It’s been a week for big hires and promotions, kicking off with the news that London-headquartered digital payments company Shieldpay has announced two significant leadership appointments as it readies for further growth of its Verify, Hold, and Disburse payments platform. Sophie Condie has been promoted to CEO, while Amanda Howkins has joined the company as CRO.
Condie has over 20 years of experience in finance, banking and payment. As CEO of Shieldpay she is responsible for leading the business through its next growth phase. Shieldpay has raised a total of $41.3m over four funding rounds according to Tracxn, the biggest round of which was a Series A in 2021.
Condie joined the company in 2021, initially as director of operations, before being promoted to chief operating officer in 2022. Her prior experience includes senior roles with Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Corporate Banking and, Form3.
Howkins, meanwhile, will work alongside Condie and the executive team. She joins from Form3 where she was global head of sales & partnerships, before that she spent time in leadership positions at Visa and Lloyds, and held several roles at Barclays and Natwest.
Howkins said: “The legal industry is crying out for smarter, safer derisked payment solutions. That can only happen through true partners who are committed to pursuing best practices and technological innovation. I’m excited to join Sophie and the team to help realise this next phase of growth.”
This news follows the ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification of Shieldpay at the end of 2024.
Elsewhere, UK managed IT services provider SCC has appointed Anthony Barrett as business development account executive.
Operating out of 65+ locations in the UK, France, Romania, Spain and Vietnam, SCC delivers IT solutions in partnership with global technology vendors.
Barrett is a well-known figure in the legal tech market and has held account executive and business development roles at many UK tech vendors over the past two decades including nQueue Billback, LexisNexis InterAction, Enable Business Solutions, Novaplex, Infotrack and nQ Zebraworks.
He told Legal IT Insider: “SCC has such a breadth of services and depth of knowledge in it services, it’s about marrying that with my personal network of legal connections, and that’s the challenge I’m looking forward to.”
SCC provides IT solutions for a range of verticals including banking, government, education, healthcare, and legal, which is a comparatively newer offering. The consultancy has a handful of medium-to-large law firm clients including Browne Jacobson and Lewis Silkin.
Barrett said: “We work with 800 vendor solutions including Microsoft, Dell and a lot of other vendors, and I’m looking forward to to facilitating the introduction of our services into the legal sector.”
Moving to North America, and Litera has appointed Ed Empamano as global head of business development and alliances, based in Chicago. Empamano was briefly a senior vice president at K2 Services and before that was chief information officer of US law firm Dykema in Chicago. He has held director-level roles at Perkins Coie, Sidley Austin and Seyfarth Shaw.
Empamano will lead strategic partnerships, with a mission to strengthen Litera’s global presence.
Litera’s chief revenue officer Sean Munafo, said: “Ed will drive our expansion in both existing and new markets by deeply understanding our customers’ evolving needs, shape the development of tailored solutions based on direct feedback from legal professionals, and ensure Litera’s innovations continue to enhance efficiency and deliver measurable value to law firms and legal departments worldwide.”
In other US movers and shakers news out this week, US contract management provider Pramata has appointed Garrett Derman as vice president of strategic solutions and alliances. Derman was previously director of success at Salesforce and before Salesforce was strategic engagement manager at IBM.
In his new role, Derman will be focused on building a scalable, structured framework for the Pramata Partnership Program. Launched in 2023, the program encourages consulting firms and technology companies to embed Pramata’s contract AI technology as a core foundation of their value added services.
Derman said: “We’re deeply committed to our partner ecosystem, recognizing that collaborative innovation drives exceptional outcomes. The unique opportunities generated by our differentiated GenAI approach is already producing quantifiable results across all stakeholders.”
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