The people behindthe ME and the WE.

Charles

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Charles works in the space where artificial intelligence stops being a demonstration and starts being infrastructure. The founding conviction is simple and difficult: every meaningful advancement in AI should end up in service of ordinary human life rather than adjacent to it — and somebody has to do the unglamorous integration work that makes that true.

That work is hands-on. Charles builds in the AI layer directly — the routing, the agents, the automations — and owns the gateway integrations that connect Apex to the systems businesses already run on: payment rails, communication platforms, scheduling, records, the software a company cannot simply abandon. An integration is where an AI product either becomes part of someone's day or quietly stops being used, and that seam is where Charles spends the time.

From that foundation come the three things the company is actually made of: product, shaped by what the integrations reveal about how people really work; operations, built so the promise survives contact with volume; and partnerships — Maverick Payments, Lead Maker, DigiSphere and the channel beyond them — assembled so Apex reaches markets it could never reach alone.

The standard applied to all of it never changes: did this give somebody back time they can spend as a person rather than as an operator of software? The mission — focus on the ME so we can all be a better collective WE — originates here, and it functions as an engineering constraint rather than a wall poster. It has killed more internal ideas than any competitor ever has.

• AI development and the gateway integration layer
• Product creation across Apex Intelligence, Apex Ignite and AI Pay
• Operations built to survive real volume
• Partnerships and the white-label channel

Sena Yaptangco

Chief Innovation Officer & Chief Brand Officer

Sena is the vision of this company — not in the ceremonial sense that word usually carries, but in the literal one. She saw what Apex should be before it existed, and every version of it since has been measured against that picture. The brand was born from her, and it still runs on her heartbeat.

Her work begins where most companies stop: with what this should mean to a person. She takes technology that is genuinely difficult and designs its application to the world people actually live in today — the small business owner who has no technical team, the operator between phone calls, the person who was told AI was for someone else. Then she pushes the same design further out, toward the version of that life five and ten years from now, so what we build does not need rebuilding when the world arrives.

She holds two roles most companies keep in separate buildings, and that is deliberate. As CIO she owns innovation itself — what gets invented, in what order, and against which human problem. She sets the direction the technology organisation then builds toward, so advancement is aimed at something rather than pursued for its own sake.

As CBO her primary focus is the brand's birth, its vision and its identity: what Apex is, how it speaks, and what it will never claim. Here the voice specification is a technical document rather than a mood board — defined vocabulary, claim discipline, and the rule that we do not assert what we cannot show. Innovation and identity answer to the same person, so what we invent and what we promise can never quietly drift apart.

She is the inspiration and the core heartbeat of the brand, the product, the company and its ethos. The parts of Apex that feel considered rather than assembled — the restraint, the refusal to overclaim, the insistence that a person stays in the loop — are hers.

• Brand birth, vision and identity — the primary focus of the role
• Design and its application to today's world, built toward the future
• Innovation direction: what gets invented, and against which human problem
• The ethos: voice, claim discipline and human-in-the-loop as principle

John David

Chief Technology Officer

John David is fresh with AI — working at the edge of what the technology can currently do rather than at the edge of what it could do three years ago. In a field where the frontier moves every few weeks, that currency is not a nice-to-have; it is the difference between building on what exists and building on what people remember existing.

His specialism is the interworkings — how the pieces connect. Not any single model or framework, but the seams between them: how routing decisions cascade, where a system loses time it did not need to lose, which integration is quietly costing three steps that could be zero. Understanding a stack as a whole rather than as parts is a rarer skill than deep knowledge of any one part, and it is where the compounding gains live.

That translates directly into company efficiency. Every internal process that runs faster, every workflow that stops needing a person to shepherd it, every layer of the platform that does more with fewer calls — this is the work that makes a company of our size operate like a much larger one, and makes what we charge sustainable at the rates we charge it.

He owns the foundation the entire company stands on: the multi-model routing layer, the approval gate, the provenance record, and the local-first deployments for environments where data cannot leave the building. Every platform — Rio, AutoScope, Writewell, SnowyButterfly, Phantom, Vantage Report — inherits from that core, which is why a decision made once reaches six products the same day.

• Core infrastructure and the multi-model routing layer
• Technology interworkings — the seams between systems
• Company-wide efficiency and operating leverage
• Governance: approval gates, provenance, local-first deployment

Bao Zheng

Chief Financial Officer

Bao is not a traditional CFO, and that is the point. The conventional version of this role protects the balance sheet by saying no. Bao's version protects it by making the economics fundamentally better — and at a company whose product is technology, that means being fluent in the technology itself.

The focus is progressive and specific: AI and technology solutions applied to our merchant services platform. Payment economics are made of thousands of small, unexamined decisions — routing, card mix, retries, fee structures, reconciliation — and each one is a place where intelligence applied properly returns real money to the merchant rather than to an intermediary.

What that produces for a customer is unlimited potential in savings: not a one-time negotiated rate that decays over three years, but an economic layer that keeps finding efficiency as volume grows and as the technology improves. The savings compound because the system keeps looking.

And it produces the second thing this role is aimed at — continuous ease of exchange. Transaction simplicity and a frictionless experience are financial outcomes as much as design ones: every failed authorisation, every unexplained fee, every reconciliation that needs a human is friction with a price attached. Removing it is CFO work here.

• Financial leadership across all three businesses
• AI and technology applied to merchant services economics
• Compounding savings for customers, not one-time rate cuts
• Transaction simplicity and frictionless exchange

Jarrod Tennell

Executive Equity Partner · Go-to-Market & Growth

Jarrod came up through the full arc of a commercial organisation — sales first, then operations, then go-to-market — and that sequence matters. He has sold the thing, then had to deliver it, then had to build the machine that does both repeatedly. It is a rare order to learn in, and it produces someone who will not promise a market something the operation cannot honour.

The product's introduction into the world is Jarrod's focus. The plan and the runway: how a platform reaches its first real users, what it costs to get there, in what sequence, and how long the company has to make it work. Every launch at Apex runs through that plan.

His primary focus is the connection itself — our ability to put this technology in front of the market it was built for. Not the widest possible audience, but the intended one: the operators, owners and teams for whom the mission of elevating humanity through communication and convenience is not an abstraction but a Tuesday. Getting the right technology to the right people is a discipline, and it is his.

He leads the growth department, which at Apex means owning the whole path from first awareness to a customer who stays — not a lead-generation function bolted onto a product.

• Product introduction to market: the plan and the runway
• Go-to-market strategy across all three businesses
• Connecting the technology to its intended market
• Leads the growth department end to end

Ashley Chandler

Executive Equity Partner · Growth & Operations

Ashley leads alongside Jarrod in growth, and carries operations with it — a pairing that only works because of a rare ability to hold two things at once: the relationship on the outside and the machinery on the inside.

That ability shows up first in partner relations. Maverick Payments, Lead Maker, DigiSphere and every channel relationship after them are not contracts to be administered; they are working partnerships that need someone who understands what each side actually needs to succeed. Ashley is that person.

It shows up second in interdepartmental work — the least visible and most decisive job in any company. Product, growth, operations and support each move at their own speed and each believe they are the constraint. Ashley corrals them into one motion, so what gets sold is what gets built and what gets built is what gets supported.

Customer service reports into that same instinct. The standard is exacting and simple: everyone joining the Apex movement should feel every aspect of the experience we designed — not a version of it degraded by a handoff, a queue, or a department that did not know what another had promised.

And Ashley protects the brand's integrity in the place it is most easily lost — not in the marketing, but in the hundredth interaction, on an ordinary day, when nobody senior is watching. The promise on this website is only true if it survives that moment. Making sure it does is the job.

• Growth leadership alongside Jarrod, and operations
• Partner relations across every channel relationship
• Interdepartmental alignment — product, growth, support as one motion
• Customer experience and protection of brand integrity

Mike Hawes

Product Performance Manager

Mike keeps his finger on the pulse of everything the company puts out. Not whether a product shipped — whether it is still delivering on the purpose it was built for, this week, under real load, for the people relying on it.

It is the function most companies discover they needed only after something has been quietly broken for a month. Output that degrades slowly does not announce itself: a workflow that used to run clean starts needing corrections, a model change shifts quality by a few percent, an integration begins timing out on the largest accounts. Nobody files a ticket. They just stop trusting it.

Mike is the wheel. Product performance is watched continuously so that release velocity never comes at the cost of what is already in customers' hands — and so the promise the rest of the company is making stays true after the launch week is over.

• Continuous performance monitoring across every platform
• Output quality: is the product still doing its intended job
• Issue detection before customers feel it
• Release integrity as the product line keeps expanding

Sarah Clayton

Head of Client Success & Delivery

Sarah leads the 25-person technical team and owns the two things a client actually experiences: client success and every deliverable that leaves this company. Whatever was promised in a working session, whatever was scoped in a pilot — Sarah is accountable for it arriving, on time and at standard.

The role sits at the intersection of the other three by design. Close to Jarrod, so what goes to market is what the team can genuinely deliver. Close to Ashley, so the experience holds through onboarding, support and every interdepartmental handoff. Close to Mike, so a performance signal becomes a fix in a client's environment rather than a note in a dashboard.

That intersection is where most companies leak. A promise made in sales, a product that drifts, a support queue that does not know what was agreed — each handoff is a place the brand quietly stops being true. Holding those seams together is the job, and it is why delivery reports to one accountable person here instead of being distributed until nobody owns it.

The standard applied to all of it is the mission itself: focus on the ME, at all times. Not the account, not the segment, not the aggregate satisfaction score — the individual person on the other end of this deliverable, and whether their week is genuinely better for it.

• Leads the 25-person technical team
• Client success and accountability for every deliverable
• Works closely with Jarrod, Ashley and Mike across every handoff
• Protects the Apex brand where it is actually tested — in delivery

Fred Goldie

Outbound Reach & Client Coordination

Fred leads outbound reach and client coordination — the first contact most people have with Apex, and the calendar that contact runs on.

Appointments are set in an organised fashion, and the word is doing real work there. A schedule that is merely full is a schedule that shortchanges somebody: back-to-back calls with no preparation between them, a rushed first conversation, a follow-up that lands two weeks late. Fred builds the calendar so that every person gets the adequate attention they deserve — which sometimes means fewer conversations in a day, deliberately.

Company outreach sits in the same hands. Working alongside Ashley and Jarrod, Fred keeps a continuous flow of conversations moving toward the people who either need what Apex does or already share where it is going — so growth never depends on a burst of activity followed by a quiet quarter.

It is the least ceremonial job on this page and one of the most consequential. Every relationship the company has started with a well-run first conversation, and somebody had to make sure it was well-run.

• Outbound reach and company outreach
• Client coordination and appointment setting
• Adequate attention for every person, by design
• Continuous customer flow alongside Ashley and Jarrod

Rosie

Customer Communications Coordinator

Rosie holds the communication layer of the company together — every message that moves between departments, and every message that reaches a customer.

The combination that makes this work is unusual: deep practical experience in how communication actually breaks down inside a growing company, paired with essentially complete command of the AI the company runs on. Knowing what needs to be said is one skill. Knowing exactly which system, which routing path and which automation should carry it is another, and very few people hold both.

Internally that means interdepartmental communication that does not drop. What sales committed reaches delivery. What performance monitoring catches reaches the people who can act on it. What a customer said in week one is still known in week nine. The seams between Jarrod, Ashley, Mike and Sarah are exactly where messages historically go missing, and Rosie is why they do not.

Externally it means every customer communication lands — accurate, in the company's voice, and on time. Not a high average with occasional failures, but a success rate held at the top of its range at all times, because in communication the exceptions are the entire reputation.

• Interdepartmental communication across every function
• External and customer communication delivery
• Deep AI system knowledge applied to how messages move
• Success rate held at all times, not on average

Jan Berlage

Outside Counsel

A company intending to change something at scale has to be built to survive its own success. Jan Berlage is the reason ours is.

The work is foundational rather than reactive: correct registrations, so the entity, the DBAs and the platforms stand on ground that holds as we expand; protected trade secrets, so the routing architecture, the models and the methods that make Apex what it is remain ours; and aligned partnerships, so every agreement with Maverick Payments, Lead Maker, DigiSphere and the channel beyond them serves both sides for years rather than looking clever on signing day.

That foundation is what makes national reach possible now and global reach possible soon. Moving quickly across jurisdictions is only survivable if the legal structure was built for it in advance — otherwise speed becomes the thing that eventually stops you.

It is unglamorous, preventative work, and it is why we can move at a fast and ever-growing pace without gambling the company to do it.

• Corporate registrations across entities and platforms
• Trade secret and intellectual property protection
• Partnership and channel agreement alignment
• National footing today, global structure next