Gecko Governance eye up London expansion

Áine McMahon

A Dundalk based finance company will head to London on Monday to pitch at the Bloomberg event.

Gecko Governance is a new RegTech solution to easily allow fund managers to monitor and manage their regulation and compliance requirements.

It provides fund managers with a live oversight of all the funds regulation and compliance requirements – which funds are on schedule and which are behind, which compliance tasks are outstanding and which have been completed.

It enables fund managers to schedule all their end to end compliance and regulatory tasks and provides an verifiable independent audit trail of compliance to satisfy global financial regulators requirements.

The company has also been Top 20 shortlisted for the “FinTech Start Up Bootcamp” in London – the No. 1 Fintech Accelerator in the world.

The investors’ event will be held on Monday July 11th and will be hosted jointly by the Irish International Business Network (IIBN), in collaboration with Bloomberg.

There will be 10 business presentations and investors are mainly drawn from the greater London area, with high net worth individuals, venture capitalists, private equity and corporate venture funds participating.

Shane Brett co-founder of Gecko Governance said the financial crisis led to the genesis of the company.

“Following the financial crisis there was a lot more regulation implemented and I used to help companies like Northern Trust, BNP, Citibank, which often have 40 or 50 different pieces of regulation to try and manage. I had a brainwave that it would be great if they had a birds eye view of all of the regulation and centralise it with one piece of software,” he said.

“We have spent they past year building up the company and getting it right. We have been through the Enterprise Ireland process and have been a high potential start up since Christmas,” he said.

“We on boarded one of our largest fund management client in May – a medium sized fund manager called DMS offshore. We are also looking doing a pilot with the Bank of Ireland too for regulation,” he said.

Mr Brett said he is currently between London and Dundalk where the company’s office is based.

“To date, we have done everything from our own resources but we want to cement ourselves in London because that is where most of the fund managers are and then take on New York,” he said.

“At the pitch event on Monday we hope to find investors who understand the challenges of regulation and fund management. We are looking for funding of around half a million or more from an angel investor. We will use that money to open an office in London, look at potential candidates here and hire a business development manager,” he said.

Mr Brett said the Brexit vote and the potential for more fund regulation will boost their business.

“The Brexit vote means there will more regulation for banks in the next few years so they can use our product to simplify all the regulatory requirements and how to implement them,” he said.