Payment Expert’s ID Check: Payments Professionals offers insight from industry leaders and experts on how they got their start in the financial industry, from their early years in education, to how they have been able to climb the corporate ladder.
This week, Peter Daunton, Chief Product Officer at Sokin, reveals how he learned the hard way during his early career, and the challenges moving up the ladder as his career progressed as responsibilities for other people led to imposter syndrome and how he overcame this.
Where did you go to university and what did you study? What impact did this have on your current journey?
I studied Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, specialising in mechanical and electrical engineering. That background gave me a strong grounding in systems thinking and problem solving, which has stayed with me throughout my career.
Oxford has a habit of throwing information at you and expecting you to figure out the rest yourself. It taught me to be comfortable sitting with complexity and working through it rather than waiting for someone to hand you the answer – which, it turns out, is exactly what payments demands of you.
What first drew you to the payments industry and why have you stayed?
I came into payments through product and systems roles rather than finance directly. What drew me in was impact.
Payments is something every person and every business touches every single day, and I was fascinated by the idea that good product decisions in this space could meaningfully improve how that experience feels – whether that’s a small business getting paid faster, or a family sending money across borders without losing a chunk of it to fees. I’ve stayed because that potential hasn’t gone away.
If anything, the internationalisation of business has made the stakes higher. The complexity is fun, but it’s always been the impact that keeps me here.
Are there any lessons from your first role in the industry which you still draw on?
Early on, particularly in product ownership roles, I learned the importance of understanding the end-to-end system rather than focusing on individual features. Payments do not fail in isolation.
Issues tend to emerge at handovers between teams, platforms or jurisdictions. I learned this the hard way early in my career when a product launch resulted in payment failures that weren’t immediately obvious. Unpicking it meant going back through every handover point in the chain to find where an assumption had been made and not checked.
That lesson still informs how I approach product design and cross functional collaboration today.
When was your first big break in the industry? Why was this such a significant moment for you?
I started in the payments space at IG Group but my time at Currencycloud was the real turning point. I joined relatively early and stayed for over six years, which in this industry is a long time.
What made it formative wasn’t just the company’s growth – it was having a manager who genuinely invested in pushing me further and faster than I would have pushed myself. That combination of a scaling business and the right support at the right moment is fairly rare, and I was lucky to have both at the same time.
Was there a moment you faced in the industry which really challenged you? How did you overcome this?
The hardest transition was moving into a director role and realising that what had made me successful up to that point was no longer the thing that would make me successful going forward.
I had built my confidence around being close to the product work – understanding the detail of the payments space, contributing directly. Suddenly my job was to create the conditions for others to do that well, and I found that genuinely difficult. I struggled with imposter syndrome for a period, questioning whether I was actually adding value or just attending meetings.
What helped was reframing what “contribution” meant at that level. Your output is the quality of decisions your team makes, not the decisions you make yourself.
What are some of the skills you deem essential to starting in your industry and how have yours developed over the years?
The skills that matter most have shifted considerably as I’ve progressed. Earlier in my career, technical depth was critical. There’s a particular kind of satisfaction in working through the detail of a PSD2 obligation or sitting in the weeds of an MT103 SWIFT spec looking for a routing improvement that reduces failed payments.
Over time, leadership, prioritisation and decision making have become just as important. Payments products succeed when teams are aligned around clear goals and customer outcomes.
Who was your biggest role model – inside or outside of your industry – who continues to inspire you in your current career?
Marty Cagan, perhaps a predictable answer for anyone in product, but his writing genuinely changed how I approached the work. The shift from thinking about outputs – roadmaps, features, delivery – to focusing on outcomes and real customer problems was a significant one for me. It sounds obvious in retrospect, but it takes time to fully internalise, and his frameworks gave me a language for conversations I was already having instinctively.
If you didn’t work in the industry, what other career option would you have pursued or would have loved to
I always imagined I might have become a musician. I played in jazz bands and still think there was a version of my life where I pursued that seriously. What appealed wasn’t just the music itself but the idea of a vocation – something you own completely. I
I find myself occasionally tempted by the same idea when I think about running a restaurant. The craft, the ownership, the tangible feedback from people sitting at your table. Payments are actually not that different in some ways. You are building something that either works or it doesn’t, and people notice immediately when it doesn’t.
Lastly, what is some advice you would give to an aspiring person looking to get a start in your respective industry?
In the payments product space, I would say: focus on understanding how money really moves, not just the technology, but also the regulatory, operational and customer dimensions. Be curious, ask questions, and do not rush to specialise too early. Payments rewards people who can connect ideas across disciplines and think long-term.
On the surface payments should feel simple – and the best ones do. But the depth is where the fun is.
