Gordon McHarg and the Christmas Eve phone call

Gordon McHarg had just won the sort of contract a software founder remembers. Days before Christmas in 2012, his team learned that its bid for a New York Stock Exchange project had succeeded. Then, leaving the meeting, he saw a television news ticker announcing the exchange’s acquisition by Intercontinental Exchange. On Christmas Eve, a call confirmed the project was off. He waited until the new year to tell his colleagues.

There are business lessons that arrive as neatly numbered slides. This one arrived in reception. Winning the customer had required long hours and missed family occasions; a decision elsewhere undid the work. For a founder selling software into financial institutions, the episode supplies a useful distinction between doing a job well and controlling what happens next.

McHarg’s career has unfolded in that gap. He co-founded the business behind AutoRek in 1994, led it from 1998, and eventually handed executive responsibility to Chris Livesey in 2023. Along the way, a Glasgow consultancy became a software company serving banks, asset managers, insurers and payment businesses. The work concerned an apparently modest question with expensive consequences: do the records agree?

A computer before a company

McHarg traces his interest in computing to a Sinclair ZX81 he received at fourteen. Football had its attractions, too, but he joked that “my programming skills are just a little bit better”. Software offered a rather more dependable route to a professional career.

He graduated in Computing Science in 1989 from the institution now known as the University of the West of Scotland. His professional experience includes work for IBM in the United States and Renaissance Capital in Russia, with Barclays and JP Morgan among the international clients in his biography. That is a useful background for a future reconciliation business: different organisations, different systems, and plenty of opportunities for information to become troublesome between them.

The founding partnership began at university. McHarg and two friends who had studied computer science together established a business focused on bespoke software and data management using Microsoft technologies. The co-founders were George Urquhart and Steven Morosi. Their company began as Oasys Technology and subsequently became API Software Limited. AutoRek would become the product name people recognised.

That sequence matters. There was a services business before there was a packaged answer. Consulting puts the developer close to the customer's actual difficulty, including the parts that resist a tidy specification. It also poses a commercial question: which piece of this work will the next customer need?

When success creates a paperwork problem

The product grew from work with a retail stockbroker in the late 1990s. Customers and transactions were increasing, and reconciling cash and assets was becoming difficult. In other words, commercial success had created a practical problem behind the scenes. More business meant more records to check, rather than simply more reasons to celebrate.

AutoRek’s early deployments supported stockbrokers dealing with large share sales during privatisations and building society demutualisations. Volume, deadlines and accuracy were arriving together. A process that could cope with yesterday’s workload had to accommodate a much larger one. The opportunity was specific enough to build software around.

Reconciliation is the work of checking records against one another and investigating the differences. A customer-facing transaction can look complete while the institution still has to account for it across its systems. The unglamorous part begins when those versions disagree. An exception needs an explanation, and the explanation needs to survive the next person's scrutiny.

The software’s relevance extends beyond making a tedious task quicker. Financial control requires people to understand what has been checked and what remains unresolved. AutoRek developed tools for cash allocation, reporting, account attestation and controlled workflows. These are practical products for organisations whose records have to withstand questions, including questions asked long after a payment has moved.

The years between the milestones

The company’s history places the AutoRek brand in 2002 and its first deal with the banking group then called HBOS in 2003. Turnover exceeded £1 million in 2004. An Edinburgh office followed in 2008, and staff numbers reached forty in 2009. These are the increments through which a small software business becomes an institution in its own right.

There is a pleasing lack of cinematic compression here. A new office does not make much of a montage. Neither does another reporting requirement. Yet these details help explain the accumulated knowledge that McHarg would later bring to the board: years of customers, implementations, technical changes and decisions about what to build next.

The technical delivery changed, too. McHarg described a progression from a Windows client-server application through web technologies to software delivered through the cloud. Each version had to address a continuing customer need while making use of a different way of providing the service. Staying in the same field required a considerable amount of movement.

Glasgow goes calling

International expansion involved ordinary work as well as ambition. In 2018, McHarg travelled to Manhattan with colleague Jack Niven through the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce’s trade programme. AutoRek already served global organisations, but much of its software supported their UK operations. Selling directly into another market was a separate undertaking.

He identified the United States as the first major target for the company's international plans. The trip offered introductions and a closer understanding of the obstacles. There is something reassuringly concrete about this version of expansion: travel, meetings, local contacts, and learning which assumptions need revising when the customer is across an ocean.

In 2019, AutoRek established a partnership with US software business Cforia, which embedded its reconciliation technology into an order-to-cash platform. In February 2021, AutoRek was selected for the UK Department for International Trade’s virtual US RegTech Roadshow, alongside nine other companies. Partnerships and introductions were doing some of the travelling that a Glasgow address could not do by itself.

By then, the customer list had acquired considerable weight at home. McHarg discussed wins with Nationwide and the Bank of England in 2020. He attributed those selections to understanding the organisations’ requirements and handling complex data at high volumes. The selling point was specific competence in a difficult job.

More people, more things to know

Scottish Equity Partners announced its investment in March 2021, when AutoRek employed more than eighty-five people across Glasgow, Edinburgh and London. The stated purposes were product development and international expansion. Andrew Davison and Angus Conroy joined the board. Outside capital brought additional people into decisions that the founders had spent decades making.

Recruitment followed. In August 2022, McHarg reported a workforce of 140 and a target of 170 by the end of the year. He also highlighted employee tenure: the average was four years, with almost forty per cent of employees having spent at least four years at the company. Those were company-reported figures, but his choice to emphasise them is revealing. He wanted to talk about colleagues staying as well as colleagues arriving.

The company appointed Andrew Elmore as chief technology officer in June 2022. His remit stretched from defining products to operating the cloud service. Growing the business meant increasing delivery capacity while keeping the service dependable. Customers buying financial controls have little reason to find growing pains charming.

“the majority of businesses develop and mature over time”

Gordon McHarg, 2020

McHarg's comments about Scotland connected recruitment with the universities, the competition for technical staff, and the attraction of living there. His view of company-building allowed for the occasional overnight success, then returned to the longer timetable most businesses inhabit. AutoRek had already given him ample experience of that timetable.

Handing over without taking the knowledge away

Livesey joined as chief executive in October 2023. A year into the job, he described the advantage of having McHarg available as a non-executive director, able to draw on his understanding of the product, customers and market. His assessment was direct: “Gordon built strong foundations”.

Succession changes the use of a founder's experience. The person who once carried daily executive responsibility can help someone else make decisions, provided the roles allow it. Livesey described McHarg as supportive. It is a practical continuation of the story: knowledge gathered through the consultancy years and the product years remained accessible after the title changed.

The business has continued to develop under Livesey. AutoRek announced its acquisition of reconciliation and compliance technology company Grath in August 2026, widening its software and embedded technology offerings. At that point, it reported more than 170 employees and over 100 clients in fifteen countries. Those are developments at the company McHarg co-founded; executive leadership now belongs to his successor.

The Christmas Eve cancellation makes a dramatic opening, but the longer career provides the perspective. One project could disappear after a successful bid. The company had to remain useful through the next decision, the next customer and the next change in technology. McHarg's contribution is visible in that continuity: a business started with university friends, built around a recurring problem, and eventually entrusted to another chief executive.