Matthew Ranson and finance’s unfinished homework

A financial report can be delivered on time, accepted by a system and still contain the wrong answer. Matthew Ranson has spent much of his working life in the gap between those outcomes. It is an unglamorous place to look for a business. The vocabulary includes reconciliation, reporting fields and regulatory traceability. The rewards for getting it right tend to arrive quietly: fewer errors, less manual work, a question answered before it becomes an investigation.

Ranson is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Novatus, the London-based technology and consulting business he established with Andrew Hedley in 2019. His particular territory is transaction reporting: the records that financial institutions send to authorities about their activity. He helped develop the company’s En>ACT platform with banks, asset managers and brokers. The aim is to let institutions check what their reporting machinery actually produces, down to the underlying data.

There is a certain comic justice in making a career out of checking finance’s homework. Trading gets the dramatic verbs. Reporting gets the consequences. Ranson began on the trading side, then moved into the work of making the record stand up to scrutiny. Eventually, he helped turn that expertise into a product.

Before the software, the difficult questions

His background combines a master’s in physics with an early career in fixed income trading. Senior roles at KPMG followed, along with responsibility for UK capital markets regulatory change at Deloitte. That progression put him on several sides of the same institutional problem: activity happens in markets, systems describe it, and somebody has to establish that the description meets the rules.

At Deloitte, his remit involved the implementation of regulatory change. His regulatory work covered MiFID and EMIR, including reviews after implementation and the correction of historical reporting. These are assignments where the first answer rarely settles the matter. Finding an error creates another question: how long has it been there, what caused it, and which other records might be affected?

Ranson’s work included methodologies that linked reporting checks back to the regulatory text and used peer comparisons. Those two habits are revealing. A rule needs a traceable basis. A result needs context. An institution can be internally consistent while looking peculiar beside its peers; it can also have a tidy process built around a mistaken interpretation. Neither possibility is especially comforting to the person signing off.

The advantage of having done the job

Ranson and Hedley founded Novatus in 2019. By the time they raised growth investment five years later, Ranson explained their starting advantage in unusually plain language: “Andrew and I had both lived this problem first-hand.” It is a modest origin story by technology standards. No revelation was necessary. The inconvenience was already familiar.

Their company combined advice with technology. That combination matters to Ranson’s story because it preserves the connection between understanding a reporting obligation and building something useful around it. Banks do not arrive with interchangeable systems and identical requirements. Their existing records, internal processes and responsibilities shape the work that software has to perform.

In July 2022, Maven’s venture capital trusts committed £4 million for a minority stake. The product was then described as the Transaction Reporting Analysis tool. The intended spending covered technical advisers, sales and marketing, and further development of the software. Expertise and product investment were being financed together.

Ranson’s explanation at the time connected the tools to insights gathered through advisory work. That gives the company’s beginnings a practical texture. Consulting supplied contact with the problem; software offered a way to repeat parts of the solution. For a founder with his professional history, the link was direct enough to explain without a fashionable slogan.

The rulebook needs an address

One of the more distinctive details in Ranson’s account of the product is its specificity. In a 2023 discussion of Novatus’ technology, he described tests that identify an error and connect it to the relevant regulatory provision. The attraction is easy to understand. A warning light is helpful; a warning light that explains where to look is considerably better.

He also described a feedback loop in which clients suggest features and changes. “We don’t rest on our laurels,” he said. Behind the familiar expression sits a useful constraint: a reporting product has to keep changing as its users’ needs and obligations change. Completing a release does not complete the subject.

Ranson talked about hiring across different backgrounds, bringing together data scientists, developers and professional services advisers. That mix reflects the demands of the work. Someone must understand the rule, someone must understand the data, and someone must make the resulting tool usable. A correct interpretation that cannot survive contact with a client’s systems has limited commercial appeal.

“We don’t rest on our laurels.”

Matthew Ranson, 2023

His public appearances bring the same concerns into focus. In 2023 he joined Carolyn Jackson, John Kernan and Hannah Meakin on a panel about the EMIR reporting overhaul. The conversation covered operational demands, regulatory expectations and the need to understand the tools firms use to check their reporting. Delegating a task did not make the questions about oversight disappear.

The panel also stressed preparation at senior management level. Reporting changes require resources, clear responsibilities and an understanding of the work ahead. This is the less photogenic side of a technology company’s market: explaining the size of a problem before the deadline makes that explanation redundant.

Three words, each a separate test

En>ACT’s proposition rests on accurate, complete and timely reporting. Those words look agreeable together. In practice, each demands a separate check. A record might be correct but late. A submission might arrive punctually while leaving out transactions. A complete file might carry a field populated with the wrong value.

The platform reconciles source systems with submission files across global transaction reporting regimes. Its role is to examine the relationship between what happened in the institution and what was reported. For Ranson, that takes the audit trail he worked with as an adviser and makes it part of an ongoing software service.

The distinction also explains why a consulting practice still has a place beside the platform. Software can make checks repeatable. People still have to interpret exceptions, decide what needs attention and work through organisational changes. Novatus’ model gives those activities a shared commercial home. The co-founder’s earlier career remains relevant to what the business sells.

Capital follows the checks

In September 2024, Novatus secured a $40 million growth investment from Silversmith Capital Partners. Todd MacLean and Ned Kingsley joined its board. The stated plans included deeper technology investment and further international expansion, particularly in North America, following the company’s entry into Australia the previous year.

Maven described a 13-fold increase in annual recurring revenue during its investment period. The figure captures growth in the company’s recurring revenue over Maven’s investment period. Alongside the new capital, it marked the distance travelled from the founders’ original venture.

His ambition was correspondingly explicit: to build a transaction reporting platform with worldwide reach. Expansion in this market brings further obligations into scope. More jurisdictions mean more rules to interpret, maintain and turn into working checks. Growth increases the usefulness of accumulated expertise while increasing the amount of expertise the company needs.

The comparison comes back

In January 2026, Novatus introduced benchmarking within En>ACT. Clients could examine their performance against peers and the wider market, including at individual field level. The feature was designed to help identify outliers and prioritise corrective work.

For Ranson, there is a continuity here with the peer comparisons described in his earlier regulatory work. Checking a firm against itself answers one set of questions. Checking how its reporting differs from the wider population opens another. The comparison supplies a reason to investigate; the underlying evidence still has to explain the difference.

Then came a different sort of comparison. On 6 May 2026, Novatus received a King’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation. Ranson credited the team behind the platform and the consulting practice. An award for a reporting business has a pleasingly bureaucratic symmetry: years spent helping institutions satisfy external scrutiny, followed by a formal judgement in the company’s favour.

By June, Novatus described a team of more than 120 across London, the US, Australia and India. Andrew Pinnington joined as Chief Customer Officer from DTCC. Ranson welcomed his combination of commercial experience and transaction reporting knowledge. The appointment placed customer relationships, sales and managed services under an executive whose career was closely connected to the work.

In July, Northern Trust selected LSEG and Novatus as a preferred partner for OTC trade repository reporting services for its middle office clients. The arrangement combined LSEG’s submission engine with En>ACT and specialist support. It showed the business reaching clients through a partnership, with its technology occupying a defined part of a larger reporting service.

Ranson’s career has followed an unusually consistent question through different jobs: can the record be trusted? Trading, regulatory implementation, consulting and product development each put that question in a different setting. Novatus gives him a business built around answering it repeatedly. The work will rarely make a trade more exciting. It may make the morning after considerably easier.