Startup Member Spotlight: Q&A

By Phil Dutton, Co-Founder, Solidatus

Tell us about Solidatus

What does Solidatus do? 

Solidatus brings control to an organisations’ data landscape, helping reduce their exposure to risk and improve their data economy. In the simplest form, it’s a data lineage discovery and visualisation tool that is uniquely engineered to allow any sized firm to understand how data flows through their organisation.

Solidatus enables a company to build end-to-end data models more efficiently and effectively, through its flexible and intuitive web-based features. It helps demonstrate regulatory lineage, improve governance, assist with transformational change and reduce inefficiencies in data handling.

It's being used within the financial services sector as well as some of the most data-rich industries across the globe, including pharmaceutical, utility and infrastructure companies. It has also been adopted by leading consulting and technology firms, to support and enhance the delivery of their services.

2. Why was Solidatus founded?

Solidatus was founded by Philip Dutton & Philip Miller after finding the same systemic issues related to system landscape and data-economy understanding across the entirety of the financial services industry

It was incubated within Threadneedle Technology, an IT financial services consulting firm, over a 3 year period. This enabled it to be developed to solve real-world data lineage inefficiencies related to regulation, governance, transformation and optimisation. Solidatus is architected and developed by some of the brightest talent from Imperial College London.

3. What separates you from the competition (what’s your USP?)? 

• Utilieses crowd sourcing, automation and simplicity to rapidly injest data
• Easily connected to other applications
• Highly scalable and highly performant
• Highly fexible and business case agnostic
• Dedication to leading edge technology
• Cloud based web browser application

4. What has been your biggest challenge to date? 

Organisational maturity and honesty. It is difficult for organisation to admit publicly that they have a problem of the scale we are trying to help address.

Convincing organisations that spending to achieve understanding of the current before trying to move forward is the only way to move towards best practice. Building a mansion on a house of cards foundation will ultimately end in disaster.

Being able to connect with the right people within an organisation, since each company, and industry, is structured differently and the person responsible for what our solution offers varies.

5. What’s the best thing about working at Solidatus?

• It’s a fast-paced environment which allows for rapid acceleration and the ability to implement new and innovative ideas and improvements to the software.
• Being at the forefront of a revolution that must take place if the financial services industry is going to continue to grow and evolve.
• Being truly disruptive, from both a technology perspective but also from a process and cultural perspective.
• Hopefully leaving the industry as a whole in a far better place than we found it.

6. What is next for Solidatus? 

• Hyper-growth…over the past six years there has been an ever increasing tsunami of regulation, forcing organisations to focus on meeting these regulations to the detriment of their core businesses growth.
• Before organisations can evolve and truly take advantage of their data they first need to better understand their whole systems and data-economies. Solidatus is ideally placed to help with understanding and meeting these regulatory requirements, assisting with both governance and control.
• We also see a massive opportunity to help an organisation to enact transformational change while managing risk and reducing cost and redundancy.

Tell us about your space?

1. Why did you choose to enter the RegTech space? 

I like to think it was the other way around and that the Fintech / RegTech space chose us.

However, our ambitions and the interest we are receiving extends far beyond only financial services. Solidatus is industry and problem agnostic; it only needs complexity that leads to a lack of visibility and understanding to find a use case. We have already received interest from the government, military, pharmaceutical, transportation, utilities and retail sectors to name a few.

2. What is next for the *fintech subsector* (RegTech) space? 

I think for me it is to learn from the past mistakes and successes and not to repeat them with new technologies.

The financial services industry has evolved organically over the last 20 years, and the current state highlights that greater understanding, architecture, governance, control and care needs to be taken when building data-economies of this scale.

The disruption that the sector seeks needs to extend far beyond the technology into the culture, processes, and beliefs that the decision makers and practitioners hold.

3. Who do you think are the leaders and challengers in *fintech subsector? (RegTech)*

• I think the sector is still new and hasn’t met one company that isn’t both leading and challenging based on their product or service offering. At this time it’s hard to name just one since I enjoy following all companies that are accelerating in the space and helping build an ecosystem of solutions for firms of all sizes to adopt.

What about the FinTech landscape?

1. What new technology do you think will revolutionise finance and have the greatest impact?

Anything associated with regulation and data privacy. Take for example the latest issue surrounding Uber, a company that has scaled up very quickly, and even though their foundation is data and technology, they have still had problems. Or if relating it directly to the financial services sector, many banks continue to be slapped with fines due to not being able to account for their data-flows. Whether an organisation is at the start-up or maturity stage the increased amount of data that flows throughout the company needs to be correctly managed. I may be slightly biased, but it would be hard not to see why new technology needs to focus on helping simplify and improve the way all organisations manage their data economy.

2. What do you think is the greatest challenge facing the FinTech sector (UK and abroad) (investment, policy, regulation, talent)?

Right now, uncertainty, which combines investment, policy, regulation and talent. But if I had to just pick one, talent. All of our developers are UK based, but I know that it is becoming increasingly difficult for London/UK based firms to hire and with Brexit there is likely to be an even larger shortage.

3. If you could work with one type of business or individual of a certain experience in the future who would it be?

It is difficult to define a single type of business or person that I would like to work with. I think you should learn from each person (and business) you work with. For me, the biggest thing is working for and with companies that are trying to make a difference. I believe there needs to be a greater emphasise on using technology for advancement of “us” as a species rather than individiually. There also needs to be balance in the way in which it impacts on our environment.