Nayax is best known for the yellow card readers on vending machines. Its UK general manager argues the same payment principles that made vending work are now being tested on EV chargers, car parks and kiosks, where the transactions are larger and the expectations higher.
Lynda Clarke has been general manager UK at Nayax since August 2025, having previously held senior roles at Barclaycard, Elavon and Network International, and served as chief operating officer at Tribe Payments. Nayax supplies cashless payments and management tools for unattended and self-service operations, and says it now supports more than 100,000 customers globally across over 1.5 million connected devices.
The company sits in a part of the market that has changed shape quickly. Unattended payments were built for low-value, low-friction purchases, a bag of crisps or a coffee. The same infrastructure is now being asked to handle electric vehicle charging, parking and automated retail, where a single transaction can run to tens of pounds and the customer has less patience for a failure. We asked her about that shift, about her career, and about what still frustrates her.
Tell us more about your company and its purpose.
In a nutshell, we help businesses take payments and manage self-service operations more effectively.
We’re probably best known for the yellow card readers you’ll see on vending machines across the UK, but today we’re much broader than that. We provide cashless payments, management tools, loyalty capabilities and operational insights that help businesses run everything from vending machines and coffee services through to EV chargers, parking, kiosks and laundromats.
What really interests me is how quickly self-service is evolving. Consumers increasingly expect to be able to access products and services whenever it suits them, whether that’s buying a coffee, charging an electric vehicle or paying for parking. Businesses want to meet those expectations while keeping operations efficient, and that’s where Nayax comes in.
What are some of your recent achievements you would like to highlight?
A big development for Nayax this year has been the evolution of our unattended platform with the launch of VPOS Media 4, our PIN-capable point of sale terminal, across countries like Japan and the UK.
The launch really reflects how much the unattended market is changing. Historically, many self-service transactions were relatively low value, but we’re now seeing growth in areas such as EV charging, parking, kiosks and automated retail, where transaction values are often much higher and customer expectations are evolving.
VPOS Media 4 has been designed with that shift in mind. It supports both contactless and PIN payments while giving operators access to the wider management, engagement and operational tools that sit behind the transaction itself.
How have your previous roles influenced your career?
Every role has taught me something different. Barclaycard gave me my grounding; it’s where I first understood that payments isn’t just a product, it’s an infrastructure that businesses depend on. Elavon and Network International broadened that, exposing me to the complexity of operating across markets and at serious scale in senior leadership roles.
But it was at Tribe Payments where my thinking about leadership really matured. Scaling a business during a period of rapid growth forces you to make hard choices about where to focus. I learned that culture isn’t something you build once, it’s something you actively maintain every day, especially when things are moving fast.
Each of those experiences shaped how I think about building teams, setting direction, and what it actually means to lead rather than just manage. Coming into Nayax, I drew on all of it: the commercial rigour, the operational discipline, and the belief that the quality of the people around you determines almost everything.
What is the best thing about working in the fintech industry?
The pace of it. Fintech never stands still, and for someone who gets easily bored, that’s a gift. Every few years the landscape shifts in a way that forces you to think differently, whether that’s the move to contactless, the rise of open banking, or now the explosion of self-service commerce.
What I love most is that payments touch almost every part of daily life, yet most people never think about it. The infrastructure behind a tap of a card on a vending machine or an EV charger involves more complexity than most people would imagine, and there’s something genuinely satisfying about making that invisible. When it works well, nobody notices, and that’s exactly the point.
What frustrates you most about the fintech industry?
The same thing that has always frustrated me about traditionally male-dominated industries: the barriers that still exist for women. According to the latest data from The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, women still only hold 19 per cent of top leadership positions in major financial institutions and this continues to impact women across industries and seniority levels.
I’ve spent most of my career in fintech, and I have seen that while some progress has been made, there’s a lot that we can, and should, do to work towards gender equality. It’s clear to me that progress doesn’t come from gatekeeping, it comes from being generous with your knowledge and expertise. When we share our time, mentor others, and advocate for women, we all benefit.
Giving back has always been part of how I lead. Whether that’s mentoring underrepresented talent, challenging outdated workplace norms, or using my platform to open doors, I believe that leadership comes with a responsibility to create opportunity, not just for those who look or think like us, but especially for those who don’t.
What is the best mistake you have ever made?
Saying yes to a role I wasn’t sure I was ready for. Early in my career I was offered a position that felt like a significant stretch, the kind where your first instinct is to wonder whether they’ve got the right person. I nearly talked myself out of it. I took it, and it turned out to be one of the most formative experiences of my career, precisely because it was hard.
The mistake wasn’t taking the role, the near-mistake was almost not taking it. I’ve thought about that a lot since, particularly when I see talented women hesitate in front of opportunities because they don’t feel a hundred per cent ready. Nobody ever is. Readiness is mostly something you feel in retrospect.
What has the future got in store for your company?
One of our biggest areas of focus is supporting the continued growth of self-service commerce, particularly in sectors such as EV charging.
Rising EV adoption means drivers want to charge in the places they already visit every day, hotels, campsites, car parks, retail destinations. The numbers back this up: in the EU, battery-electric cars made up 19.4 per cent of new car registrations in Q1 2026, up from 15.2 per cent a year earlier. And here in the UK, March 2026 saw our strongest-ever month for
battery-electric car registrations.
In the UK, we have around 73,000 public charge points today, with at least 300,000 needed by 2030 to meet rising demand. The speed of this growth will come with real pressure, as EV chargers need to be able to handle growing transaction volumes while meeting rising consumer payment expectations.
What’s interesting is that the same payment principles that allowed vending to scale apply directly here. Embedding EMV and contactless card payments into chargers recreates that low-touch, app-free experience that made modern vending viable. With drivers able to tap and charge with no downloads or account creation, payments will not become the bottleneck.
What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?
I believe the shift from self-service being a convenience to an expectation will happen remarkably quickly. Supermarket checkouts, click-and-collect lockers, unattended coffee kiosks and micro-markets are now all expected to happen without staff present and this is only going to increase over the next few years.
It’s vital that our industry recognises this shift and prepares for unattended commerce to expand into environments we haven’t fully imagined yet. For industries including EV charging, hospitality, automated services, parking and forecourts, operators need reliable payments, better operational visibility and ways to create stronger customer experiences, often across large, distributed estates.
Personally, I’m also interested in how we make the payment point work harder for operators. Historically, it existed simply to complete a transaction. Increasingly, it can become a point of engagement, helping operators communicate with customers, run promotions, support loyalty programmes and better understand consumer behaviour.
The post In Profile: Lynda Clarke on Why the Payment Point Should Work Harder appeared first on The Fintech Times.
