Jlinked wasn't dreamed up in a strategy meeting. It came from watching one family's dinner-table conversations turn into a national statistic – and deciding to do something about it.
Oliver is 18. He did well at school, came through his A-Levels, and was lucky enough to land a job at John Lewis. Then he looked around at his A-Level classmates – and around six in ten of them still hadn't found work. Not because they weren't capable. Because nothing was built to help them start.
At home, he watched his 15-year-old sister trying to find part-time work just to have some money of her own – and finding nowhere safe or simple to look. And when he tried the platforms adults use, he found them intimidating: a wall of show-offs and fancy titles with no room for someone at the very beginning.
He also remembered his own work experience: a tick-box exercise, a week arranged around what was available rather than what he was curious about – when it could have been the moment a 14-year-old starts to genuinely think about, and choose, what they want to do.
Daniel has spent more than two decades building and running payment infrastructure that the world quietly depends on – at Earthport, the cross-border payments pioneer acquired by Visa; as a General Manager at FIS, running global payment testing operations; and today as founder and CEO of PennyCent, the payment testing network trusted by the world's largest payment companies.
He knows what it takes to build platforms where trust is the entire product – verified participants, rigorous controls, safety by architecture rather than promise. Jlinked applies that same discipline to something closer to home: giving every young person a safe, real first link to work.
He is also Oliver's dad – which is how the whole thing started.
Isha is the engineer behind the platforms. As co-founder and CTO of PennyCent, she designed and built the technology that global payment networks rely on to test the systems moving money across borders – platforms where reliability, security and verification aren't features, they're the foundation.
At Jlinked she leads technology and product, with one design principle above all others: a platform serving 14–18 year olds must be the safest place on the internet they use. Privacy locked on by default, no private adult-to-minor contact, and safeguarding enforced in the architecture – not the terms and conditions.
In one family you can see the entire journey: an 18-year-old who made it into work and watched most of his classmates get left behind. A 15-year-old who wants a Saturday job and has no safe way to find one. And a parent who has spent a career building trusted infrastructure, asking why nobody had built any for this.
Over a million young people in the UK are now NEET. Jlinked is the platform. The Work Experience Charter is the standard. No NEETs UK is the mission that owns them both – and the target is zero.