Software Bureau 'secures future' to be employee owned

The Software Bureau, the data company founded in 1998 by Philip Morgan and Paul Callow, has officially transferred to an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT), in a move which the firm insists locks in a future owned by its staff not a corporate overlord.

With a team of 19 professionals, each with at least eight years under their belt – and some the full 27 years – the company maintains it wants to stay nimble and independently owned by the people who do the day-to-day heavy lifting.

An EOT is a structure where a trust holds company shares on behalf of employees, who benefit from success without needing to buy in themselves. Introduced in the UK in 2014, EOTs are rapidly becoming a sustainable ownership model and a way to secure continuity while ensuring company values endure.

This, The Software Bureau claims, means it is keeping its culture intact, without external meddling, with employee-owned firms often enjoying higher productivity, lower staff turnover, and stronger morale.

The firm was launched after the founders observed a lack of efficient data processing tools on the market and in 2001 it released the first version of its proprietary data processing software, Cygnus. Havas CX Helia (then EHS Brann) was its first licensed customer).

Seven years later, the company launched an “embedded” suppression module, at the time claimed to be an industry first that integrated data hygiene directly into the Cygnus software.

A number of tools for the direct mail industry followed, standalone postal sortation software SwiftSort; Mailmark software Gemma; online postal sortation service Sort MyMailing; and cloud data processing platform SwiftCore.

In 2019, the Software Bureau partnered with Wilmington Millennium to offer the Mortascreen deceased suppression data to clients through its SwiftCleanse application and SwiftCore platform.

A year later it partnered with major data providers to launch Clean Contacts, which automatically updates contact data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

More recently it has launched the Postal Sortation Engine, an API for sorting mailing address data to optimise for postal discounts; and SwiftCore PAF Cloud Batch, a high-volume API engine for the Postcode Address File data processing.

Software Bureau managing director Martin Rides (pictured) said: “Handing business control to the people who actually make it hum – it’s not a charity stunt. It’s smart business.”

Meanwhile co-founder and shareholder Paul Callow added: “We may have passed ownership into a trust, but we’re not disappearing. We’re still here, committed to guiding the business through this transition and beyond. Nothing changes – except the certainty that The Software Bureau’s independence is here to stay.”