Significant change lies ahead for EML Payments, following an annual general meeting on Friday where the chair was voted off the board and the new chief executive presented the results of a strategic review of the trouble-plagued business. Former chair Peter Martin paid the price for the company’s failure to effectively address compliance issues in its European and UK businesses, poor financial performance and a collapse in the share price over the past 18 months. Just over half (50.49 per cent) of shareholders voted against his re-election. Now it is up to the new chair David Liddy and CEO Emma Shand, who was appointed in July, to turn things around. EML has been subject to regulatory intervention by the Central Bank of Ireland since May last year over the compliance failings of its Irish subsidiary PFS Card Services. The CBI was concerned about the elevated risk of money laundering and terrorism financing within the business, as well as the poor quality of its risk management framework and governance. Earlier this month the CBI notified the company that it will continue with its regulatory intervention, which includes the imposition of a limit to growth in payment volumes, until the end of next year. In the meantime, the UK Financial Conduct Authority has called for improvements in risk management and compliance in the company’s UK business. Costs involved in the remediation programs plus contingency fees related to a shareholder class action that was launched last year contributed to the company reporting a loss of A$4.8 million for the year to June. This follows a loss of $28.7 million in the previous year. Shand launched a strategic review of the business when she started at EML and on Friday she gave a high level rundown of the outcomes. She said the company’s problems go back to a period of rapid growth between 2015 and 2021, when it made seven acquisitions. The acquired businesses were left to operate largely on their own, “missing an opportunity to integrate, extract synergies and align culturally.” Shand said: “Unintegrated acquisitions bring with it fragmented technology and processes, many of which are manual. Data is also fragmented, impacting operational efficiency. “Today we start a three-year transformation to focus the business for responsible growth.” The company will “elevate” its European and UK remediation work, automate more of its business processes (such as customer onboarding), consolidate business units, modernise core technology and create a single source of data. She said the company, which does a lot of business selling prepaid and reloadable payments cards, also needed to be ready to operate in a market where open banking, digital wallets and embedded payments will change the landscape. It will narrow its focus to four market segments: financial services with embedded payments; human capital management, with a focus on payment and rewards; retail, with an extension beyond gift cards; and government payments, where it sees a drive to replace cash and paper-based payments with digital alternatives.