In 2024, Tomas Liljeborg handed over the job he had held since Macrobond began. Sixteen years is a long time to spend building a company around other people’s working habits. His customers needed help finding economic data, analysing it and turning the results into something their colleagues could use. Now his own working arrangements were changing. Stephanie Covert would become chief executive. He would become chairman.
The detail that makes the handover interesting comes from Ashley Evans, a partner at Francisco Partners, Macrobond’s majority owner. Evans described a founder who had put himself forward for the transition while his company remained profitable and growing. He was ready to support a successor. The company he had spent years expanding would have a different person at its executive desk.
That decision gives Liljeborg’s career an unusually tidy theme. Macrobond was built to take repetitive work out of financial research. He asked employees to take ownership of their responsibilities. Eventually, he entrusted the running of the whole business to someone else. Delegation has a rather better plot than its reputation suggests.
An awkward year to open the doors
Macrobond opened in Malmö in June 2008. Financial markets were already supplying plenty of reasons for economists to look anxiously at their screens. Starting a company that served financial professionals during a financial crisis required a product those professionals could put to work.
The founding team numbered eighteen. Their intended users included economists, portfolio managers, researchers, asset allocators and strategists. These were people trying to understand a changing economy, with decisions waiting at the other end of the research. A useful tool had an immediate test: could it help them get through that work?
Liljeborg brought experience from the business he was entering. He had been head of sales and managing director at EcoWin, then global head of sales at Thomson Reuters. He also held a master’s degree in economics from Lund University. His career had already put economic information and the people buying it in the same frame.
The early ambition was broad in geography and specific in purpose: build a platform for economic and financial research. Malmö was the starting point. The work being addressed travelled rather well. An economist in another country could recognise the same problem without needing a translation of the office furniture.
The chores behind the chart
Economic research produces charts that can look deceptively effortless. Behind a line on a page sit a selection of data, a calculation, choices about presentation and the work of keeping everything current. The audience sees the result. The researcher also knows the preparation.
Macrobond combined a maintained database with analysis and visualisation tools. Its application allowed users to find time series, work with them and produce charts within an integrated research process. Automation addressed the repeated tasks along the way. The appeal was practical: reduce the handling involved in getting from data to a usable piece of research.
A 2021 account of Erik Penser Bank’s use of Macrobond makes the purpose tangible. Jonas Thulin, then head of asset management, described the importance of finding data independently and doing the bank’s own analysis. He also discussed using visualisation to explain decisions to clients. Research had to support both a judgment and an explanation.
Liljeborg described his original ambition in similarly workmanlike terms: economists should have tools they could use easily, the data they needed and the ability to find and analyse it. There is a certain commercial elegance in helping an expert get on with being an expert. The product need not have an opinion about interest rates to be useful to someone who does.
The integrated workflow, drawn as a sequence. No stopwatch implied.
A New York office with a reason
By 2013, Macrobond was building out its sales presence. Its London office opened that March. The following year brought a more revealing geographical detail. On April 28, 2014, the company opened an office in New York, led by Max Eklund, who had previously worked as an international account manager for Macrobond in Sweden.
Liljeborg’s explanation was refreshingly concrete. European clients wanted to extend use of the workstation to their offices in New York and elsewhere in the United States. American organisations were also becoming customers. The company’s existing relationships were helping to pull it across the Atlantic.
That gives an office opening a human scale. International expansion can sound like a map acquiring flags. Here it involved people in one office wanting their colleagues in another office to use the same research tool. The business followed a working relationship.
The New York expansion also shows the commercial background Liljeborg brought to the founder’s job. His public explanation started with customer demand. For a company selling to institutions, the next opportunity could be sitting several time zones away inside an organisation it already knew. Geography was becoming part of the service.
More people, more moving parts
In August 2018, Nordic Capital acquired majority ownership of Macrobond. The management team and founders reinvested alongside the new owner. At the time, the business employed 156 people, including ninety in data acquisition and development. Maintaining the information and building the software already accounted for a substantial part of the company.
For Liljeborg, the partnership connected the ambition for a worldwide platform with investment and organisational experience. Growth meant finding people as well as customers. A database does not acquire, maintain and explain itself simply because someone has approved an expansion plan.
“we have gone from walking to running with the business”
Tomas Liljeborg · 2019
In the 2019 discussion where he used that phrase, Liljeborg described employee numbers rising from 150 to 210 in less than a year. He emphasised the experience new hires brought and the usefulness of Nordic Capital’s network in recruiting them. The figures were part of a discussion about how the organisation was changing.
By July 2023, when the sale to Francisco Partners was announced, Macrobond had more than tripled annual contract value during Nordic Capital’s majority ownership. The announcement recorded 34 percent growth in that measure over the preceding twelve months. Annual contract value measures the contracted business; it deserves its own label rather than being casually swapped for revenue.
Francisco Partners became the new majority owner, while Nordic Capital Evolution took a minority stake. Liljeborg remained involved through another change in the company’s ownership. By then, Macrobond served a market extending across Europe, North America and Asia. The original research problem had supported a much larger organisation.
A company full of little CEOs
There is a useful glimpse of Liljeborg’s expectations in Macrobond’s 2022 graduate recruitment material. The company described a flat organisation where ideas and contributions were encouraged. His own instruction to employees was more demanding than a promise that everyone would be heard.
He expected people to take ownership, bring ideas and challenge the organisation. Each person was responsible for driving their portion of the business. A graduate reading the description was being offered responsibility along with a job.
“you are actually the CEO of your part of the business”
Tomas Liljeborg · Graduate recruitment material, 2022
It is an expansive use of the title. Most companies manage with one chief executive and an ample supply of opinions. Liljeborg’s formulation assigned some of the burden of initiative to everyone else. The phrase asked colleagues to notice what needed doing and take their responsibilities seriously.
Read beside the product, that expectation has a recognisable logic. Macrobond gave researchers tools for independent work. The recruitment message asked employees for independent thought about their own work. In both settings, responsibility stayed with the person using the tools. Making a process easier still left someone with a decision to make.
The founder changes seats
When Covert took over in 2024, she publicly thanked Liljeborg for supporting the transition and looked ahead to working with him as chairman. The company presented the succession as a planned step after more than sixteen years under its founder’s leadership.
Evans’s account adds the unusual element: Liljeborg had raised the question himself. A growing, profitable company provided the setting for a voluntary change. The next chief executive would arrive with the founder’s support, while he took a different position in the business.
In October that year, Liljeborg also joined the board of BRP Systems, the Nordic software company serving fitness facilities. Lisa Åberg joined as a director, and Nina Bjornstad became chair. His work now extended into another company’s boardroom, with another organisation’s expansion to consider.
Macrobond’s ownership and leadership had changed over the years. Its founding purpose remained easy to recognise: help people carry out economic and financial research. Liljeborg’s own role had changed with the company he helped build. The founder who asked colleagues to run their part of the business had made room for a successor to run the whole of it. After sixteen years, that was a substantial piece of work to hand over.
Keep the conversation going
Explore Liljeborg’s work, the company and his filmed conversation.