In his previous position as Vice President of Sales & Account Management for the UK & Ireland, Anant was responsible for MasterCard's leading accounts across both countries.

But in ending his eight-year career at Mastercard, his new role as Head of UK Sales will see him reporting directly to another industry veteran - Andrew Rush, formally from MasterCard but most recently was hired as Global Head of Sales after being Global Director of Product Development at 02 Telefonica.

"I'm joining ERN at a truly revolutionary time for the payments sector," said Patel. "While obviously Mastercard has been a great place to work, the opportunity to be involved in something as innovative as ERN's new global transactional big data payment platform was too good to turn down."

The system - capable of processing 100,000 transactions per second - will be launched next month at the prestigious annual showcase of finance and banking technology innovation, FinovateEurope.

ERN's scalable, reliable and secure big data platform will, for the first time, enable both banks and merchants to perform deep-level analysis of customer behaviour on a micro and macro scale.

The system - which is fully PCI and ISO 27001 compliant - is designed to boost customer loyalty by enabling banks and brands to create value-added products based on the analysis of transactional data.

"The launch of our system will revolutionise the use of big data," said Dan Brassington, CEO and co-founder of ERN. "The 11trn transactions that take place across the country every year represent the richest - yet most under-utilised - source of data."

"It can be used to analyse an individual customer's purchasing behaviour and create loyalty-based offers - with the ability to offer it based on location and time. However, the legacy IT systems used by banks has meant that up until now, this massive amount of data goes to waste without realising its full value."

"The real worth of a transaction isn't in the card fees or the money that changes hands but in the data that transaction generates. This data has the potential to be used to turn a one-off client into a long-term, loyal customer."

Banks can use the data to offer individual customers tailored offers based on their transactional history, through partnerships with merchants - promoting their credit and debit cards to the top of consumers' wallets.

Merchants can use the data to analyse customers' purchasing behaviour and create offers to promote loyalty, letting them target an individual at a specific time or when they're in a particular location.

Consumers will be able to track all of their spending on their credit and debit cards through a smartphone app in real time. ERN's app gives the consumer the ability to budget effectively and export their transactional data, as well as take advantage of loyalty offers from participating merchants.