Desucla is a UK headquartered company that was founded by tax and technology entrepreneurs who wanted to disrupt the antiquated world of fiscal representation and cross-border VAT payments.
In a changing world with BREXIT and online marketplaces stepping up VAT compliance our founders felt the number of companies requiring fiscal representation was likely to increase. The fiscal rep industry however was not set-up to scale or work with potentially millions of smaller online sellers. There was no clear global player and a disparate network of small local firms often presented significant cost and hurdles to representation.
Desucla was founded with the mission to change all this and enable quick, cost-effective global representation for everyone.
We built proprietary technology and risk management systems to standardize fiscal representation across 35 key markets, minimizing the need for bank guarantees or bank deposits and leveraging our online platform to enable self-service and keep costs to a minimum. In addition, we built an integrated VAT payment portal to save our clients time and money when making their VAT payments.
We operate differently to other fiscal reps in that we are a technology company first with expert tax & payment knowledge that we leverage to our clients’ advantage. Our core business is simply to represent you, the merchant, and help you pay your VAT to the tax authorities if required.
We work with individual merchants and multi-national group companies handling their own compliance as well as with advisers, compliance providers and online markets.
Our aim is to help all our clients and partners find a simple solution which meets their needs at a competitive price.
Leadership
Team
Richard Baxter
Director, UK
Richard Baxter is a founder and director of Desucla. Richard was formerly head of indirect tax at Arthur Andersen UK and head of indirect tax technology at Deloitte. Richard has served in interim roles as head of VAT of Lehman Bros in Ch11 and at P&G Pharma. In 2014 Richard led a project for the European Commission examining the performance of the Task Force for Greece. The recommendations of this report led to the creation of the Structural Support Reform Service within the EU to ensure all member states have appropriate infrastructure to support the complexity of modern tax management. Richard created Desucla after an approach asking him to try to create a solution to address the challenge of applying an antiquated fiscal representation model to large volumes of non-resident merchants trading on Europe’s online markets. Richard is a Chartered Tax Adviser.
Ryan Bishop
CTO, UK
Ryan is our UK based Chief Technology Officer. He is responsible for all technology across Desucla. Ryan is a Chartered IT Professional (specialisation in Software Development) with 23 years of IT experience across a wide range of industries (e.g. FMCG, Manufacturing, Finance, Government) . He is an experienced enterprise architect & technical project manager having driven large scale application development teams across functional, geographical, and organisational boundaries.
Having started his career as a management consultant for PwC, during the dot com boom he joined an integration technology company (CrossWorlds), supporting with pre-sales and technical consultancy. CrossWorlds was bought by IBM to become WebSphere, within the IBM Scandic region (based in Denmark) Ryan helped setup the WebSphere professional services business. Ryan has lived in various places across Europe and is fluent in Danish.
Ian Dyke
COO, UK
Ian is the COO of Desucla and is based in London. Ian has 25+ years experience as an investor and operator across a wide range of sectors and situations.
Ian’s recent experience includes being appointed as co-Managing Director of Maple Knoll Capital, a real estate investment business, and co-founder / CFO of European Commercial REIT, a Canadian listed real estate platform. He has previously worked as an Investment Partner at Electra Partners, and Director of Terra Firma Capital Partners, both private equity investors.
During his career, Ian has acted as principal in transactions with a value over €10.0 billion and specialises in creating value through identifying opportunities for businesses to scale revenues, and operate with ever improving efficiency.
Stephen Gregson
Finance Director, UK
Stephen is an ACA financial professional with over 20 years of experience in the financial services sector. Stephen trained and qualified with Mazars LLP London in audit before taking on finance roles at Man Group, Investec and London Stock Exchange. Most recently he gained experience in the FinTech sector working for 6 years as Finance Director at WorldFirst where he supported their acquisition by ANT Group (Alibaba).
Robbert Hoogeveen
Director, Netherlands
Robbert is a director in Desucla NL BV and is based in Rotterdam. Robbert spent 12 years with the Dutch tax authority as tax auditor before working at Shell Netherlands where he spent 12 years in various roles, including Head of Indirect tax Netherlands and Global Design Architect Indirect tax. His work at Shell was focused on indirect tax automation, customs processes and energy trading. In addition to being a director of Desucla, Robbert works with a number of the Big 4 accounting firms and software companies in the NL and elsewhere in Europe where he provides support to them on tax systems and automation. Robbert is a Dutch qualified accountant.
Jonathan Quin
Advisor, UK
Jonathan co-founded World First in 2004, with the goal of making it faster, easier, safer and cheaper to make international payments. The business grew to 700 people and $15 billion of turnover. It was in the top 100 fastest growing companies in the UK five times, was twice awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, and Jonathan was a finalist for EY Entrepreneur of the Year. He sold World First to Alipay in 2019. Before setting up World First, he worked for Citibank and RBS Financial Markets. He now runs Q Capital, which has 15 start-up and early-stage investments in UK businesses. He is also a trustee of the Q Charitable Trust, which is a grant-giving body that supports charities in the UK and globally.
Jonathan grew up in Scotland and has a Law and Accountancy degree from Edinburgh University. He lives in South London with his wife and two daughters, but spends as much time as possible on the Isle of Mull. His interests include art, architecture, design, music, cars, food, and business.