Marcus Richards
Finboot is a technology company that gives its world class customers a competitive edge through accelerating their digital transformation, realising value and building trust through blockchain.
Finboot has developed MARCO, a ‘low-code’ platform that simplifies digital transformation by enabling companies to develop and deploy digital solutions with minimum efforts and resources. This ‘low-code’ platform accelerates the ‘time to value’ – the time it takes to deliver an application to market.
MARCO brings together blockchain technologies in one place, connecting multiple ledgers simultaneously. It also powers ‘no-code’ applications which helps businesses realise value.
It enables companies to incorporate blockchain within their value and supply chains, which increases traceability, transparency and compliance which, in turn, helps them meet sustainability and ESG requirements while also increasing operational efficiency.
Tell us about yourself?
I’m the CEO and co-founder of Finboot, the technology company that gives its world class customers a competitive edge through accelerating their digital transformation, realising value and building trust through blockchain.
I’m an engineer by training and I have a PhD in Physics, which has given me a strong focus to design and develop technology-enabled products in both the software and hardware ecosystems. My expertise in tech includes areas from distributed ledgers to semiconductors and imaging systems.
I have a successful track record on applying these technologies to a wide range of sectors, including oil & energy, chemicals, consumer goods, water management and healthcare.
All of my professional experience has been concentrated on building technology-enabled products. I’ve always enjoyed understanding the fundamentals of different technologies, but more importantly I love finding a place for them in different markets and industries; basically finding ways to look beyond the fundamentals and explore where the most value could be delivered and creating the tools to facilitate such delivery.
With Finboot, I was also keen to not only help enterprises apply emerging technology to deliver value, but to also help solve some of today’s most pressing issues such as setting and monitoring ESG goals and helping businesses transition both digitally and sustainably.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Perhaps to enact changes faster. In my view, in startups, a series of small failures is in part what leads to big successes. This means that whether it pleases us or not, founders and senior executives often need to take fast action and make changes when required to stay relevant and at the cutting edge.
Don’t get me wrong, every decision should be well thought through, but a key part of my role is to make sure that I make the time for that.
What problem does your business solve?
There’s two ways we typically look at this. One is from the technology perspective, we help our clients accelerate their time to value for the adoption of blockchain technology.
Our main mission is to facilitate and simplify the delivery of this technology through our low-code and no-code solutions.
Making it so that any business or industry user can access and interact with the underlying tech without having any IT background or training. In a way, it’s like commoditising blockchain know-how and expertise.
The other viewpoint is what’s driving the adoption of blockchain e.g. why are enterprises so interested in this particular technology. In this case, the answer may shift slightly depending on the industry or the use case.
However, today the killer use case for blockchain continues to be traceability and visibility across value chains. We help an enterprise gather data from its suppliers and share it with customers, regulators and even investors in a way that is transparent, trustworthy and immutable; all well-known characteristics of blockchain.
This is becoming more and more of a priority in light of ambitious ESG and sustainability commitments. Simply put, blockchain is an excellent choice to digitally enable and accelerate your sustainability agenda. Evidence of that is the work companies like SABIC, Repsol, and Stahl among others are doing with us.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Our inspiration came from looking at the nascent enterprise blockchain sector back in 2015. Back then we saw industry leaders begin to take an interest in the technology behind cryptocurrencies to use it in other business areas: supply chains, financial services, etc.
What we realised back then was that even though the fundamentals of blockchain did meet the requirements for the use cases in question, there was a huge gap between the tech and its intended users. Essentially, you can’t expect everyone to become a blockchain expert overnight.
Instead, what was needed was an abstraction layer that simplified the use of blockchain for any business user. And so, that’s what we set out to do – and that’s what our platform and ecosystem MARCO is all about.
What is your magic sauce?
This is another question we can tackle in two ways.
One, is of course our tech, we have a solution that is capable of addressing very specific business pain points (circular economy, product passports, invoice reconciliation), while at the same time providing a horizontal and flexible approach to blockchain.
This gives our clients the freedom and flexibility to choose any underlying framework or ledger technology and easily connect to their legacy architecture (any existing systems or solutions) while ensuring their adoption of the technology is future-proofed.
The other way to look at this is on delivery, from what we’ve witnessed and what they’ve said, our clients certainly love our product and technology – but the enterprise software business is still a people business at heart.
What our clients value most is customer care, how they are looked after through implementation with great care and dedication, and how our team listens to their needs in order to strengthen our product with what they need.
Perhaps more importantly, how we do all this with an impeccable time-to-value – our speed is certainly a key value driver and strong differentiator.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
In short, our vision is “platform and ecosystem”. As we continue to grow with our enterprise customers, we plan to launch a global partnership program that will allow us to increase the number of MARCO powered apps and solutions for our clients, quickly expand to new markets and geographies and to strengthen our position as an enabler of blockchain technology.
We can only do that by partnering with key technology providers, software vendors and system integrators to build a strong ecosystem around MARCO.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Running and growing a startup is a survival game. It is all about anticipating issues and adjusting course. There are many challenges through it all, but I would say the biggest one for me is maintaining company culture, and keeping the team focused on our mission and vision.
Doing all this as we grow rapidly with new teammates, investors, and clients… that to me is one of our biggest challenges.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
If the platform and ecosystem vision around blockchain resonates with you, if you believe, like we do, that this is the right approach to truly maximise the value of enterprise blockchain; then we encourage you to reach out.
We work with companies across a number of sectors and geographies so we’re confident we can create solutions that enable them to achieve their unique goals while making blockchain technology easy to use and accessible.
Our client base and team continues to grow, we are closing partnerships with system integrators and software vendors, and we will soon be opening up our Series A fundraising, so now it’s a great time to get in touch.
We are a very open organisation, so reach out to me, anyone on the team or use our website or social media channels and we’d be delighted to help.
