Introducing Pepper

Charles Hall is founder and CEO of PepperHQ, having grown Pepper from a London-based start-up launching in 2015 to a market leading platform powering 120 merchants across some 2000 locations in the UK and with over 2 million users.


Charles began his career in investment banking spending 10 years at Citigroup in New York advising on equity financing and M&A. He then built one of Europe's largest private higher education groups, launching Kaplan International Colleges into the leading university pathway business in the UK and helping grow an organisation that served more than a million students a year.

Charles brings with him a wealth of business finance and operational experience that has driven the success of PepperHQ to date. Charles holds a BSc in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford.

Adam Montgomery is the Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Product Officer at PepperHQ, ensuring that product and the commercial goals are aligned. 


Adam joined Pepper in a partnerships and business development lead, becoming VP of Strategic and Channel Partnerships, then VP of Strategy and Payments, before taking on his current role. Before PepperHQ Adma worked in  payments at Judopay, where he was  Senior Partnerships Manager, and was previously at IBM. Beyond Pepper, Adam is the co-founder of We Are Kusudi, a social venture connecting Kenyan software engineers to global opportunities. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Management from Manchester Metropolitan University.

Tom Thorne brings over 30 years of engineering and architectural experience to his role as CTO, spanning highly regulated financial platforms and real-time broadcast control systems. 

Before joining PepperHQ, Tom co-founded two technology start-ups, FPS Ltd and Tradar where he built their initial software architectures, scaled their international development teams, and guided them both to successful corporate exits. His technical expertise is specialised in cloud enterprise architecture, agile methodologies, and scaling unified codebases. Tom serves as a Non-Executive Director and technical advisor for several European software firms.

Dominic Rosenfeld is the Commercial Director at PepperHQ, responsible for the sales and partnerships operations. Dominic joined the business in 2018 as Sales & Partnerships Manager, based in the United States, where he helped establish PepperHQ’s footprint in the US market. He returned to London to lead the sales team as Head of Sales from 2021, and stepped into the Commercial Director role in 2024.

Before Pepper, Dominic worked at Como, a data-driven customer engagement and loyalty platform later acquired by Global Payments (NYSE: GPN).  He brings with him a wealth of experience in the area of loyalty, guest retention and business growth.

Prior to joining PepperHQ, Tom worked in hospitality tech at iRiS Software Systems in 2014 where he led projects with SME and Enterprise brands  across the luxury hotel industry, including Hyatt, GLH and , Mandarin Oriental.


Tom Marshall-Evans joined PepperHQ in 2017 to build and manage the Company’s customer facing operations,where he runs a team of project managers, support technicians and customer success managers.