such an important part of people’s lives. Working for PayCaptain, I have an exciting opportunity to work with an outstanding system and team of people. My role allows me to learn and be creative, while using the latest technology to build a product that our customers love.”

Payroll Manager, Rebecca Davenport, has a Foundation Degree in Payroll Management and she’s a member of the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (‘CIPP’). She has over 15 years of payroll experience. Prior to joining PayCaptain, she was Senior Payroll Manager for an international payroll service provider where she managed new business implementations and services teams.

Becky loves building relationships and is heavily invested in the onboarding process when new customers transition across to the PayCaptain payroll solution. She works closely with the internal operations team to configure PayCaptain to meet the customer’s needs and support the implementation with employee communications and training.

With extensive experience of implementing payroll solutions, combined with her payroll and auto-enrolment expertise, Becky helps businesses improve payroll performance by reducing mistakes.  

“Payroll is forever changing and gives me great satisfaction to know that employees are paid correctly and on time, every time. These days, payroll isn’t just about accuracy. Payroll providers and employers need to ensure that payroll is as efficient as possible to avoid risks. I love seeing how our payroll solution turns a manual, time-consuming task into a quick and easy check for employers.”

Wiktoria Lis MCIPPdip is a Payroll Specialist with more than six years’ experience in the payroll industry. Prior to joining PayCaptain, Wiki was Payroll Supervisor for an international payroll service provider.

Loving the accomplishment of getting payrolls completed and ensuring employees are paid correctly and on time, she revels in the challenges of payroll and says this enables her to develop her problem-solving skills every day.

Wiki’s responsibilities include processing payrolls and communicating with, and supporting, both customers and employees. She ensures payrolls are completed to schedule, HMRC reporting and information provision is up-to-date and she also processes pension contributions for her customers.

With a Payroll Technician Certificate and a Foundation Degree in Payroll Management, Wiki’s extensive knowledge of both payroll and pensions allows her to support customers and employees in all scenarios. Having worked on payrolls ranging from one to 14,000 employees, she’s able to adapt to each customer’s needs and use her expertise and knowledge to deliver exceptional service and support.

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I’ve spent over 45 years in payroll and HR. After 10 successful years at ADP, I started my first business, a payroll bureau servicing SMEs.

After selling the business five years later to a local accounting firm, I was head hunted to help build out the payroll solutions for IBM and after that, Bank of Scotland.

In 1999, I founded Employer Services Ltd, the first true cloud-based payroll bureau to launch with full electronic reporting and ePayslips.

Employer Services Ltd was soon challenging the market, with established ‘legacy’ bureaus struggling to keep up. We were responsible for producing 7.5m+ payslips and £120m in salary payments a year and happy to win numerous awards.

In 2011, we launched the first cloud based cloud payroll software PaySuite. Three years later Paysuite was acquired by Intuit, who went on to service thousands of clients using QuickBooks.

Employer Services Ltd was acquired by RSM in 2015. Since then I have been serving as a director on the CIPP board alongside multiple other NED roles. I enjoy speaking at payroll industry events, as well as writing for sector publications.

In my spare time, I raise money for Great Ormond Street Hospital, run an internet Radio Station, play the trombone in one of the country’s top brass bands – oh, and run the occasional half marathon!

Alasdair Leggat is a Salesforce Engineer and joined PayCaptain in 2022. Originally training as a theoretical physicist and gaining his PhD, after a change of direction he decided to pursue a career in software development. Developing Salesforce since 2017, Alasdair previously worked at Deliveroo and Oodle Car Finance.

Responsible for building and maintaining the PayCaptain solution, Alasdair focuses on simplifying and automating repetitive tasks to improve the customer experience. Working closely with Michael Taylor, Head of Engineering, Alasdair sets up and maintain processes, with best practices in mind, so PayCaptain can be efficient and easily support growth and expansion.

Alasdair enjoys the challenge of expanding into new areas of the platform as well as making processes as automated as possible. This, he says, helps the customer and the internal team with increased efficiency, error reduction and faster task completion, reducing some of the the tedious tasks associated with payroll.

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Paulina Lis MCIPPdip is a Payroll Specialist with more than six years’ experience in the payroll industry. With a Payroll Technician Certificate and CIPP Foundation Degree Diploma in Payroll Management, Paulina started work as a Payroll Trainee for an international payroll service provider and worked her way up to processing payroll for one of the bureau’s biggest customers.

Paulina’s favourite part of her job is knowing that payroll has been carried out to a high standard and all employees have been paid correctly and on time. She enjoys working within a close-knit team and watching PayCaptain come up with great solutions for payroll as well interacting with customers and employees, providing great customer service.

Her responsibilities include ensuring that employees get paid accurately and on time and helping customers and employees with payroll queries. She’s also responsible for processing pensions and HMRC-reconciliation. In her career to date, she has processed large and complex payrolls with bespoke processes. This, she says, has allowed her to develop excellent problem-solving skills where she can investigate issues and come up with solutions by developing new processes.

With payroll being such a big part of everyone’s working life, Paulina loves the challenge that it changes all the time with new functionality and legislation. She loves that no day is ever the same and enjoys learning new skills every day, continuing her professional development.  

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Payroll Specialist Rachel Smith has both a CIPP Payroll Technician Certificate and CIPP Advanced Practitioner Certificate in Payroll. Rachel has a BSc (Hons) in International Spa Management and started her working career in the beauty industry. She also worked in the care sector supporting adults with learning disabilities. In all these roles she thrived on meeting customers’ and clients’ needs, something that she brings to working in payroll.

With more than five years in the payroll industry, prior to joining PayCaptain, Rachel worked as a payroll implementation specialist at an international service provider. Her role in Pay Captain includes processing payrolls, ensuring they are completed accurately and on time, and communicating regularly with customers and employees. She also processes customers’ pensions contributions.

Rachel is passionate about caring for people’s wellbeing and providing a high level of customer service. With great interpersonal skills and, knowing the importance of payroll to her customers and their employees, she creates a calm environment, delivers exceptional service and inspires confidence in the payroll process.

“I love working for PayCaptain and seeing how our functionality positively impacts employees’ lives. PayCaptain is a solution that puts employees in control of their pay while giving them the tools to build financial resilience and confidence. It’s so exciting to be involved in the journey!”

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