finnCap Tech Chat | Forethought spares afterthought

Half of successful investment is spotting opportunities and the other half is avoiding - and learning from - mistakes; in this we are generally the root cause of a lot of our own misfortune. History offers many examples but a classic was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803; when this country paid for its own invasion. The nascent United States wanted to double its size by purchasing a huge stretch of land up the Mississippi from Napoleonic France for the (then) huge sum of $15 million. The young US didn’t have that kind of cash so issued cheap US Gov bonds in London, greedily snapped up by British banks and investors. Of course as soon as Napoleon got the money he put it towards invading Britain, funding an army of 70,000 soldiers at the Channel ports by 1804. Britain only avoided disastrous consequences thanks to the efforts of Nelson’s Royal Navy at Trafalgar in 1805.

It’s impressive when we have to pull off miracles, but in most cases forethought and planning might have avoided a perilous situation in the first place. That is exactly why a good management team and pre-planned strategy is the first place we start with any corporate; prevention rather than cure. For example forethought has been a remarkable trait for Tremor over the years; starting in internet advertising, its management anticipated the mobile revolution and made a move from desktop. It then anticipated the move to video just as video and connected TV advertising were starting to flourish, and they have now driven +96% organic revenue growth in Q1 21. D4t4 is another company notable for its anticipation and careful planning and strategy. Its purchase of Speed Trap, a highly advanced (in fact initially over-engineered) tool for measuring website speeds, was inspired; that technology was the basis of its Celebrus Customer Data Platform which today leads the field in the huge volumes of granular data it is able to gather in real time from customer online sessions. That data is used to improve the customer experience and drive additional business across the retail, financial services and travel industries. With the CEO set to retire next year it has again demonstrated excellent succession planning with the experienced and respected US VP appointed to step up to replace him over this next year. Other examples of good foresight are shown by PCI-Pal which developed a cloud based payment security solution whilst rivals concentrated on the security of getting hardware into contact centres. Clearly management had not foreseen the pandemic, but the ability to deploy remotely around the world, without physical delay, has come into its own over the last year and enabled PCI-Pal to expand rapidly into new regions in Canada, Australia and mainland Europe.

The follow up to this story proves why forethought is so important - as we often don’t learn from poor foresight. Ten years later in 1814 the Duke of Wellington bought a palatial house, the Hotel de Charost in Paris, from Napoleon's sister, Pauline Borghese, for use as the British Embassy (as it is to this day). As might have been expected Pauline handed the cash straight to her brother to finance his escape from exile on Elba and fund a swift return to Imperial power, which Wellington himself then had to bring to a bloody end to at Waterloo the following year. Forethought will avoid a lot of pain in the future. One of Napoleon’s favourite maxims was “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”