Listen to this articleWith offices in New York, Chicago, Vancouver, London, Singapore, Raleigh, and Halifax, Global Relay is the leading provider of cloud archiving, compliance, and eDiscovery solutions for the global financial sector. Global Relay delivers services to over 20,000 customers and partners in 90 countries. Below is our interview with Warren Roy, CEO & Founder of Global Relay:
Q: Could you tell us something more about Global Relay and your services?
A: Global Relay is the leading provider of cloud-based electronic message archiving, compliance and supervision solutions for the global financial sector and other highly regulated industries. Essentially, we archive an organization’s electronic communications – such as email, IM, social media and mobile messaging. We also provide services that help the company get value out of those archived messages, whether that’s producing records for a lawsuit, reviewing communication for noncompliance with regulations, or simply retrieving messages that had been mistakenly deleted. Especially in highly regulated, highly litigious industries like finance, our services are hugely valuable to an organization.
We’ve been providing cloud-based solutions since 1999, making us one of the pioneers in the field. In the past 16 years we’ve grown to 370+ employees in seven offices worldwide. We have over 20,000 customers in 90 countries, including 22 of the world’s top 25 banks.
Q: What advantage does Global Relay have over its competitors?
A: Global Relay competes against a lot of multi-billion-dollar tech giants, so we’ve always known that we had to play to our strengths in order succeed. One key advantage for Global Relay is our focus on the financial sector. We knew from the beginning that we couldn’t try to be the next Microsoft and take on the whole market at once. We found success by growing within our niche. With that focus, we’ve been able to develop unparalleled expertise in finance. Some of our biggest successes, such as our eight-year partnership with Thomson Reuters and our selection as FINRA’s Compliance Resource Provider for Message Archiving, have come directly out of our ability to provide services that are designed to meet the precise needs of the financial sector.
Another key advantage is our commitment to developing the best possible technology, and doing it all in-house. Around half of all Global Relay employees are dedicated to research and development, which is practically unheard of in the tech industry. Our control over our technology extends through the entire stack, including our privately owned and operated green data center, which we launched in 2013. Because we invest so much in development, we have some of the most powerful and scalable technology on the market, and the agility to quickly adapt and improve it, all at a comparatively low operational cost.
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Q: Global Relay was a winner of Canada’s Best Managed Companies program, could you tell us something more?
A: Something that I’m particularly proud of is Global Relay being named to both the Best Managed list and to the Deloitte Fast 500 simultaneously. We’ve been a winner in the Best Managed program for two consecutive years, and the Fast 500, an annual ranking of the fastest growing North American tech companies, for four. As far as I know, we’re the only B.C. tech company that’s ever been on both lists simultaneously, which I think says a lot about how we’ve been able to maintain our core values and mission while doubling in size several times over the last few years.
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Q: Global Relay has grown from a bootstrapped tech start-up to the leading provider of cloud-based electronic message archiving, compliance and supervision solutions. In terms of what you’ve learned from building Global Relay, what advice would you give to future entrepreneurs?
A: When we started Global Relay, we spent a great deal of the first five years trying to raise funds and deal with venture capitalists, none of whom saw the potential value in the company. My advice for entrepreneurs would be to believe in your concept, and commit yourself to realizing it. A VC might be able to see a way through the potential roadblocks, but an entrepreneur finds a way through the roadblocks to achieve what seems almost impossible in the eyes of other people. If you have that conviction, you can bring the people that you need on-board, whether they’re partners, investors, or even customers, by passionately communicating the value of your idea. When you do that, you’ll be amazed how many people actually want to help you succeed.
Q: What we can expect from Global Relay in the future?
A: We’ve been remarkably successful in one stage of our mission, which was to dominate the small-and-medium business side of the financial sector – the broker-dealers, hedge funds, and so on. Now we’re shifting our vision to the enterprise customer – the banks and other organizations that might have tens of thousands of employees. To meet the needs of those organizations, we’ll be continuing to scale and evolve our technology. We’re also in the process of launching a messaging system for the financial sector that has the integrated security and compliance capabilities that other IM systems lack.
I really feel that we’ve just barely scratched the surface of Global Relay’s potential for growth. We have the plans in place to take some massive steps forward in the next couple of years, and I’m excited about seeing the results.
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