Nicolas RiegertPayments entrepreneur and founder of PayXpert
“I started coding at 14 on a Sinclair. Since then I have built, sold and rebuilt companies across four countries, always with technology in the service of real people.”
Observe change. Learn quickly. Build what matters.
Across software, industry, telecommunications, regulated payments and social impact, Nicolas’s career is defined by practical curiosity and constant reinvention.
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Years building
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Companies founded, led or partnered in
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Countries lived & worked
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“I never inherited a company. I built them, sometimes lost them, and always started again.”
Nicolas Riegert
The entrepreneurial journey
Built through transitions.
Eleven defining chapters: from a teenager writing business software to building an international payments company.
An active adolescence
1988-89 US Experience
1993 1st company
European vision
Telecom to payment
A different course
Since 2009
2023 : entering SG Group
Personal cause
Social impact · Since 2024
Beyond business
An active adolescence
01
Technology, industry and entrepreneurship
Nicolas’s entrepreneurial education began long before he created his first company. The son of an entrepreneur, he grew up around RGDH, the industrial hydraulics business his father built after losing his previous job.
He helped prepare invoices, organise postal marketing campaigns and inventory spare parts. At 14, a Sinclair computer introduced him to programming; by 16, he was building software to automate inventory and invoicing for the family company. His education developed simultaneously through computers and the practical realities of an industrial SME. That early start represents more than 40 years of hands-on entrepreneurial and technical experience.
1988-89 US Experience
02
Learning abroad in Kentucky
At 18 and 19, Nicolas spent two summers at the White hydraulic motor plant in Kentucky. What began as a way to improve his English became an immersion in manufacturing, marketing, diagnosis and repair.
Back in France, he translated that knowledge into French marketing materials, employee training and formal workshop procedures. Work on ISO 9004 also revealed both the value and the limits of outside expertise for smaller businesses, an insight that later shaped his European consulting marketplace project.
1993 1st company
03
Creating his first company
In 1993, at the age of 23, Nicolas founded IFS (Informatique Formation Services). He had spent time working unpaid in a computer shop to learn the trade, and a customer who needed two weeks of software training showed him that the real value was not in selling technology, but in helping people use it.
He used a bank loan guaranteed by his mother, originally intended for a car, to launch the company. IFS grew from computer training into professional retraining. Nicolas was later called away for military service, and without his daily presence the company could not survive: it closed on 25 December 1995. The experience taught him an early, lasting lesson in cash discipline and operational proximity.
European vision
04
From the family business to Europe
After IFS closed on 25 December 1995, Nicolas returned to the family business as Administrative and Financial Director. When his father prepared to retire, he chose not to inherit the company, helping sell it at the end of 1999 so both could pursue new ambitions.
He then developed a European marketplace connecting independent consultants with SMEs that needed practical expertise. Hosted in France by the CGPME and developed through an executive programme at ESCP, the project took him to London. The dot-com collapse prevented the original launch, but London opened the next chapter.
Telecom to payment
05
From telecommunications to payments
In London, Nicolas joined an accounting and company-formation firm and became a partner. A major client introduced him to international telecommunications payments and the fast-growing market for premium-rate services.
As broadband replaced dial-up, the model came under threat. Nicolas noticed that US online commerce already relied heavily on cards while European digital services still used telecom billing. He saw not only disruption, but the opportunity to build an early card-payment gateway.
A different course
06
A different course: Buddha Boat
After selling his stake in his London telecom-payment business, Nicolas moved to Barcelona to live aboard Buddha Boat, the 60-foot classic steel yacht he dreamed might one day carry a family around the world.
Sailing took him across the Costa Brava, the Balearics and Corsica, pushed him to learn Spanish from scratch and, most importantly, led him to meet Isabel, his future wife.
The nomadic life eventually gave way to new priorities, but Buddha Boat remained part of the family story. After an extensive restoration combining classic character with modern comfort, she returned to Mediterranean sailing in 2026.
Since 2009
07
Building PayXpert
The return to payments was not originally part of the plan. While Nicolas was living in Spain, his former business partner Pierre Achache contacted him after losing an important banking relationship supporting his online payment activities. What began as an attempt to help solve a practical problem gradually pulled Nicolas back into the industry.
The two entrepreneurs began working together again, initially relying on third-party European payment technologies. The activity grew rapidly and would ultimately become the foundation of PayXpert.
The team acquired UK payment technology and PCI DSS certification, became a regulated payment institution, and expanded Spanish infrastructure after Brexit. PayXpert combined proprietary technology, online and in-store payments, international acquiring and omnichannel solutions. Ownership was shared with long-serving executives who had helped create its value.
2023 : entering SG Group
08
Governance experience within Société Générale
After Société Générale became PayXpert's majority shareholder in 2023, Nicolas stayed on as CEO and took a seat on the Board.
Following Société Générale's acquisition of a majority stake in PayXpert in 2023, Nicolas remained CEO and joined the company's Board alongside senior executives from the Group's French retail banking, payments and regulated financial-services businesses.
The experience exposed him to a governance environment very different from the entrepreneurial organisations he had previously built. Board discussions covered strategy, financial performance, risk, compliance, cybersecurity, regulation and organisational development, within the standards and decision-making framework of a major European banking group.
Over this period, Nicolas combined his perspective as a founder and operator with the governance discipline of a large financial institution. The experience contributed both to his own development as a business leader and to PayXpert's evolution toward stronger governance, controls, risk management and organisational maturity.
Personal cause
09
Making payments accessible
A close friendship with Pierre, who is blind, gave Nicolas deep insight into visual impairment. After temporarily losing his own sight for several months, accessibility became an intensely personal priority.
He promoted independent payment experiences for visually impaired people, advocated with schemes and terminal manufacturers, and supported PayXpert’s accessible physical and online payment experiences based on standards including RGAA and WCAG. For Nicolas, accessibility is not merely compliance: technology should remove barriers, not create them.
Social impact · Since 2024
10
Practical impact in India
Since 2024, Nicolas has supported Pierre Achache on a charitable project in India, initially conceived as an orphanage dedicated to visually impaired children.
Local complexity required a practical first step: financing the reconstruction of a building and helping relaunch an existing orphanage. Their longer-term objective remains support specifically for blind and visually impaired children: proof that meaningful change often begins with what can be done now.
Beyond business
11
A European life shaped by curiosity
Having lived and worked across France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Andorra, Nicolas works across French, English and Spanish environments and has developed a strongly European outlook.
The move to Andorra was above all a personal choice: his parents live in Arcachon and his parents-in-law in Barcelona, and as they grew older, long journeys became harder. At a time marked by the Ebola crisis and the terrorist attacks in Barcelona, safety also mattered: he and his wife wanted to raise their children somewhere secure, healthy and naturally bilingual in French and Spanish. He is a member of Barcelona’s Círculo Ecuestre. Together with his wife, he collects art with a particular interest in painting, as well as antique books.
An active adolescence
01
Technology, industry and entrepreneurship
Nicolas’s entrepreneurial education began long before he created his first company. The son of an entrepreneur, he grew up around RGDH, the industrial hydraulics business his father built after losing his previous job.
He helped prepare invoices, organise postal marketing campaigns and inventory spare parts. At 14, a Sinclair computer introduced him to programming; by 16, he was building software to automate inventory and invoicing for the family company. His education developed simultaneously through computers and the practical realities of an industrial SME. That early start represents more than 40 years of hands-on entrepreneurial and technical experience.
1988-89 US Experience
02
Learning abroad in Kentucky
At 18 and 19, Nicolas spent two summers at the White hydraulic motor plant in Kentucky. What began as a way to improve his English became an immersion in manufacturing, marketing, diagnosis and repair.
Back in France, he translated that knowledge into French marketing materials, employee training and formal workshop procedures. Work on ISO 9004 also revealed both the value and the limits of outside expertise for smaller businesses, an insight that later shaped his European consulting marketplace project.
1993 1st company
03
Creating his first company
In 1993, at the age of 23, Nicolas founded IFS (Informatique Formation Services). He had spent time working unpaid in a computer shop to learn the trade, and a customer who needed two weeks of software training showed him that the real value was not in selling technology, but in helping people use it.
He used a bank loan guaranteed by his mother, originally intended for a car, to launch the company. IFS grew from computer training into professional retraining. Nicolas was later called away for military service, and without his daily presence the company could not survive: it closed on 25 December 1995. The experience taught him an early, lasting lesson in cash discipline and operational proximity.
European vision
04
From the family business to Europe
After IFS closed on 25 December 1995, Nicolas returned to the family business as Administrative and Financial Director. When his father prepared to retire, he chose not to inherit the company, helping sell it at the end of 1999 so both could pursue new ambitions.
He then developed a European marketplace connecting independent consultants with SMEs that needed practical expertise. Hosted in France by the CGPME and developed through an executive programme at ESCP, the project took him to London. The dot-com collapse prevented the original launch, but London opened the next chapter.
Telecom to payment
05
From telecommunications to payments
In London, Nicolas joined an accounting and company-formation firm and became a partner. A major client introduced him to international telecommunications payments and the fast-growing market for premium-rate services.
As broadband replaced dial-up, the model came under threat. Nicolas noticed that US online commerce already relied heavily on cards while European digital services still used telecom billing. He saw not only disruption, but the opportunity to build an early card-payment gateway.
A different course
06
A different course: Buddha Boat
After selling his stake in his London telecom-payment business, Nicolas moved to Barcelona to live aboard Buddha Boat, the 60-foot classic steel yacht he dreamed might one day carry a family around the world.
Sailing took him across the Costa Brava, the Balearics and Corsica, pushed him to learn Spanish from scratch and, most importantly, led him to meet Isabel, his future wife.
The nomadic life eventually gave way to new priorities, but Buddha Boat remained part of the family story. After an extensive restoration combining classic character with modern comfort, she returned to Mediterranean sailing in 2026.
Since 2009
07
Building PayXpert
The return to payments was not originally part of the plan. While Nicolas was living in Spain, his former business partner Pierre Achache contacted him after losing an important banking relationship supporting his online payment activities. What began as an attempt to help solve a practical problem gradually pulled Nicolas back into the industry.
The two entrepreneurs began working together again, initially relying on third-party European payment technologies. The activity grew rapidly and would ultimately become the foundation of PayXpert.
The team acquired UK payment technology and PCI DSS certification, became a regulated payment institution, and expanded Spanish infrastructure after Brexit. PayXpert combined proprietary technology, online and in-store payments, international acquiring and omnichannel solutions. Ownership was shared with long-serving executives who had helped create its value.
2023 : entering SG Group
08
Governance experience within Société Générale
After Société Générale became PayXpert's majority shareholder in 2023, Nicolas stayed on as CEO and took a seat on the Board.
Following Société Générale's acquisition of a majority stake in PayXpert in 2023, Nicolas remained CEO and joined the company's Board alongside senior executives from the Group's French retail banking, payments and regulated financial-services businesses.
The experience exposed him to a governance environment very different from the entrepreneurial organisations he had previously built. Board discussions covered strategy, financial performance, risk, compliance, cybersecurity, regulation and organisational development, within the standards and decision-making framework of a major European banking group.
Over this period, Nicolas combined his perspective as a founder and operator with the governance discipline of a large financial institution. The experience contributed both to his own development as a business leader and to PayXpert's evolution toward stronger governance, controls, risk management and organisational maturity.
Personal cause
09
Making payments accessible
A close friendship with Pierre, who is blind, gave Nicolas deep insight into visual impairment. After temporarily losing his own sight for several months, accessibility became an intensely personal priority.
He promoted independent payment experiences for visually impaired people, advocated with schemes and terminal manufacturers, and supported PayXpert’s accessible physical and online payment experiences based on standards including RGAA and WCAG. For Nicolas, accessibility is not merely compliance: technology should remove barriers, not create them.
Social impact · Since 2024
10
Practical impact in India
Since 2024, Nicolas has supported Pierre Achache on a charitable project in India, initially conceived as an orphanage dedicated to visually impaired children.
Local complexity required a practical first step: financing the reconstruction of a building and helping relaunch an existing orphanage. Their longer-term objective remains support specifically for blind and visually impaired children: proof that meaningful change often begins with what can be done now.
Beyond business
11
A European life shaped by curiosity
Having lived and worked across France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Andorra, Nicolas works across French, English and Spanish environments and has developed a strongly European outlook.
The move to Andorra was above all a personal choice: his parents live in Arcachon and his parents-in-law in Barcelona, and as they grew older, long journeys became harder. At a time marked by the Ebola crisis and the terrorist attacks in Barcelona, safety also mattered: he and his wife wanted to raise their children somewhere secure, healthy and naturally bilingual in French and Spanish. He is a member of Barcelona’s Círculo Ecuestre. Together with his wife, he collects art with a particular interest in painting, as well as antique books.
In the press
A recognised voice in payments
Interviews and opinion pieces on payment innovation, Click to Pay and accessibility.
09/2024Le Figaro Partner
Paiements : la nécessité d’une approche holistique et inclusive
Interview on the need for a holistic and inclusive approach to payments.
Frente a la revolución en los medios de pago, ayudamos a las empresas en su digitalización e internacionalización
Interview on helping companies digitalise and internationalise their payments.
Print edition
A lasting philosophy
“Technology should remove barriers, not create them.”
Entrepreneurship is not the pursuit of one perfect idea. It is the discipline of observing change, learning quickly and rebuilding, combining innovation with execution, resilience and inclusion.
Interests
Art. Sailing.
Europe. Impact.
Start a conversation
Ideas move forward when the right people connect.
For conversations around entrepreneurship, payment innovation, business transformation or accessibility, contact Nicolas directly.
