MYS 2026: Ankor Software on Fixing How Money Moves On Board

At the Monaco Yacht Show, Shari Liu sits down with Elliot Cousins and Mike Sager, co-founders of Ankor Software, to talk about how money actually gets managed on board a yacht today — and where the current tools still fall short.

"It's actually quite antiquated still... it's a lot of manual reconciliation from everyone involved."

"There's still a lot of inefficiencies with how money is managed on board."

That gap between the sophistication of the yachts themselves and the tools used to run their finances is exactly what AnkorPay was built to close. Petty cash, crew expenses, charter budgets, supplier payments — the mechanics of keeping a yacht funded day to day have long relied on processes that haven't quite kept pace with everything else modernising around them.

Several platforms already operate in this space, which raises an obvious question: what makes AnkorPay different rather than simply another entrant. For Cousins and Sager, the answer isn't a single standout feature so much as the foundation the whole product is built on.

"A lot of it comes down to the modern technology and modern infrastructure that we build on."

Speed is a recurring theme in how they describe the gap they're closing. Where older systems might leave a crew member waiting on funds before a purchase can be made, Ankor's founders are blunt about why that's no longer acceptable.

"We don't have time to sit around and wait for money to be loaded onto a card."

Artificial intelligence runs through much of that infrastructure, and the founders don't undersell its impact on how the platform operates.

"We leverage AI extensively... how did we ever exist without it? It's like Harry Potter, magic wands!"

For captains, yacht managers and brokers, the shift promises to look less like adopting new software and more like finally removing a layer of friction they'd stopped noticing because it had simply become normal — faster reconciliation, fewer manual steps, and financial processes that move at the same pace as the rest of a charter season.

Much of that direction has come directly from the people using the platform day to day. As Sager puts it: "We're very customer led... We welcome their feedback, in fact we're guided by them."

Where Ankor goes next will likely be shaped by the same instinct — building toward whatever gap in how money moves through yachting becomes the next obvious one to close.