Pendo Systems (Pendo) provider of international world-class financial products saw skyrocketing growth in 2015. The Company was widely recognized by industry leaders and publications including ACQ5 Global Awards which named it Capital Markets Technology Provider of the Year and SWIFT’s InnoTribe Showcase, which awarded Pendo the title of Top Innovator.

“Capital Markets shifted in 2015 from searching for Alpha to searching for the Unicorns,” states Pamela Pecs Cytron, Pendo’s Founder & CEO. “The industry is creating an immeasurable number of contests and incubators and every bank to insurance company created a ‘fintech’ fund. There are now over 5,000 so called #fintech start-ups,and on top of that, 700 blockchain entrepreneurs.”

Cytron says, “If you are looking from the outside in, you are thinking about Unicorns and Pixie Dust, but underpinning the noise, the theme really stayed the same. The established #fintech vendors continued the consolidation theme, as the FIS acquisition of SunGard was completed. Market headlines remain filled with issues about data, transparency and regulatory compliance.”

Between the headlines and hash tags, Pendo was able to focus on the growth of their pivotal product strategy.

“The year not only provided for skyrocketing growth; we launched our new platform to Beta,” says Cytron.

To support the growth and adoption, Pendo expanded its staff and opened a Charlotte, NC office. It appointed, Philip Dodds CTO early this year; followed by the appointment of Doug Richman as their COO.

Doug Richman is an experienced and innovative financial services investment technology executive focused on delivering robust, scalable, and low-cost business solutions to both sell-side and buyside businesses. Philip Dodds is a serial entrepreneur in financial services.

Pendo’s unveiling of its new platform in 2016 focuses on improving the access to dark data held in financial firms’ back offices.

“I’ve been in this industry for 30 years, and 2015 was the most fascinating year I’ve experienced,” says Cytron. “During 2008 to 2013 the amount of private equity and venture capital focused on financial services technology was reduced by almost double digits. Yet now we have a bubble. Who’s trying to disrupt the institutions themselves and who is focused on enabling the institutions to transform? Pendo’s vision is clear; we are the enabler to the industry.” 

Pendo believes the replacement market is over. 

“We don’t anticipate an exodus of vendors, but we do envision accessing and releasing the valuable data in the enterprise to gain transparency,” states Cytron. “Pendo’s transformation will set a foundation for the future. A marketplace that allows for streamlining and repurposing data sets in the back office to provide universal inventory that can then be fed to any system, any consumer.” 

There are a lot of good new products on the market, added Cytron. 

“Many small vendors are making significant investments in our industry. But they are all slaves to the data they can consume. As data management platform, we are making all of our data available to market participants to begin to build the bridges to discover and unite data. The most valuable data in our enterprise is hostage in the back-office, and we have to begin to enable firms to monetize that data. So we have our pixie dust to share with a community; a community of customers, vendors, and market participants that will re-imagine the future of the capital markets back office.”