Irish fintech Fenergo is set to create 300 jobs in Dublin as part of a €100 million global expansion which will see 500 jobs created globally.
“This recruitment initiative is really to solidify our position as the number one in the global market in the financial technology and financial crime space,” Fenergo founder and chief executive Marc Murphy told The Irish Times.
The majority of the roles will be in software engineers, senior AI engineering positions and product managers which will be created over the next three years. Hiring for the positions, which includes 30 roles on a new graduate programme for the company, has begun.
Mr Murphy said the investment is aimed at “driving the AI agenda” and would “help with product expansion” in response to client feedback.
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“A lot of global financial institutions are looking to consolidate vendors, and they want to back, and double down on, the vendors that they trust,” he said,
Fenergo develops software for financial institutions that helps them with issues such as regulatory compliance and managing client data. Its customers include many of the largest banks and insurers in the world.
The company has eyed an initial public offering (IPO) a number of times in recent years, but Mr Murphy said plans had been “slowed down” by “turbulence in the market”.
“It is certainly still on the cards,” he said but noted there are no concrete plans for an offering. “We just need to wait for the conditions to be better.”
Likening the decision on timing the IPO to a sailing trip, Mr Murphy said: “You’re not going to take a sailing boat out in the storm, we aren’t going to put our business into the IPO market with how turbulent things are.”
He ruled out the company seeking an IPO in 2025 but said a decision would be made “next year, probably spring or early summer”.
He said revenue growth was strong last year, with headline figures “in the late teens” and expects top-line growth of about 20 per cent in the coming year; hoping for its annual contract value to see slightly faster growth in the “mid to late 20s”.
Despite exports accounting for 97 per cent of the company’s business, the fintech founder is not concerned about the impact of US import tariffs on the business with the uncertainty acting as a “great catalyst”.
“In the last quarter, we’ve signed three of the largest five banks in the US,” he said noting they were “some of the largest deals we’ve ever done”.
Mr Murphy said the ongoing “turmoil has been an incredible tailwind” as firms see his company as helping to cut costs.
The company founder said the firm had become “bloated in certain areas” after pursuing growth “at all costs” from 2015 to 2021.
“We opened a load of offices that, in hindsight, we didn’t need because we can serve a lot of these countries from Dublin,” he said.
