Firing on all cylinders
This week, we just released our annual financial results. While we’re not (yet 🙂) large enough to be putting together laminated and glossily printed 200-page annual reports, I thought it might be an opportune moment to highlight a few of our recent successes.
The financial scorecard
Firstly, I’m proud to report that our revenues grew 40% in 2022 compared to 2021, now sitting at an all-time high. The growth has carried on into 2023: our trailing twelve-month revenues to March 2023 are now up 50% compared to the previous period.
Importantly, our revenue base isn’t concentrated - it’s spread across over 25 clients across dealers and issuers. Of course, we are still nowhere near 100% market-share, but we’re getting close to that point where we can (quietly) claim to have reached “critical mass.” We’re growing our suite of products as well, as our announcement last week about our structured notes offering shows. As that CFO catchphrase goes, we really are “firing on all cylinders.”
Obviously we’re a business and not a charity, so, of course, revenue matters to us, our investors, and our employees. But just as importantly, it matters to our clients and business partners as well. They have put a lot of trust in us as an organization, and they want to see that we are building a business that will be around for the long run.
This is especially important in 2023 in the midst of a tech downturn. We’re very grateful to our clients who choose to work with a small business like ours. We’re not always the obvious choice, (even if we have a superior product), and I can see how it would be easier to try and get a project done with a larger software company. As the old saying goes, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
Despite that natural headwind, we’ve had clients who have been with us since 2016, (some on multi-year contracts) and it’s important to us that they know they’re working with a winner.
Growing global footprint
Our broader community continues to grow, too. We now count 21 dealers and 104 issuers as clients, which is another all-time high. Those dealers and issuers log in from more than 70 cities worldwide, from New York to Tokyo to Sydney, and pretty much everywhere in between. Our ecosystem of post-trade partners continues to grow, and we’re now connected to 2 major exchanges, 3 paying agents and 1 CSD, with more in the pipeline that we will soon announce.
Issuance volumes - what really matters
Perhaps most importantly, our platform is processing more and more transactions every day. Our documentation library now has 74 EMTN and CD programs digitised and tested that are regularly used for transactions. We formally launched our documentation product in 2021, and that year we saw 35 deals across the tool. In 2022, we beat that by 88%, completing 64 trades. This year, we’re off to a roaring start, with 42 deals in just Q1 alone, up 162% year on year. There are all vanilla debt issuance, so don’t include our traction in the structured notes space.
Look back to look forward
A couple of weeks ago, Origin celebrated its 8th birthday.
On the one hand, that’s a long time, and if you asked me and Rob back then where we’d like to be by now, I’m sure we would’ve given some bullish (unrealistic!) predictions. For the most part, we still wish things could move faster and that our traction could be greater. But, every once in a while, it’s important to remember that, in our market, 8 years is the blink of an eye.
Changing practices in the bond markets is one of the hardest tasks to undertake. Even with a band of willing, supportive clients on board, bureaucracy and red tape can extend timelines from weeks to months to years. In the early days, it can feel like a slog, with so much work going in and so little traction being gained. Many peers have fallen as they failed to escape the purgatory of the “traction gap,” that period between after you launch your first product but before you find product-market-fit.
But, after years of staying focused on our clients, we’re pleased to see that the fruits of our labour are really beginning to pay off. To our clients who have stuck with us, (many for 5, 6,7 years) we are eternally grateful for your loyalty. And of course, we couldn’t have done any of this without the Origin team. These successes are not mine and Rob’s – they are all of ours, and long may we celebrate them as our growth continues.
