We started developing the idea behind Finboot back in 2015. Ethereum had just been launched and the thought of using blockchain technology for enterprise applications was very nascent. Me and my fellow founders, all of whom are from tech backgrounds, were witnessing industry leaders voice their ideas about the many different ways they were thinking blockchain would revolutionise their businesses.
While we agreed from a conceptual standpoint, we found it hard to imagine how these companies would drive adoption of such a complex technology across business units. Gathering internal know-how and creating internal engineering teams specialised on blockchain was not only going to be resource exhaustive, but also very challenging, especially in lieu of a sufficiently large talent pool.
Presented with this scenario, our motivation was to find a way to make this technology “usable” no matter your background or what your technical capabilities are; after all, nowadays we use countless digital tools without worrying about how the underlying tech actually works. At the same time, we wanted to build something very flexible.
If blockchain was meant to work for so many different use cases, we did not want our clients to have to go to different vendors for each use case. The combination of ease-of-use and flexibility or configurability landed us in another nascent digital trend: Low-code / No-code – the idea that you don’t have to be a software engineer to build or configure your own business applications.
That’s how MARCO was born, a low-code platform and ecosystem that would abstract blockchain complexity and power easy to use No-code applications that any business user could operate. This to us was a clear method of accelerating digital transformation, realising value and building trust through blockchain technology.
Now, the Low-code/No-code approach already makes MARCO quite unique. That said, we wanted to strengthen our positioning even more. Back in 2016 when development for MARCO kicked off, we started to see an evolution of the blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). More and more DLTs or blockchain frameworks started to appear, so the idea of a winner takes all scenario was very evident to us. With that in mind, we wanted to make sure that when it came to ledger technologies, MARCO was built with the same agnostic design it had for use cases; no matter what blockchain network or technology a client wanted to use, MARCO could abstract that complexity and bring it all under one roof.
Fast-forward a few years, and now the number 1 requirement for CIOs across industries when it comes to blockchain is interoperability; MARCO’s agnostic design is a big first leap towards that broader interoperability that the industry is looking for.
How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
Our vision from day one was to build a platform and ecosystem. In 2009 Marc Benioff told the Salesforce leadership: “We will never be a US$10bn company if we’re not a platform. No software company has hit that milestone without being one.” While the exact numbers might not apply to every software company today, the message behind it continues to be very relevant: Platforms and ecosystems are a strategic growth lever.
Additionally, the cloud economy has all but eliminated the technical and operational barriers that made ecosystems difficult to set up in the past. Being able to connect multiple systems and stakeholders through application programming interfaces (APIs) has accelerated the creation and delivery of ecosystem value.
That said, step one of building a platform and ecosystem for us was, let’s prove that our tech works, and step two was let’s prove that it drives value for customers. So, over the past six years, we have focused on building the Low-code platform (MARCO) creating No-code applications in-house powered by the platform (Track&Trace, BlockStamp, and SRM), and executing a go-to-market strategy using our No-code apps to drive adoption of MARCO. Today we have many blue chip customers including Repsol, Iberia, SABIC, and TC Energy; all of whom are using MARCO to accelerate the time-to-value in their blockchain use cases: such as digital product passports, validating sustainability claims and invoice reconciliation through smart contracts.
With our applications in the market and success stories from clients, some of them up to four years old, we are now ready to start the roll-out of our partner program to make sure we start building an ecosystem focused on strategic growth. A partner ecosystem will help us scale, but it will also be instrumental in enhancing the experience and the value generation for our existing customer base.
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What can we hope to see from Finboot in the future?
Well, I would like to say that the best is yet to come. Not to diminish any of our achievements so for, for which I am insanely proud, but as a sign that up until now we’ve been building the foundations and setting up the groundwork. Our efforts now are to execute on that platform and ecosystem strategy.
Over the next couple of weeks, you’ll see announcements on some of our initial partnerships with strategic system integrators and independent software vendors across geographies that will be instrumental for the growth of MARCO over the coming months and years. You will also see the release of key materials like our MARCO Academy and our Documentation – the technical documentation of the platform resources to nurture our growing developer and business user community.
We are also growing and strengthening the relationship with some of our clients as they scale the use of MARCO and its No-code apps inside their enterprise. We are getting ready to announce the growth in usage and use cases for several of our clients, as well as announce details on some recent client engagements. In a way up to 2021 companies were in a learning and experimental stage with their blockchain use cases.
As adoption and validation of business cases has consistently been achieved, we’ve seen how in 2022 the way to see and plan blockchain projects is changing. Companies went from having this technology in sandboxes and innovation budgets and are now moving it to operational budgets with large implementations planned to roll-out over the next couple of years. So, it is very exciting to see how adoption is picking up momentum. It is also very well timed with our strategy to release the platform to a broader partner ecosystem.
Another area where you’ll see more growth from Finboot is from a geographical standpoint. We are already a global company, with a team made up of eight nationalities from three different continents, and with clients across Europe, North America and Asia. More recently we have been strengthening our presence across the Americas with some strategic hiring and marketing actions.
Being a UK company with a base in Spain creates the ideal platform for expansion into the Americas. The ties the UK has with the US and Canada and Spain with countries across Latin America create a perfect scenario for the smooth scaling of our target market as well as our team.
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