The Australian Ambassador to Ireland, Mr Richard Andrews and Australia's Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner Mr David Watson, visited WIT’s Research and Innovation Centre ArcLabs on May 16th as part of a trade mission to explore business opportunities and areas for collaboration between Australia and Ireland, particularly in the areas of financial services and agriculture-technology.
Speaking during his visit, Mr Andrews said that he was delighted to make his first visit to Waterford as Australia's Ambassador to Ireland. “This visit is part of the Embassy's mission to keep Australian businesses informed about opportunities in Ireland, including right here in Waterford."
During the tour of ArcLabs, the Australian delegation met with Mr Ben Cronin, Founder and CEO of Kyckr Ireland which has offices in Sydney Australia as well as Waterford and Dublin. Kyckr Ireland is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Kyckr Australia, which listed on the Sydney Stock Exchange in September 2016.
According to Mr Cronin, “One of the most important decisions for Kyckr was locating in ArcLabs in Waterford. The company is fundamentally a technology business so being located here has allowed us to grow the team with the best tech experience and to leverage existing knowledge and experiences from within ArcLabs. Support from Enterprise Ireland and the ArcLabs team have been instrumental to the Kyckr story”.
Kyckr provide award winning, commercially proven products for the authentication of businesses globally. The company has developed API’s and cloud based decision engines for Best in Class KYC due diligence and customer on-boarding. Kyckr’s products offer a significant competitive edge to customers with automated data cleansing, remediation and on-going monitoring that dramatically improve customer on-boarding timelines. The Kyckr registry network is now the largest authoritative company search network available online, uniquely connecting to over 150 business registries worldwide which are all accessible via the Kyckr API or web portal. The company has successfully built a solid customer base with a number of the top global banks using the service as their primary data source for corporate KYC checking for AML compliance. Kyckr has a number of bank customers in the AsiaPac region, including Australia. Kyckr see enormous potential for growth in the region.
Ciaran Cullen, Innovation Centre Manager at ArcLabs spoke glowing of Kyckr, saying, “ArcLabs has had a great relationship with Kyckr and its founders from its inception and through all the company’s iterations. Kyckr’s international experience and success has been an example of what can be achieved from a base in the South East of Ireland to other new start-ups. They have utilised knowledge within WIT and generously shared their knowledge by mentoring and sharing their experience with other start-ups that have come through the ArcLabs process. It's great to see their relationships in Australia grow as their global expansion continues.”
ArcLabs Research and Innovation Centre is the location for 32 companies in Waterford and Kilkenny and was established ten years ago to enable an entrepreneurial environment among researchers, entrepreneurs and academics in order to develop WIT spin out companies and augment spin in companies. It arranges and hosts the Arc Academy and New Frontiers programmes and has relationships with investment vehicles through Acceleration programmes.
During their time in Waterford, the Ambassador and Senior Trade and Investment Commissioner met with key personnel at Dawn Meats; Kyckr, TSSG, ArcLabs and Waterford Institute of Technology.