Ireland’s growing unicorn herd is sign of a strong start-up sector

Home-grown Irish fintechs have established themselves as leading global players with stratospheric valuations in a relatively short period of time, several of them achieving unicorn status – privately owned start-ups valued at more than $1 billion.

Perhaps the most famous Irish fintech success story is the one that did not actually start here. The Collison brothers decided to found Stripe in Palo Alto, California, rather than here at home in 2010. The company provides technology to help retailers process consumer payments, and earlier this year was valued at an astonishing $65 billion (€60.5 billion). In 2022 alone more than $800 billion in payments in more than 130 currencies were processed on its technology.

Ireland’s original fintech success story may well be the Fexco Group. The company has been offering foreign exchange and payment services from its Kerry base for the past three decades and processes more than €34 billion in transactions annually, spanning foreign exchange, treasury, digital tax and government-backed financing sectors. Fexco has developed deep expertise in constructing, operating and supporting complex, mission-critical technology platforms.

The first unicorn to actually start up in the State was Fenergo. The company supplies software solutions for client life-cycle management, serving investment, corporate and private banks across the globe. Fenergo’s software streamlines the entire regulatory onboarding and entity data management processes and guarantees compliance with various regulatory standards. The solutions enable faster client onboarding, quicker revenue generation and improved customer experience.

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The latest fintech to join the small but growing unicorn herd in the State is Transfermate, which provides business-to-business global payment infrastructure as a service to clients around the world. The company’s products are designed to streamline, modernise and automate the traditionally manual processes associated with making and receiving payments. The solutions allow customers to send and receive payments in more than 200 countries and more than 140 currencies.

From its base in Westport, Co Mayo, Payslip specialises in automation and integration technology for managing payroll in large multinational corporations. The Payslip platform automates the entire payroll process, from data collection and validation to post-payroll reporting, helping multinational companies streamline their payroll operations, digitise multi-country payroll and connect various systems for more efficient payroll management.

Fineos specialises in customer-centric core software solutions for the employee-benefits and life, accident, and health industries. The company’s platform encompasses various components offered on a software as a service basis. Functionalities within its AdminSuite solution include absence management, billing, claims processing, payments handling, policy management, provider management, quote generation, rating calculations and underwriting support.

Splink made quite a splash in 2021 when it launched its white-label payments infrastructure application programming interface that offers secure, plug-and-play fintech solutions, enabling brands to deliver services to customers. The flexible and processor-agnostic solution has allowed the company to establish strategic partnerships in key markets. It collaborates with banks, managed service providers and application developers to tailor solutions to meet specific needs of customers including Stripe, PayPal, AIB and Mastercard.

Daon has established itself as a global leader in biometric authentication and identity assurance solutions. Daon’s platform provides a trusted digital security experience, enabling users to establish, authenticate and recover their identities with confidence.

Regulatory technology specialist Corlytics continues on its rapid growth journey and recently signed an agreement to sell a majority equity stake to growth investor Verdane. The investment will enable the company to cement its global category leadership and build on its strong client base which includes 40 per cent of the world’s top 30 systemically important financial institutions. Corlytics enables customers to stay ahead of regulatory demands and offers a fully integrated end-to-end solution, from regulatory horizon scanning to policy management, through to attestation.

Another Irish fintech making a name for itself internationally is Alt21 which offers an end-to-end foreign exchange trading platform that allows customers to access attractively priced over-the-counter currency hedging solutions through any channel.

In the investment space, Ctrl Alt is bringing a fractionalised approach to alternative investments. Small stakes in alternative assets are tokenised using blockchain technology and sold as individual investments.

And there are lots more besides. Circit is a financial audit management platform that offers real-time access to audit confirmations with direct connections to banks, solicitors and fintech services. Bidx1′s property transaction platform enables buyers and sellers to complete property deals efficiently and transparently online. Fundrecs develops software to enhance data management, processing and utilisation within the funds industry.

NoFrixion is a money movement platform combining the technology and regulatory authority to enable businesses to send, store, receive and reconcile funds programmatically.