This time of year, is a time of traditions. Putting up the Christmas tree, school concerts, work parties, endless awards ceremonies and excruciatingly ‘fun’ knitwear.
Another common feature of this time of year are articles, reflecting back on the previous twelve months and often looking forward to what lies ahead.
For Credas it has been an extraordinary 12 months and this year’s reflections carry added poignancy for me personally having recently survived a serious diving accident. Such events tend to make one ponder longer and deeper than usual when assessing the key pillars of one’s life, such as family and career.
In the wider world, it has been an extraordinary year of seismic events. A change in UK Government, the utterly bonkers US election, The Reeves Budget (more about that later), the ongoing war in Ukraine, the Middle East on a knife-edge (again), mystery drones, floods in Spain, Royal cancer cases, Welsh rugby woe and Greg Wallace-Gate.
Closer to home, last November, six years after being founded, we sold Credas to Dye & Durham. We always planned to sell the business at some point, but we always assumed that would be to Private Equity, not necessarily a trade buyer. But when Dye & Durham came in at the 11th hour, we were excited by the synergies they could offer – so the deal made perfect sense.
We never shouted or made a song and dance about the sale at the time, which was deliberate. As a compliance company, I like us to be sitting quietly in the background, under the radar. Much like a referee in sport, if people are talking about their compliance provider, it’s probably not a good thing. Yelling and bragging about selling the business or how much money we’ve raised isn’t really our style. We sold the business to Dye & Durham and just quietly went about our business without much fuss – which reflects what we’re all about.
Fast forward a year and under Dye & Durham’s ownership, Credas has, by any metric one chooses to use, flourished.
We’ve won more new business than ever before, with our customer base increasing by around 40%, from what was already one of the biggest customer bases compared to our peers – in just a year! Particularly pleasing was the winning of EY, who when added to our longstanding customer Deloitte, demonstrates the quality of our technology. Such deals are only won after exhaustive evaluation against all major players in the sector.
Revenue, EBITDA, Gross Profit, all the key metrics that point to the health of a business are off the charts, exceeding forecasts by as much as 60% in what has been the most extraordinary financial year in the business’s history.
It is believed that 52% of residential housing transactions in the UK now use Credas to undertake due diligence checks, either directly, or via one of our many close partners to whom we license our technology, often on a white-label basis. It isn’t widely known, but over half of our revenue at Credas comes from such partners, many of whom are our direct competitors. For a huge number of compliance providers in the market, if you actually look under the hood, you’ll find it is Credas technology quietly powering their compliance checks.
Credas in numbers in 2024
Credas now runs over 35,000 compliance checks a day (that’s 72 checks a minute during working hours!) and runs compliance checks on behalf of our customers on over 4 million individuals a year. To give a sense of the scale that we now run at, our app (which has for three years been the highest ranked compliance app in the UK) has 250,000+ reviews, six times more than our closest competitor.
It is a credit to Dye & Durham that they have allowed us the space to keep doing what we do, many acquiring owners do not and damage their newly bought asset in the process. For sure, I’d be lying if I didn’t say we’d had the odd bump in the road as integrating a small boutique technology business like Credas in to a global Goliath like Dye & Durham causes chaffing points, but it is to the credit of outgoing Dye & Durham CEO, Matthew Proud, that of the Executive team in Dye & Durham, he was the first to see that supporting Credas, supporting myself and my management team and creating the conditions where Credas could flourish within the Group was the best way of maximising the value of the business – and the results during the past year have proven him to be correct in giving me and my management team that space and support.
During this period of extraordinary growth, we’ve also had to face unprecedented challenges. Co-founder and CTO, Kevin Smith, took the opportunity of the change of ownership of the business to step away for a well-deserved rest early in 2024 and to rack up some miles on his Peloton bike.
A substantial proportion of the business had been gifted to staff ownership, so the acquisition saw all staff share in the financial reward of the sale. This created a natural reflection point for some of our longstanding senior team, so with a sense of ‘job well done’, some moved on from the business (notably Drew and Maria) and they do so with my sincere thanks and appreciation for the critical roles they played during the first six-year phase in the company history.
There has therefore been a sense of renewal in the past six months as new hires have replaced familiar faces, bring new ideas and new ways of doing things which have built upon the solid foundations we already have in place.
2024 also saw huge leaps forward in our technology and service offering. Our new Credas Connect platform has jumped us well ahead of the pack, offering a capability and flexibility that is hard for others to compete against – hence the record customer wins. We’ve also launched a new KYB-2-KYC service which has been an enormous success and the release of Credas+, our remediation service, which has seen over 70% of our new customers take-up the service, far exceeding my expectations.
In the same year Credas became the first IDSP in the UK to achieve the highest certification standard as part of the UK Government’s Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework. We also won Fintech Company of the year at the Fintech Awards and saw a number of our staff recognised for their contribution to our sector.
Having highlighted some of the successes, it is customary to pay tribute to those who have made it happen – the team. Such hat tipping often feels trite and formulaic, but I do so with the most sincere and genuine heartfelt words that my limited writing ability is able to muster. Credas is not a massive faceless organisation, we are 50 people based in South Wales. Many of our employees are related to each other, two of my own sons work within the business and many of our staff have been with us since the very early days of the business being founded. I usually hate it when companies use the world ‘care’ – but honestly, there isn’t a person who works within the business who doesn’t care about the job that we do for customers, who doesn’t care about how our technology performs, who doesn’t care about our long-term relationships with suppliers and customers.
I’ll often hear, after the event, how team members have worked until the early hours to get a release out or have worked overnight fixing a bug. I frequently hear how staff have logged in to answer a client query over a weekend or whilst on holiday. All unannounced, unasked for, done without fuss or a big show. Just nice people, doing nice things.
I know this personal effort comes across to customers because I see it in the statistics. Our client revenue retention is staggeringly high and we’ve never lost a Reseller customer in the history of the business. It is but one example of how staff behaviours and performance are directly reflected in the P&L.
I am enormously proud of the high-performance unit we have built together. 50 people in Cardiff should not be duking it out with TEAMS, Zoom and LinkedIn in the app chart Top 10. This high-performance culture is based on a foundation of clear shared values – which we talk about a lot. My job as leader is to protect this culture, I owe it to the team who have bought in to it and fostered it and I owe it to the public company who now owns Credas – as it is a key component that is driving the value of our business.
Looking ahead to 2025
As thoughts turn towards the future and what 2025 will bring, I feel a sense of incredible optimism for the things I can control and influence within Credas – tempered by events over which few of us have control over, such as Government policy and the instability created by conflicts around the world.
2025 will see Credas internationalise. We already have live Proof of Concepts ‘on the ground’ in South Africa, Australia and Ireland – with more in the pipeline for other territories. This opens up a whole world of opportunity for my team as we export the benefits of our sector leading Credas Connect platform to other territories in lockstep with our owners, Dye & Durham.
A brand new ‘Payments Module’ will mean that our customers (such as Estate Agents) will be able to choose whether in the future they pay for their compliance checks (as they do now), or whether Credas collects the payment from their client instead – offering huge savings for many of our customers.
The first half of 2025 will also see a game changing release of a shareable compliance service from Credas. Over half of housing transactions currently use Credas and our new service will make these results instantly shareable with any other party involved in the transaction. This has the potential to save days (or weeks) from half of the transactions in the UK. Others have tried a shareable solution, which is often no better than bandying around a PDF, but none have the scale nor the unique, slick technological solution that Credas will be launching for a genuine shareable solution for the housing market, working at scale on day 1. This will be a huge development for many of our customers – and we’ll be giving it to them for free. But what’s more, we’ll also make this service open to non-Credas customers, so the entire sector can benefit.
The New Year will also see the addition of QES standard eSignatures added to our platform (legally accepted for contract exchanging in the conveyancing process), enhancing our existing free eSign solution as well as a host of cool new features and services that will keep increasing the value that we can offer our customers and keep Credas at the vanguard of our sector.
As a recent report from Aventine Lab said:
As CEO, I know that we have to keep working hard to maintain this best-in-class position.
A large part of our business is linked to the property sector, a sector which was showing confidence going into the final quarter of 2024 and there was a genuine buzz, excitement and expectation that 2025 was looking to be an excellent year for the sector. However, much of this optimism was popped with the actions of the new UK Government since being elected. Months of talking down the economy (for political purposes) in the run up to the budget and then the changes announced in the budget itself have sucked out much of the positivity, a fact that is reflected in the collapse in GDP growth rate and business confidence indices since they were elected and the prospect of further interest rate cuts have now disappeared off over the horizon. This is frustrating as the sector, and wider economy, was bubbling along quite nicely before this controversial approach to economic policy was unleashed.
My hope is that the new (are they still new?) administration will settle down, forget the politics of opposition and quickly learn the politics of government. Stop talking down the economy and take a more mature view of small businesses and acknowledge that they are the backbone of the economy and deserve supporting, not punishing.
More than many years of late, 2025 dawns full of opportunity, but with challenges and potential headwinds that could blow things off course.
For Credas, the best thing we can do is ‘business as usual’. Keep doing what we’ve been doing. Keep to our values and culture, keep cherishing our customers, keep developing sector leading technology, keep releasing cool features and functions that reduce pain points for our customers, keep doing the right thing, keep executing on our business strategy – something we’ve been doing each year for seven years now. It seems to be working.
Happy Christmas and New Year to all our customers, suppliers, partners and peers – I’m off to book a hiking holiday*.
Tim Barnett,
CEO, Credas Technologies
