London start-up Cygnetise raise £1m seed funding to roll out UK corporate blockchain application

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Cygnetise, the Blockchain based application built to help organisations maintain and distribute their Authorised Signatory Lists, today announced the completion of a £1m seed funding round led by London based VCF, Calibrate Management.

The Cygnetise product, launched in April 2017, has been proven by a range of FTSE 100 financial and professional services firms and is ready for wide scale market uptake.

The raise, which sees Cygnetise’s total funding since incorporation (May 2016) reach £1.6m, will help the company rapidly accelerate their sales and business development for efforts in both domestic and international markets and attract clients in the insurance, fund management and legal sectors.

Stephen Pomfret, Founder and CEO, said:

“We wanted to create a simple application using Blockchain to bring operational efficiencies, reduce risk and mitigate the opportunities for fraud from a mandatory paper based process. Our vision is that our product, the first UK based corporate Blockchain application, will revolutionise overnight the way companies maintain and distribute Authorised Signatory Lists.”

Remy Kesrouani, managing partner at Calibrate Management added: \

“We share the view that the Cygnetise product, using Blockchain technology, is instantly relevant for managing authorised signatory lists in banks, insurance companies and wider professional and legal services. It is a beautifully simple way to modernise a manual paper based process and we are excited to be investing and will work closely with Cygnetise to accelerate the uptake of this solution.”

Since the launch of their live platform in April 2017, the Square Mile start-up has attracted clients from the insurance, fund management and legal sectors. The latest version of the platform (Oct 2017), now provides a self-service model, enabling firms to sign up to the platform directly.

Key features and benefits of the Cygnetise platform;

  • Legacy model sharing functionality — using dynamic PDFs with auto-update features to ensure a smooth transition from current systems.
  • Real time editing and maintenance of authorised signatory lists, alleviating the time delay in procuring signatures within an organisation.
  • Permissions based collaboration — giving companies the flexibility they need to grant and revoke interaction rights of counterparts instantly.
  • Increased security through access management, data encryption and time stamped usage, substantially reducing the risk of misrepresentation and fraud.

Cygnetise is a digital Blockchain platform for maintaining and distributing Authorised Signatory Lists. It significantly simplifies the current process that is carried out by nearly all organisations, alleviating internal operational inefficiencies, reducing risk and mitigating opportunities for fraud. The application provides significant benefits to clients and counterparts removing the existing administrative burden and improving the overall customer experience.

How Cygnetise works

Authorised Signatory Lists can be uploaded and shared with their counterparts on a permission only basis.  Only those permissioned to view the signatory list can see the list of the authorised personnel.  If a change is required to the authorised signatory list, each of those permissioned to view can instantaneously see the update.  Also using the ‘immutable’ facet of Blockchain, each change is recorded with a timestamp, including details of who made the change, providing a very useful audit trail.

This remediates pain points that can be found in the existing process of manually compiling and emailing scanned copies to each and every counterpart.