With several large Canadian clients, Four Eyes Financial is turning its sights to the United States market, with the Saint John maker of regulatory compliance software for wealth management businesses planning a roughly two-year expansion push.

Founded by CEO Lori Weir and CTO Kendall McMenamon in 2015, Four Eyes sells its software to back office firms like Winnipeg-based Wellington-Altus Financial or the investment arms of the big banks that back independent investment advisors, rather than selling to the advisors themselves.

“The work that we are changing is how back offices look at transactions that come from daily trading by investment advisors on behalf of people like you and me,” said Weir in an interview. “There’s somebody who looks through all of those trades to make sure that the trades being made for each individual actually meet their suitability requirements. So for example, if you’re 90 years old, your advisor isn’t buying 100 per cent crypto for you.

“We’ve built a platform to enable this, with multiple products, and we’ve been working in the market to attract clients. We’re now working with nine different broker-dealers and large financial institutions.”

Four Eyes has three main software products, called Risk7, 4ms and Discovery Zone. Risk7 is for checking the suitability of investments, 4ms helps back offices open and manage client accounts and Discovery Zone is an information-sharing and communication platform for advisors and clients.

Since it entered commercialization in 2018, Four Eyes has won clients nationwide, though they are concentrated in the country’s financial capital of Toronto. A handful are also located in smaller centres like Winnipeg.

Other than the United States, Weir also sees the United Kingdom and Australia as potential markets for Four Eyes, since they have similar regulatory structures for their financial systems.

Like many business-to-business SaaS companies, Four Eyes sells its software via multi-year deals, with contracted annual revenue, similar to recurring revenue, currently growing year over year.

“The type of solution that we’re selling to our clients is fairly systemic, so it has a major impact, and there is a cost to integrate our software into an ecosystem,” said Weir. “As a result of that, it’s a major commitment, so as a vendor and as a client, it makes sense to make that commitment over the course of multiple years (as opposed to all at once).”

Of Four Eyes’ 50 employees, meanwhile, 48 are based in New Brunswick, with about a dozen added in the past year and more hiring to come, though Weir stopped short of naming a target figure.

“We have ambitious goals for our company, which are to be serving a global clientele, and so significant growth will be required from our employee base,” she said.

Other than a small equity funding deal early in Four Eyes’ history, the company has been self-bootstrapped with the help of debt-financing. Now that Weir and McMenamon are confident they have demonstrated product-market fit in Canada, though, she said future growth will likely require additional capital.