Less than a year into his role as CRO, Form3’s Mark Fieldhouse tells Payment Expert
December is often the point in the calendar when the payments world finally pauses long enough to look back at what just happened. After another year of real-time rails, new fraud pressures and rising expectations from merchants and consumers, 2025 has felt less like business as usual and more like a live stress test of the industry’s infrastructure.
Behind the scenes, cloud-native providers such as Form3 have found themselves moving from interesting innovators to critical plumbing for banks that cannot afford a misstep on reliability or resilience.
On January 29, the company announced the appointment of Mark Fieldhouse as Chief Revenue Officer, signalling to the market that its next phase would be defined as much by commercial execution as by technical capability. Speaking at the start of the year, Fieldhouse said Form3’s “market-leading technology enables us and our customers to grow at scale in the UK, Europe and the US”, a statement that has only grown more relevant as banks grapple with cross-border complexity and regulatory change.
As 2025 draws to a close and Christmas lights go up across financial centres from London to New York, Payment Expert sat down with Fieldhouse to look back on Form3’s year, and to take stock of what the past twelve months have meant for the wider payments ecosystem.
Form3 launches this year
Form3 has recorded another strong year of growth, driven by major client wins and increased demand for its Verification of Payee (VoP) service ahead of Europe’s October 9 mandate.
Speaking to Payment Expert ahead of the rule change earlier this year, CEO Mike Walters said the shift toward mandatory name-checking would accelerate instant payment adoption in 2025 and beyond.
But the most significant milestone for the SaaS provider came in October, when Nationwide invested in the company. Form3 said the capital will be used to expand hosting capabilities and enhance its account-to-account payments platform, including new functionality for the building society.
Nationwide has extended its Faster Payments Service (FPS) managed service partnership with Form3 by seven years, through 2032, and has also become an early adopter of Form3’s new Payments Resilience Platform (PRP).
Asked whether the investment represented the natural next stage of the relationship, Fieldhouse told Payment Expert that “it was a combination of two things”.
“One was reinforcing their trust in our partnership that we have together, funding our path to profitability,” he said. “Secondly, if not more importantly, it’s also contributing to a resilience platform that we’re building-out in partnership with Nationwide.
“As we look at Form3’s heritage as a cloud-native payments platform, we’re being asked by trusted banks and partners how we build out additional resilience for elements of their infrastructure. Where Form3 sees itself now is assisting not just in a cloud-native aspect, but looking at how old customers want to deploy software, and that could cover everything from resilience to speed, to access, and to rails and schemes.”
“I think where we look at our future now, as well as expanding into North America, is what other deployment models we can help our customers with.”
The North America opportunity
A major focus of Nationwide’s investment is to accelerate Form3’s expansion into the US and wider North American market.
Form3 already has a footprint in the region, having contributed to the FedNow pilot launched in 2023 and secured $160m in funding from Goldman Sachs in 2021. Fieldhouse said conversations at Money20/20 USA last October underscored the demand among US institutions for modern, agile banking infrastructure.
“In the UK and Europe, we are in a mature market where the brand is well known,” says Fieldhouse. “In North America, what’s really exciting is our brand is becoming very well recognised.”
Although the US is often described as lagging behind Europe in payments innovation, research from CoinLaw shows North American institutions now lead all regions in cloud banking adoption at 54%.
For Form3, that sets the stage to replicate its cloud-native, real-time payments model in the US, but adapted for unique domestic rails and regulatory requirements.
“What we’re starting to do is to transition a lot of what’s worked in the UK and Europe, and nuance that for the US market,” Fieldhouse continues. “The drive for real-time payments is a little bit slower than the rest of the world (in the US). It’s still very much based around ACH technology and Zelle, so we’re looking at how we change our go-to market strategy to be even more successful in North America.”
He added that interest from US institutions has surged. “We are having a lot of conversations about how people are looking at us and the success that we’ve had in the UK and Europe about how we could help modernise their banks, whether that’s the Tier-1 operators, or the super regional banks or fintechs in the US. The interest is really palpable at the moment.”
AI is the next frontier
Form3 were not only holding conversations at US-based payment events, but those in Europe too, as Payment Expert spoke to Fieldhouse at Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt on the proposition AI can afford payment processing.
Circling back to the conversation several months on, Fieldhouse remains confident about the role AI will play in Form3’s proposition, particularly through payment orchestration powered by its APIs.
Agentification, and the rapid emergence of agentic commerce, has become a focal point across the payments sector. Major players like PayPal and Worldpay have already rolled out agent-led retail payment features, and Fieldhouse believes the next phase will see businesses deploying their own AI agents directly.
“What we’re looking to try and do is to give our customers the ability to add their own Agentification layers. We have an orchestration product, which is designed to do just that,” he explains. “Through this orchestration platform, we are providing people a great corporate citizen platform for them to use, and some of our customers at the moment are really looking at how they inject AI into that themselves. Rather than us providing it, we’re providing the platform to do it efficiently and effectively.”
But alongside this momentum, Fieldhouse offers a note of caution. AI’s potential to run across an entire infrastructure means payment firms need to be strategic in how they deploy it.
He points to a future where “really smart” operators run multiple agents in parallel – “seven to eight working simultaneously but each functioning different tasks” – spanning compliance checks, routing, customer service and more.
“You have to think, how does my infrastructure scale or de-scale automatically? How do I augment risk analysis into our infrastructure?” says Fieldhouse. “I think the market leaders will come out of this process having picked out the little functions that accumulatively make the biggest impact.
“If you try and do one big explosive AI project, you are probably deemed to be less successful than taking small functions that have really high impact.”
A2A payment maturing
Away from the fast-emerging AI space and back to a market where Form3 has operated for nearly a decade, account-to-account (A2A) payments saw another major leap forward in 2025.
Pay by Bank — one of open banking’s flagship use cases — has accelerated into mainstream adoption this year, driven by both payment service providers and consumers. TrueLayer went as far as branding 2025 the “breakout year” for the payment method, while Form3’s cloud-native platform has supported a growing number of firms looking to embed A2A capabilities.
Fieldhouse believes the surge reflects a broader shift in expectations from businesses and financial institutions, who now demand more sophisticated and agile API-driven infrastructure.
“The last few events have really underpinned what Form3 has been building and has built absolutely the right market fits,” he says.
“Having had some very exciting conversations with prospects and customers over the last few months, it’s about them wanting to use the most modern way, APIs, tech stacks, like Form3 provide, to give the best agility to their customers.”
Scaling for the future
In a previous conversation with Payment Expert for ID Check: Payment Professionals, Fieldhouse described Form3 as “a company steeped in financial services skill and experience that happened to be building a great software product”.
In the same interview, he went further, stating his ambition to turn Form3 into “a fantastic software-as-a-service business”.
That transition already appears to be underway. With momentum in AI, a deeper push into North America and new resilience-focused services rolling out, 2026 presents a clear runway for scale.
Fieldhouse also hinted earlier this year at the mindset he believes will set Form3 apart from its peers.
“Often when I’m talking to a customer, I don’t refer to them. I refer to their customers,” he says. “I think they find that quite refreshing. Having that API centric approach is the one thing that really and truly separates us.”
