A SCOTTISH financial technology firm has hailed securing a second top tier customer in less than six months, upping its outlook for a second time since the recent launch of its latest product.
Shares in Linwood-based Beeks Financial Cloud closed up two per cent after it announced the signing of a $2.2 million contract over four years for its Proximity Cloud offering with one of the world’s largest foreign exchange brokers.
The company is expected to be named once the system goes live.
Beeks Financial Cloud said in a brief trading update that, combined with positive trading with new and existing clients, this new Proximity Cloud contract win means that the board now anticipates revenues for the year ended June 30, 2022 will be ahead of current market expectations.
It also said: “The additional revenue will be reinvested in the further development of the Proximity Cloud offering, to capitalise on its growing sales pipeline and significant market opportunity.”
Gordon McArthur, chief executive of Beeks Financial Cloud, said the rate and size of new contract wins demonstrate the potential for Proximity Cloud, “addressing a significant part of the financial services market for whom the public cloud is not sufficiently secure”.
He said: “It is a long-term commitment to a product that we launched less than six months ago and this is the second customer to take it up so good news from a product point of view and reconfirms we are on the right track in terms of product development.
“We’ve spent a lot of money developing the product, we are still in version one of it, and we have a lot of opportunity pipelined.
“We still need to further develop the product to meet the market requirements so that is ongoing.”
The firm said its solutions in latency-sensitive environments mean it is positioned to cater to the requirements of financial institutions of all sizes.
READ MORE: Beeks upbeat as dividend cut to finance ambitious growth plans
Its addressable market includes up to 20,000 financial institutions around the world, a large percentage of which maintain their own IT infrastructure and are yet to move to the cloud computing model.
Mr McArthur said: “We have a big target market. They’re not all tier one accounts, but there is a lot of big names in there to target the product going forward, so it is an exciting time.
“For the second time this year we’ve said we are ahead of the market expectations, the second time in four months, so that is good news for investors.
"From when IPO’d four years ago now we have nearly 400% return for the amount for the initial investors so the share price has done incredibly well in the last four years. The City’s happy, the shareholders are happy, but we hope there is more to come.”
It said the latency-sensitive environments need to be built, connected and analysed, and “Beeks is one of the few companies in the world that can provide this”.
Mr McArthur also said: “The successes with our tier one clients mean we are now recognised as an established technology provider to financial markets, with a track record and compelling reference clients, providing us with a strong foundation to drive our business forward.
“The prospects for Beeks have never been more promising and with a growing pipeline we are excited by the opportunity ahead.”
Last year it almost doubled its headcount from 60 to around 100 and it has plans to add more staff as it moves to new premises at Braehead.
Beeks Financial Cloud is a cloud computing, connectivity and analytics provider for financial services with an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model it says offers financial organisations the flexibility and agility to deploy and connect to a variety of exchanges, trading venues and cloud service providers "at a fraction of the cost of building their own networks and infrastructure".
It has an international network of 19 datacentres, and serves around 250 institutional clients, around a dozen of which are tier one organisations.
The City reacted positively, although slightly subdued.
Shares in AIM listed Beeks closed up 1.78%, or 3p, at 171.5p. It contrasts to September when the first, $1m Proximity Cloud contract update came with a 10% rise.
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