Ambition A.M. meets Thomas McHugh, co-founder and chief executive of data management firm Finbourne, to hear what it takes to prove an idea possible.
Accurate data management is crucial for the financial services industry, especially when it comes to preventing fraud and avoiding costly errors.
Thomas McHugh, chief executive and co-founder of data integration and management platform Finbourne, found that out the hard way during a decade of working in the City of London.
The 46-year-old entrepreneur had spent his career working within large financial institutions such as Morgan Stanley, UBS and RBS, albeit being an engineer by trade.
“I moved into financial services because of the pace of change basically – it felt like more of an adrenaline rush to some extent than designing electronic circuits,” he says, with a laugh.
In 2008, he was working as a senior quant for RBS, which at the time was the world’s largest bank, during its collapse and mass reorganisation.
The way the bank traditionally operated turned out to be costly, he says, which caused it to cut hundreds of millions in costs moving forward. The long-term fix, however, was found in the integration of efficient technology and cloud services.
Could he somehow find a way to reshape the future of how companies buy IT?
After realising how desperately needed new and innovative data management systems were, he and a few others from the team decided to set out on their own to try.
How Finbourne works
Finbourne was created by a co-founding team of seven, with McHugh at the helm, in 2016 as a way to reshape the future of how financial services firms buy IT.
“It’s about driving efficiency in financial services.”
The platform works as an “interconnected network” of data and functionality services for the investment community, which is aimed at keeping pace with the ever-evolving market clients find themselves in.
“We assign effectively an account manager to you, we go what is it that you want to do as a business, where are your pain points, and we’d sit together and find a solution how we’re going to get you from where you are now to where you need to be,” he says.
The platform offers a handful of services, ranging from firm-wide data collection and organisation to portfolio management and data visualisation, and is available to firms both big and small.
Educating the market
McHugh can still remember the pushback the day the team finalised their mission statement.
“There’s no way it works like that… That isn’t how everyone else works, so there’s just no way,” he recalls.
Finbourne’s success, however, came with a careful step-by-step approach.
“We had an enormous platform to build… We knew that here’s the five components, so let’s build one of them first and sell some of that to prove that we had something and that’s sort of how we’ve gone about it,” he says.
Things seem to have worked out so far, with the founder saying revenue was up 43 per cent last year to £16.9m.
Now that the service has been in the mix of the market for some time, the challenge is learning how to stay ahead of the curve.
“You should have certainty, you should know what your overarching mission is, but chances are you’re wrong in almost everything,” McHugh says.
“As long as you’ve got that ability to change direction quickly, then you should be alright.”
But when it comes to standing against competitors that he says are worth tens of billions, including the likes of big banks and asset manager rivals such as Blackrock, Simcorp and Goldensource, how do you fight your way to the top?
“Our competition is huge, [but] it’s very hard for them to innovate – they can’t change the tanker in mid flight,” he says.
Fortunately, he says Finbourne’s innovation rarely comes from within anymore. That is, as long as they’re listening to their customers.
“Every day, if you’re listening to your customers, you learn something new and eventually it’s hard to even tell where the ideas came from.”
What’s next?
In June, Finbourne raised £55m series B investment from Highland Europe and AXA Venture Partners, which the team says will be used to streamline their global operations.
Despite all the challenges that might come with entering and conquering new and current markets, however, the Finbourne boss who now leads a global 270-person team believes that “people” will always be the biggest challenge ahead.
“If you know the space and you understand what you need to build, the challenge is making all of your own people agree and educating your own people, and then when you’ve done that, educating the market,” he adds.
“The hardest thing in any start-up is managing people.”
CV
Name: Thomas McHugh
Company: FINBOURNE Technology
Founded: 2016
Staff: 270
Title: CEO and Co-founder
Age: 46
Lives: Dublin, Ireland
Studied: BE, Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin