Ahead of Corlytics’ 10th anniversary, its CEO John Byrne tells SiliconRepublic.com about how its recent growth is setting a trajectory for further expansion.
Irish-founded risk-focused financial intelligence tech company Corlytics has had a busy couple of years. It recently made its first acquisition and it is growing its team consistently and steadily.
According to John Byrne, Corlytics’ CEO, the company has gone from employing approximately 30 people in 2020 to around 60 in total currently. Recently, it expanded its sales force and Byrne says there are more plans afoot to add tech specialists in the coming months.
“We’ve doubled our sales force already this year, since the beginning of 2023.”
Right now, the plan is to hire between 10 and 15 tech workers. “We’re looking for technical architects, cybersecurity, strong developers and strong business analysts.”
There will also be positions open for legal staff, with Byrne mentioning that the company already employs quite a few legal specialists on the compliance side – many of whom have PhDs.
How Corlytics operates
Corlytics operates primarily but not exclusively in the financial services sector. It develops what Byrne calls “intelligent regulation” for regulators, giving them tools to better manage some of the documents they deal with.
The company also works with a lot of Big Tech companies, assisting them with all of the many, many regulations that they are expected to keep track of and comply with. According to Byrne, these companies often have hundreds of pages of legal text that they have to familiarise themselves with in order to be compliant. Corlytics uses machine learning tools to help automate and speed up the process of trawling through these documents, many of which are constantly being updated and changed anyway.
At Corlytics, the tech professionals and the data scientists work with the legal experts to mimic the thought processes of a lawyer when they are reading through legal documents. Byrne says that the tools the company develops are used by a lot of the big players – from top insurers, to banks.
Byrne says that the company has benefitted from the mass digitalisation that has taken place since the pandemic.
“Last year our business went up about two-and-a-half times from the previous year. And this year, our business is probably going to double as well. Overall, we’re looking at a lot of growth.”
Byrne says that where Corlytics really prides itself is its regulation monitoring services – or, finding regulations and classifying them.
Recent acquisition of ING’s SparQ
A lot of the company’s clients are looking for a tool that completes the next step in the regulatory process, which is generating a policy based on whatever regulation the tools have identified. To that end, Corlytics acquired and successfully integrated an asset from Dutch company ING, called SparQ.
At the time the acquisition was announced, in January 2023, Byrne said that the deal “sets the runway for further strategic acquisitions” by the company.
Remote model and retention
While Corlytics is headquartered in Dublin, it is a remote-first company. Byrne says he is open to hiring people based anywhere in Europe, and the current team is spread out over a number of different locations.
“We’re hiring more people in Dublin and elsewhere. But for a lot of people as long as they are based in Europe, we don’t really mind where they’re located.”
Byrne is keen to offer eager people a meaningful career at Corlytics, too. He says he doesn’t believe in the traditional grandiose hiring announcement statements, preferring to take people on as he needs them. He also acknowledges that often a good candidate appears when he’s not looking to take on staff, so he hires them if they are able to prove they’d be a good fit for the team. That saves him when he’s looking for staff but can’t find any, he observes.
Byrne says that the challenge of managing staff does not end once you’ve got them on your books; he thinks retention of talent is very important to what Corlytics does. He points out that development suffers if staff turnover is too high because high staff turnover “can impede on the depth of what you do.”
“To me, it’s all about the retention of people and the growth of people. I think the more you invest in growing people, actually, the more people are staying.”
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