Innovative, Glasgow-based credit management software firm, Know-it, has today announced the appointment of Gordon Merrylees, as its Chief Commercial Officer.
As the former Managing Director of Entrepreneurship for NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank, Gordon’s leadership and wealth of customer experience supporting SMEs, will help Know-it’s growth strategy and help fulfill its ambition and potential to be one of the UK’s most innovative start-ups.
Know-it, is a cloud-based credit management platform which streamlines the credit control process, so users can credit check, monitor, chase payments and collect overdue, unpaid invoices all from one place.
Merrylees, a finance and banking professional with almost 36 years’ experience joins the business ahead of the launch of its cloud-based platform in the coming weeks. As Managing Director of Entrepreneurship at NatWest, Merrylees worked closely with businesses ranging from start up, early-stage SMEs, to high growth, established businesses looking to scale, and provided the tailored support to help them to start, scale and succeed.
Alongside his role at NatWest, Gordon played a pivotal role leading the work carried out by The SME Taskforce partnering with a range of key organisations including the Federation of Small Business, British Chamber of Commerce, Scale Up Institute, Innovate UK and McKinsey Consultancy to deliver The Springboard to Recovery report, providing a clearly defined collaborative, partnership led approach of impactful commitments to enable more small and medium-sized businesses to restart, rebuild and renew post pandemic.
At Know-it, Merrylees will work directly with the senior leadership team and harness his knowledge, expertise, supply chain and UK ecosystem network to support the launch of the credit management platform, where business support and partnership collaboration is at the core of its mission.
Gordon Merrylees commented: “What attracted me to join the Know-it was the opportunity to thrive in an environment that is delivering innovative, customer led solutions to support SME’s and play my part in an exciting entrepreneurial team with such a strong growth mindset instilled across the team by its passionate CEO and Founder, Lynne Darcey Quigley.
I have a passion for innovation and in particular scouting and sourcing those new innovative solutions at an early stage and I’ve worked alongside many successful SMEs for years at NatWest, but it was Know-it which caught my eye immediately and I just knew I wanted to be a part of this exciting, UK fintech start-up’s growth journey.
“The issue of late payments, poor cash flow and inefficient credit control process can prove costly to a business, particularly on the back of a global pandemic as many SMEs are emerging with high levels of debt, low levels of cash and reduced confidence as they look to make their way in a trading environment that remains unpredictable and the Know-it innovative SaaS solution will set out to remove all of these pain points for businesses.”
Lynne Darcey Quigley, Founder & CEO of Know-it, added: “The appointment of an industry titan of Gordon’s calibre is a key acquisition for us and underpins our entire business strategy for the future. We hope his network and experience in working closely with Scottish businesses will help us connect with organisations who need our services the most.
“We have been working on the Know-it platform for almost two years. It’s been designed to ensure users are in a position to mitigate credit risk and the non-payment of goods and services whilst monitoring these businesses 24/7. But it is also important to not focus solely on the platform, but our personnel too and the opportunities they can bring into the business - Gordon’s experience will play a vital role in helping Know-it grow as an organisation,” she concluded.