A year isn’t a long time in marketing

This week marks my first year at SEON (and the first year of being a CMO). It’s amazing how fast the time has gone and how much we’ve got done in 12 months. Perhaps my proudest moment of the last year has been the creation of the #dad_joke slack channel that seems to have taken on a life of its own. It’s gotten so good (or bad depending on your point of view) that I’ve even got Tamas, our CEO, making dad jokes now. Perhaps the worst moment of the last year is now being referred to as “Matt D The Elder” as our new (younger) Chief Revenue Officer, Matt DeLauro, joined SEON a couple of months ago. 

On the subject of old age and time passing, I never thought I’d be in marketing. I certainly never thought I’d be a CMO when I started in IT 30 years ago, before the SEON co-founders, Tamas Kadar and Bence Jendruszak, were born (which is odd for all three of us – especially when they were named in Europe’s Forbes 30 under 30). Having written some of the worst code in the history of java and having received very delicately delivered feedback that “perhaps you’re better at explaining what technology can do than actually doing it” – I think my career in marketing was set. 

In all seriousness, SEON has come a long way in the last year. Perhaps the biggest moment of the year was the Series B funding 12 months ago, followed by our first acquisition and the launch of our “free forever” pricing plan to help small companies fight fraud. These two moments really helped us fill out some key capabilities to help us position SEON as a full fincrime platform with multiple use cases and a huge array of benefits to an organisation vs being a point solution or fraud tool. We’ve got some exciting things in the mix to help reinforce that platform in the next few months. 

Depending on who you talk to, our Total Addressable Marketing (TAM) is around the $50-60bn mark by 2025 and if we can build on some of our unique capabilities and keep putting what customers need first, we’ve got a great shot at being a company that transforms fincrime prevention. We’ve advanced a lot of the customer success, commercial and partner teams in the last few months. This gives us a really good chance at disrupting a lot of the traditional way of looking at fraud and making the most of the opportunity we’ve got and that our investors such as IVP and Creandum saw in SEON.  

To support that “shot”, we started working more closely with the industry analysts six months ago and it’s been rewarding to see their “a-ha” moments when they see what SEON can really do and invaluable to hear the feedback and trends in the market. We’ve also gone from strength to strength with keeping the customer voice front and centre with programs like our award-winning G2 reviews but also re-launching our customer advocacy programs with a regular drumbeat of great case studies and customer testimonial videos that show the impact and value that SEON brings to some really innovative organisations. We’ve just launched the latest customer story with Rebtel, a disruptive international telco.

It’s always nice to get recognised for the progress we’ve made and a few weeks ago we picked up the FS Tech Awards’ “Cybersecurity Solution Of The Year” trophy. As cybersecurity, fraud, fincrime and cybercrime continue to converge, we’ve got a fascinating few years ahead of us. 

Perhaps the biggest thing that we’ve done is to integrate marketing together and “join the dots” (which is apparently my catchphrase) across all the sales and marketing functions and thread together all our channels better to amplify them all. Like with a lot of tech companies, the last year hasn’t been all plain sailing but I’m incredibly proud of the marketing team, their resilience and how they’ve stuck together as a unit. The biggest surprise was how young the company is in terms of average age 🙂 This may not sound like a positive but the energy, innovation and speed that SEON works at, thanks to that youth, has been pretty exciting and rewarding but also gives us an advantage being at the forefront of the ever-changing fincrime landscape. 

It’s been really interesting to go back to work for a European company again after 9 years as a VP at a Silicon Valley founded company. As a CMO, it’s been incredibly rewarding to apply all I’ve learnt to a younger company but it’s been as rewarding to build some new things from scratch and learn a whole load of new things. They say that “with age comes wisdom” which in theory should make me a genius but it might just make me the exception that proves the rule. It certainly does give me the carte blanche to revel in my own dad jokes in the weekly internal marketing updates.  

It’s been a fantastic first year and I’ve met some really wonderful people along the way. It really does feel like we’ve only just got started and there’s a lot more in front of us and the promise of some very exciting news to share over the next 12 months. 

As always, thanks for reading

Matt