The Story of Cygnetise: Building the Future of Signatory Management

The Story of Cygnetise: Building the Future of Signatory Management

The confidence to start your own company doesn’t arrive on schedule. Steve Pomfret spent twenty years working inside large banks, watching other people run companies, admiring their courage from the safety of corporate employment. “I’ve always admired other people running their own company, but whilst you’re actually working for a big corporation or a big bank is you kind of, there’s some kind of security.”

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Steve Pomfret, CEO and Founder of Cygnetise, a signatory management platform that’s raised $8 million in funding, shared how he transformed two decades of banking frustration into a category-defining company. This is that story.

The Stepping Stone

Steve wasn’t a banker. He was something potentially more valuable: a process guy. Someone who understood where banks bled inefficiency and how technology could stop the bleeding. But understanding problems and earning banker money are different things.

“I loved what I did for the banks, but not being an actual banker and let’s just say front office trading or corporate finance or something like that, you don’t get paid the big bucks. So I kind of saw my career ceiling, you know, becoming, hitting the ceiling, and I left to do exactly the same thing, but as a freelance consultant.”

The freelance work was the bridge. More money, less security, and crucially—half of being an entrepreneur. “Because you’re kind of like half being a freelance consultant, you’re like half doing your running your own business. So then I guess I started thinking about it a little bit more and then decided to take the leap.”

The Perfect Collision

By December 2015, Steve finished his last contract. He could have lined up another one. Instead, he did something that would define Cygnetise’s entire trajectory: he went to school on blockchain.

“I realized that if I was going to continue doing what I was doing, I need to understand more about innovative technology. So essentially, I was advising banks on how to work more efficiently and what technology to use, and everyone was talking about blockchain and other innovative technologies.”

The first months of 2016 were meetups and classes. Not building. Learning. And in that learning, something clicked. “When I understood more about it, I realized it was in a great position to actually do something about it because I understood the problems that the banks faced, and now I actually understood more about the technology.”

This is where most origin stories get the causality wrong. Steve didn’t identify a problem and then learn technology to solve it. He learned the technology, then systematically analyzed which banking problems it could actually solve. “It was like the perfect opportunity.”

Analyzing Reality, Not Hype

In 2016, blockchain was going to revolutionize everything. Steve knew better. He’d been inside banks long enough to know what they’d actually adopt.

“I realized that there were loads of great use cases for enterprise blockchain outside of cryptocurrency, but what people were talking about is going to be really impossible to adopt.”

So he started analyzing. Not the sexiest problems. Not the biggest markets. But which problems suited blockchain technology and which ones would have the best chance of becoming a business. The critical filter? “Replacing a manual process and not replacing another technology.”

This discipline led him to signatory management. Banks needed to share who could do what on behalf of their organization. They did it with Excel and Word and quarterly email blasts to thousands of counterparts. It was painful. It was universal. And crucially, there was no incumbent technology fighting back.

The Two-Year Wait

Cygnetise officially started in May 2016. First sale? Two years later.

“It was probably two years before actually made the first sale. So, yeah, quite a long time.”

Those early conversations followed a brutal pattern. Everyone was interested. Nobody would commit. “The first question we always got asked is, like, what other customers have you got? And, of course, if you haven’t gotten me.”

The breakthrough came from rethinking geography. Big companies in London, New York, Frankfurt—they weren’t going to move first. But the Channel Islands? “The Channel Islands to the UK are probably what the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands are to the US, where you have a lot offshore trust companies and some big name brands with small, autonomous little offices.”

These offices could make decisions independently. The ticket sizes were smaller. The risk was manageable. “They really didn’t have too much to lose. They could run their existing process in parallel, so they weren’t taking on too much of a risk.”

The deals were heavily discounted. The revenue was minimal. But those customers are still with Cygnetise today. More importantly, they opened the door to what came next.

The Validation Moment

Landing Société Générale changed everything. Not because of the revenue. Because of what it proved.

“Going through their due diligence process and being trusted by them, I guess. Man, hang on a second, we’re really onto something here.”

A major European bank doesn’t pass due diligence to nice people with interesting ideas. They pass it to companies solving real problems with legitimate technology. That validation cascaded. Hedge funds in the US and UK. Switzerland became a hotspot. Oil companies, tech companies, public companies across multiple geographies.

The Dark Valley

Success stories smooth over the terror. Steve doesn’t. “When you’ve only got, like, a couple of months of Runway left, and then you’re just trying to, like, fundraise, and then you have these unpredicted without going into detail, one particular instance where there was, you know, you can’t call it bit of bad luck, bit of a bad decision, and it feels like you’re just at the bottom of a hole that you can’t get out of.”

The board saved them. Three directors, all veterans of financial technology, all operators who’d been there before. “Without them, I mean, God knows what would have happened.”

The lesson Steve learned about fundraising came from those dark moments. “The best thing is just to be completely straight up, honest and open, and then you can see which ones that you actually get on with and who you can work with.”

Get investors who want to help and support you. Be honest enough that you can tell who they are. That alignment matters more than valuation.

The Future: Winner Takes All

Cygnetise has gotten eighty percent of their revenue from direct outbound sales. That’s about to change dramatically.

“At the moment we’ve been doing direct B2B outbound sales. That’s where we get 80% of our revenue from. Now we have significant interest from channel partnerships that can be banks, big four, other large tech companies.”

The timing is deliberate. These partnerships have been interested for a while. But Cygnetise waited until they were ready. “We’ve been talking, they’ve been interested in some time, for some time, but now we’re actually ready for it and we’re beginning to have formal discussions.”

Channel partners can hit the market at scale in ways that even a sophisticated outbound machine can’t match. “This is where we see the hyper growth coming from because they can hit the market significantly quicker and at scale for us.”

Steve’s vision for the next few years is clear and ambitious. “As soon as we start having these channel partnerships and large enterprise deals, then this should be where hopefully we can take the market and get to that winner take all position.”

The Through-Line

From freelance consultant to category creator, Steve’s story reveals something important about building venture-scale companies: the journey is rarely linear, and confidence comes from experience, not inspiration.

He spent twenty years learning the problems. He spent months learning the technology. He spent two years reaching first sale. He waited years to pursue channel partnerships until the company was ready.

Nothing about that timeline is glamorous. “I don’t think there’s anything glamorous about being a Founder until probably you’ve exited.”

But that patience, that discipline, that systematic approach to analyzing problems and building solutions—that’s how you create a category. That’s how you get major European banks to trust you with critical financial operations. That’s how you position yourself to win a market that every financial institution participates in but nobody knew could be revolutionized.

The market was always there. Every bank, every corporation, every financial institution manages authorized signatories. They always have. They always will. Steve just had to prove there was a better way than Excel and quarterly PDF emails.

Sometimes the best origin stories aren’t about revolutionary insights. They’re about operational discipline applied over years. About taking the leap only after building the bridge. About understanding that category creation isn’t a sprint to product-market fit—it’s a marathon to market dominance.