From a business that started out providing those familiar post code-based address look-up tables, identity data intelligence GB Group PLC (LON:GBG) has come a long way.
To say the least, the internet has moved on a lot since those days and has become ingrained in daily life, bringing with it myriad problems, many of which GBG can resolve.
Knowledge is power
The company's activities break down into three areas:
· Personnel screening
· Fraud, risk and compliance management
· Customer insight - working out who the customers are and how they'll behave
Personnel screening includes the obvious due diligence on potential new employees, including online criminal records checks, identity and right to work verification and full driving licence checks.
Managing fraud risk and adhering to compliance regulations is more about verifying the identities of customers, rather than employees.
Around a third of the company's revenue comes from financial services, and GBG's customer registration solution covers more than 190 countries, so this is a big part of the business.
The odds are, with more of the world getting online, it is going to become bigger.
"We provide a return on investment for the client. We filter out the bad customers, and deliver the good ones," Dave Wilson, chief financial officer and chief operations officer, tells Proactive.
The third area - customer insight - is all about enabling companies to better understand their customers, and therefore serve them better.
As Sir Francis Bacon said as far back as 1597, 'knowledge is power', and GBG forte is providing the knowledge, and therefore power, to its clients.
It does this by accumulating vast amounts of data, using some fancy software and algorithms to add value and knit it all together, and then making it available in useful formats.
An international approach to 'buy and build'
Much of the data comes from competitors of GBG in what Wilson, with due apologies for the ugliness of the word, explains is an example of the "co-opetition" model, where rivals sometimes recognise the benefits of scratching each other's backs.
Those competitors include big names such as Experian PLC (LON:EXPN), Equifax Inc (NYSE:EFX) and Lexis Nexis, which is owned by RELX Group (LON:REL).
There is a multitude of smaller competitors operating in niches, and with its buy-and-build strategy, GBG has probably cast an eye over most of them.
'We're looking at about 40 businesses at any one point in time and out of that we're talking to three or four,'' Wilson told Proactive Investors.
Since 2011, the company has made no fewer than nine acquisitions.
"We are interested in buying capabilities we don't have, and being in new geographies that we need to be in for our clients," Wilson explained.
The geographical angle is an important one for GBG. When you work in the global village that is the worldwide web, it is essential to take an international view. The group's proud boast is that it can verify information “to know your customer” (money laundering) level on more than half of the global population.
Around 31% of revenue already comes from international customers, and it has active customers in 70 countries served by 24 offices in 15 countries.
Its international reach, and the breadth of its databases, give GBG a competitive advantage in a rapidly expanding global market, and it wants to extend both.
Growth drivers
Wilson identifies four main drivers of growth for the business.
The first is globalisation.
The population is not only expanding at a frightening rate, but more people are getting online, leading to more cross-border transactions, especially on mobile devices.
Secondly, in this post-credit crunch world, with the global economy still licking its wounds after the financial sector brought it to its knees, increased compliance is becoming a fact of life.
The major financial centres are already well down the heavy compliance route but others will follow the "know your customer" maxim, creating an opportunity for GBG.
Third is the information explosion.
Companies know a lot more about their customers now – sometimes too much, in terms of making sense of it all.
GBG brings all this information together in one place , facilitating understanding of a company's customer base so it can react in real time to the needs of those customers.
Who are those customers?
GBG provides services to business-to-consumer (B2C) organisations, including government bodies.
The group says its information and software is “disruptive”, which is another way of saying its target customers have to have it, so it should not be a surprise that banks, insurance companies, retailers and online gaming operators feature heavily in the client list, as do utility and transport companies.
Wilson says the company not only has to serve its customers' current needs but also keep a watch out for what's coming down the turnpike.
“We want to deliver the best product in the market place, and try to anticipate what the customers' needs will be in the future, and write that into the software.”
Current performance
Performance in the current financial year (which runs to the end of March 2017) has been good so far, with the half-year results showing 16% year-on-year revenue growth to £37.5mln and 15% adjusted operating profits growth to £5.2mln, which was slightly ahead of expectations.
The market is expecting the company to weigh in with around £90mln in full-year revenues, and thanks to the nature of the business, where trading is weighted to the second half, the board is confident of meeting those expectations.
According to forecasts compiled by data aggregator Factset, the following year revenue is expected to break through the £100mln barrier, so the market has pegged this as a high growth company operating in a fast-moving area.
Wilson draws an analogy to Moore's Law, a rule of thumb from the computing world that postulated processing speeds would double every two years.