SteelEye, the compliance technology and data analytics firm, has announced a record year of growth. Revenues increased 88 percent year-on-year in 2021 and the company now has over 120 institutional clients worldwide, with new clients including Oppenheimer Europe Ltd and JonesTrading.

SteelEye – which is headquartered in the UK and has offices in London, New York, Paris, Bengaluru, and Braga – has seen increasing demand for its services as financial firms’ regulatory compliance needs have grown across the globe. In response, the business expanded to the United States last year, backed by $17 million funding rounds in 2020, and appointed RegTech veteran Brian Lynch to lead its US operations.

Pressure from regulators and the increasing need to improve operational efficiency across the industry have encouraged more firms to replace legacy technologies through platforms like SteelEye. This demand is growing exponentially as remote and hybrid work patterns become the norm – requiring firms to have secure cloud-based SaaS solutions.

SteelEye expects another year of strong growth in 2022 as continued regulatory pressure and more pervasive adoption of cloud drives an increasing number of firms to upgrade their compliance capabilities. A particular area of focus, directly related to the new ‘normal’ is communications archiving and monitoring, as evidenced by the scale of penalties handed out recently for record keeping failures in relation to WhatsApp.

Matt Smith, Chief Executive Officer at SteelEye, said: 

“The regulatory pressures facing the industry continue to intensify. There is increasing recognition that legacy compliance systems are no longer fit-for-purpose and expose firms to unnecessary regulatory risk and high costs due to inefficiencies.”

“We are extremely proud of what our team achieved during 2021, a year marked by uncertainty, market turbulence and economic volatility. The RegTech landscape evolved dramatically in the last 12 months and SteelEye’s compelling proposition is agile and ideal for firms seeking a holistic platform to support their long-term compliance needs.”

2021 saw SteelEye launch two new products: a Three-Way Reconciliation solution to help firms improve their data quality, and an AI-driven lexicon to reduce false positives in communication surveillance. The firm increased its headcount by 60 percent last year and plans to expand by a further 70 percent by the end of 2022, with a large focus on North America to keep pace with demand.