Product Manager

The Layer wins Best Software Vendor - Workflow at the Channel National Awards 2026. A second Channel National Award in two years, this time for the workflow its partners run their businesses on. The Layer is delighted to have won Best Software Vendor - Workflow at the Channel National Awards 2026, held last week at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge in London. It follows Best Software Application of the Year at last year's awards, which makes this its second win at the event in two years. It was a strong shortlist. DocuWare, Kaseya, PacketFront, Red Cactus, Smarsh and Tollring are all serious businesses, and The Layer were pleased to be in the room with them. Well done to every finalist, and thanks to Sue Perkins for hosting and to the Channel National Awards team and Giacom for a brilliant evening. Why workflow matters. Workflow is the part of the job its partners least want to think about: orders, provisioning, billing and the handoffs between them. When it works, nobody notices. When it doesn't, customers wait, invoices go out wrong and teams spend their day re-keying data from one system into another. That is the problem The Layer was built to solve for telecoms and MSP providers: one system from prospect to cash. What The Layer has shipped this year. Most of its development over the past year has gone into automation and practical AI that partners are already using in production: * Automation Builder: a visual, no-code builder that takes repetitive work off teams' hands. Windsor Telecom connected its credit-control process to The Layer with it, with a full audit trail. * Self-Heal: its AI engineering system that investigates, fixes and tests product improvements, with every change reviewed by its engineers before it ships. Fixes that used to take days now take minutes. * MCP server: lets partners connect AI assistants such as Claude and Copilot securely to their own Layer data and ask questions of it in plain English. Alongside those, The Layer has released Report Builder, AI case categorisation, a new user interface and deeper integrations with Giacom, Abillity, GoCardless, Stripe, HubSpot and Microsoft Teams. Built with its partners. Its roadmap is shaped by the businesses that use The Layer every day. Over 200 partner-requested improvements shipped this year on weekly releases, and every implementation in the period went live. "With five acquisitions over the last five years, we would've had no chance of doing the acquisitions, and becoming the seamless UK-wide organisation that we are now, if it hadn't been for The Layer." Pete Tomlinson, CEO, Windsor Telecom Thank you. It was great to see so many of its customers and partners on the night. Thank you for trusting The Layer with the work that keeps your businesses running, and thanks to the whole Layer team, who build and support it every day. If you'd like to see what The Layer could do for your business, get in touch. Posted. September 28, 2026 Cookie consent This website uses cookies that help the website to function and also to track how you interact with its website. But for The Layer to provide the best user experience, enable the specific cookies from Settings, and click on Accept.

GoCardless Processes the First Agentic Account-to-Account Payment in the UK. * Payments * 22.09.2026 10:19 am Bank payment company GoCardless has processed the first agentic account-to-account transaction in the UK, an AI-driven donation on its website for Trussell, the anti-poverty charity and community of food banks. The pioneering transaction was completed end-to-end through a conversation with an AI agent, bringing simplicity and ease to the giving process whilst responding to market demand for the payer to stay in complete control. The entire interaction lives within an AI chat: donors can find out more about Trussell's work, then choose how much they'd like to give from a menu of options. Each donation amount - £5, £10, or £15 per month - comes with a description of how the funds will be used. Once the supporter selects their option, the AI agent prompts them to enter their bank details to set up a Direct Debit mandate on their behalf. GoCardless developed and launched this agentic payment process within the FCA's AI Live Testing programme - a scheme to support safe and responsible AI deployment - which the fintech was selected to join earlier this year. The UK government has identified agentic payments as a high priority and practical proxy for scaling AI safely in other emerging financial services use cases, whilst the National Payments Vision calls for account-to-account payments to become a genuine alternative to cards. From a global perspective, Morgan Stanley estimates AI agents could handle up to $385 billion of US e-commerce spending by 2030. Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO of GoCardless, said: "We're extremely proud to have processed the UK's first live agentic bank payment, built under FCA supervision and for a very good cause. The checkout flow is rooted in payer research: 64% of UK consumers are open to AI managing their recurring payments, provided they keep control over limits or final approval. Unlike cards, Direct Debit and Recurring Pay by Bank are specifically built for this." "We've long argued that account-to-account payments are the natural foundation for agentic commerce, and this groundbreaking transaction turns that core belief into tangible proof." Christianne McKenzie, Head of Individual Giving at Trussell, said: "Every recurring donation helps us reach more people in need. If agentic payments make it simpler for someone to commit to giving, that's a genuine win for everyone as we work to end hunger together. What struck us most was how natural the whole process felt; the giving process is a conversation, not just a form to fill out. That's exactly the kind of experience we want for our donors."