As we enter the new year, we decided to take a look back at our journey growing Cygnetise from 0 to 37 paying clients and reflect on the successes and challenges we’d faced so far.

The beginning

With background in banking and operations, Cygnetise’s founding team spotted a need for digital transformation of the existing process of managing authorised signatories within the financial institutions and other large corporations.

Traditionally, the management of authorised signatory lists has been mostly manual and paper-based. When an authorisation for a company representative needs to be changed, the paper-based list should be refreshed and redistributed to relevant counterparts. As this process is so laborious, companies rarely refresh it real time, and thus expose themselves to risk of fraud (for example by having an authorised signatory register that could include people who no longer work at the organisation).

This presented a unique opportunity for the development of a digital solution that automates the process by using the latest decentralised database technology. And that’s how Cygnetise was born.

So how we made it

The key to our go-to-market strategy was “give clients what they want”. Our biggest priority has always been to provide customers with the best user experience possible and the most intuitive and effective application. So, we focused on listening to what clients need and identified the biggest challenges they face when managing authorised signatories.

Unsurprisingly, time was a major issue. Hence, our key goal was to build an application that completely automates and digitises the process and eliminates the manual burden. Cygnetise’s application helps clients save over 90% of time spent on manually updating signatories.

Security was another problem faced by companies. Using a decentralised network allows for enhanced security by eliminating the risk of data being tampered with, damaged or lost by the central admin. By using blockchain, Cygnetise also provides users with an immutable, full audit trail of any changes made to their signatory lists and the ability to share these in real time.  This means they have a record of all of the changes made to the authorised signatories, which are all time-stamped.

After building the core product for our target audience, we focused on marketing. Initially, we approached the market with free trials and take up was rather positive. However, winning the first paying customers was much harder. And the following few didn’t come easily either. 

Then, we decided to narrow our target audience and focus on a specific region, the UK Channel Islands, so we could build a solid foundation for obtaining market traction.

We chose the region because both Jersey and Guernsey have a huge appetite for innovation. In addition, heads of businesses there, are generally more flexible and have the authority to make independent business decisions, as opposed to those in larger headquarters that usually require a large committee to make any decisions.

In the UK Channel Islands, many global financial companies have small autonomously run offices, with most of them being focused on heavily administrative activities that can benefit from streamlining. The tightly knit community also helps with from a marketing perspective, as there are fewer degrees of separation making any references much more impactful.

18 months on from winning our first paying business customer, we now have 37. From these 37 paying organisations, they collectively use the application for over 250 company entities in 13 jurisdictions across the globe. We anticipate further growth both within the islands and further afield, as our satisfied customers introduce the product to other locations.

So far, the feedback we’ve received from those early adopters is exactly what we’ve hoped for. Cygnetise’s flagship blockchain-based application aims to provide a simple solution to a genuine operational problem of managing signatory lists, and it looks like we’ve managed to achieve that.

“Cygnetise makes the process clear and simple, reducing our internal burden.” - Ian Henderson, EFG Fund Services

“Cygnetise reduces 90% of my time spent managing our authorised signatories.” - Lisa Floris, Ogier

“The Cygnetise application is the way forward for managing signatory lists.” - Hilary Jones, R&H Fund Services

Some of our early adopters have also already requested additional functionality which provides new exciting opportunities for the further development of our flagship technology and offering. This was always the intention: start small, build a trusting customer base, and provide additional functionality that benefits from using the decentralised database.

What’s next

In summary, our success to date can be contributed to focussing on a simple product that satisfies a need, and selling initially to a very small market segment. Furthermore, a segment who has an appetite for innovation, and more autonomous decision makers.

We are now exploring other regions to find where the next early adopters will be. We have been part of 2 Plug & Play accelerator programmes, in Abu Dhabi and in Japan.  Potential customers are approaching us online and the self-marketing facets of a distributed application are being realised.

In addition to this, a constant cycle of customer feedback is leading us to concentrate on the next set of iterative releases which will include opening up API’s in and out of the platform, providing white-labelled products for large clients and much more.

We still have challenges and we are under no illusion that we will encounter many more. Clearly, we need to remain focussed, but with regards to mass blockchain adoption, things are definitely heading in the right direction for Cygnetise. Not yet a tipping point, but certainly an inflection.

Want to learn more about Cygnetise? Request a free demo below and one of our team will organise it for you!