Colm Lyon is the CEO and Founder of Fire – www.fire.com. Fire provides digital accounts to businesses and personal customers based in the UK and Ireland. Fire accounts are opened online and provide customers with access to a range of payment and data services, along with a carefully crafted interface that is designed to create a compelling customer experience.

A Fire business account is suitable for all (UK and ROI registered) businesses and supports sterling and euro bank transfers, a MasterCard debit card and an API that enables integration from customer’s systems to the data in their Fire account. The personal account also supports sterling and euro bank transfers, a MasterCard debit card with real time notifications, social payments and requests to contacts and other apps

Colm was the founder and CEO of Realex Payments up until the time the business was acquired in March 2015 for €115m by Global Payments. From 2000 to 2015, Colm led Realex Payments to be one of Europe’s largest online payment gateways – processing in excess of €28B euro per annum in online payments for over 12,500 retailers, including some of the world’s leading brands – Vodafone, Aer Lingus, Virgin Atlantic, Paddy Power, Chain Reaction Cycles, AA, 32Red, notonthehighstreet.com to name a few. At the time of the acquisition Realex Payments employed 170 people, had clients in 30 countries and offices in Dublin, London and Paris

Colm is heavily involved in working with the internet community – chairing the Irish Internet Association for several years and founding the Internet Growth Alliance. The latter was a significant force within the internet community and contributed to the highly acclaimed Internet Growth Acceleration Programme (iGAP). He has been acknowledged with numerous awards over the years. Colm is a regular industry speaker on payments, business start-up and strategy.