At Ubisecure, our financial year runs with the calendar year, and so January is a time to reflect, (re)calibrate and drive, and I’d like to share some of my reflective thoughts from 2021.

Like much of the world’s population right now, I am sitting in my home office space – a converted section of garage that embraces the current continuum that used to be known as the work-life balance. It seems like whilst 2020 was a year of shock and discovery, 2021 was a year of acceptance, leveraging the “silver lining” and getting on with the job, and that is what I’m proud to say Ubisecure has done.

 

Corporate Growth

We are a private company, so don’t talk publicly about the detail of our financial performance, however our provisional results from 2021 are fantastic and a testament to everyone in the company. We’ve spent three years deploying funds from the investment made by Octopus mid-2018 with the target of passing break-even in 2021, and we have unequivocally achieved that. We have also seen significant revenue growth, whilst approaching nearly 90% of sales on a subscription basis.

 

Record Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) Issuance

Issuing LEIs through our RapidLEI brand has generated impressive statistics throughout the year. You might have seen us mention some of these during 2021, such as:

  • RapidLEI is #2 for total number of LEIs issued, passing Bloomberg and WM Datenservice.
  • RapidLEI is #1 for cumulative growth rate – issuing more new LEIs than DTCC, Bloomberg & LSEG combined.
  • RapidLEI is the #1 destination for LEI transfers.

To me, the most impressive is that RapidLEI was the number 1 issuer of validated LEIs every single month in 2021, from a standing start in 2018. This is a testament to our pioneering platform which enables automated LEI issuance, our brilliant internal team and fantastic global partner network – and completely supports the premise behind our vision that automation is the key to business efficiency.

 

Launched the CI Pipeline

Keeping with the theme of automation, 2021 saw the new Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline come online for our Identity and Access Management (IAM) engineering team. The complexity of software in general, and IAM software in particular, means that automation of build, test and deploy is critical. The proof point of this was the Log4J CVE last month. Like many software companies, we took action to ensure customers using our platform were not negatively affected. The CI pipeline enabled us to patch all supported versions of our software within hours, which was especially important with the rolling fixes that appeared for the Log4J library. A great achievement by the engineering team, and a great reassurance to our customers.

 

Announced LEI Everywhere

2021 saw the launch of our LEI Everywhere proposition – a Global LEI Foundation (GLEIF)-approved operational model for KYC Service Providers, Banks, FinTechs, & Trust Service Providers. The model allows these institutions to leverage their existing KYC & AML workflows to enhance legal entity identity information, while synchronously issuing LEIs in real-time. Our automated systems provide value-adding functionality over the basic GLEIF Validation Agent definition by detecting anomalies in legal entity data and highlighting these to enhance KYC and AML processes. We will be making several announcements in early 2022 detailing a number of global banks who have already joined the LEI Everywhere programme.

 

Advancing our IAM Platform

We had three IAM releases in 2021, with each release bringing further incremental features and value to existing customers. Throughout the year we delivered a number of features including enhanced extensibility, increased support to our already broad range of EU high assurance identities, deeper usage data, PKCE enhancements, and programmatic key rotation. I’m excited to introduce further features and enhancements that we have planned throughout 2022.

 

Looking forwards

When I look at the achievements of the individuals, teams and departments within Ubisecure I feel rightly proud of what has been achieved and frankly honoured to be part of it all. As you would imagine, the success and growth means we are continually looking for high calibre individuals to join us. If you would like to be part of the Ubisecure team, please reach out to us.