What Livingbridge's investment means for Semafone’s future

By Gary E. Barnett, CEO

Today I am absolutely pleased to share that Livingbridge, a global private equity firm, has secured a majority investment in Semafone. This news is incredibly exciting and is a huge testament to the outstanding work that the entire Semafone team, along with our growing list of world-class partners and customers, have achieved to get us to this point.

When our founders first started Semafone in 2009 as a spin-off business from a contact center outsource service provider, they had a modest objective in mind: ensuring payments made over the telephone were PCI DSS compliant  Using an innovative new technology called DTMF masking, the idea quickly caught on as businesses realized that not only would this method of securing telephone payments result in simpler, more cost-effective PCI DSS compliance, but it also enabled a better, more frictionless payment experience for customers. Throughout the years, we've grown from a small UK start-up into a fully mature, profitable and successful global business, with a market-leading portfolio of omnichannel data security solutions and employees, customers, and partners based all around the world.

Over the last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic challenged businesses across every industry, Semafone came out stronger than ever before. As companies closed their offices to in-person working, our secure payment solutions helped organizations transition to a remote working model - keeping critical lines of revenue flowing in the most difficult of times. I'm proud to report that in the year 2020 alone, we experienced strong growth globally, expanded the range of data sets our solutions can capture to include banking data and PII, enhanced our omnichannel digital solution with a slew of new features, and released a number of new add-on products to our flagship voice solution, Cardprotect Voice+. Additionally, we conducted our first-ever customer and partner satisfaction surveys and received NPS scores of 64 and 80 respectively - two outstanding grades that put us in the world-class category of B2B software companies.

Our mission of securing the world's sensitive data and protecting the reputations of its most valuable brands is far from complete. As we look ahead to the future, I'm delighted to partner with Livingbridge to further cement our status as a market leader, accelerate our global growth, and expand our existing solutions portfolio. With their help, we have a number of exciting areas of focus:

Enhance Our Solutions Portfolio

Our customers' success is at the heart of everything we do; providing solutions that make their lives easier and providing real business value is our top priority. As consumer adoption of digital channels for transacting with businesses accelerates, there is an increasing need for companies to be "everywhere". While our existing portfolio of omnichannel data solutions leads the market in providing secure, frictionless customer experiences, we won't rest on our laurels. As we move ahead, we are committed to continue building the best solutions in the world to secure customer data and enable better customer experiences.

Inform and Educate the Market

The global regulatory landscape continues to change, and the sheer number of consumer privacy and security frameworks make the task of compliance increasingly complex. Too many organizations are in the dark about the security risks threatening their businesses, and we consider it a key part of our responsibility to educate the market about the solutions available to alleviate these challenges.

Accelerate Our Go-to-Market Strategy

With Livingbridge's support, we are focused on growth and accelerating our market share as a leading security company securing all types of consumer data. With this investment we now have the opportunity to educate, inform and change the way organizations process and secure digital payments and sensitive customer data.

Expand into New Territories

We will capitalize on our successes in the United Kingdom and North American markets and will look to expand into other territories, such as Latin America, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Invest in Building Out a World-Class Partner Program

Leveraging our partnerships with leaders in the contact center, service provider, and telecommunications industries has always been key to Semafone success and with this new investment we will further dedicate our efforts to building out our world-class partner program.

Attract New Talent

With all these ambitious goals ahead of us, we'll need an equally determined team to support these efforts, and we'll look to build upon our already strong employee culture by recruiting top talent globally to add to our ranks.

As you can see, the future for Semafone is bright, and we're just getting started in fulfilling what we've set out to do. We're delighted to have Livingbridge as our partner as they share our vision for global market leadership. Our commitment to ensuring data security is stronger now than ever, and with this investment, we are poised for success. I hope you'll join us in our journey ahead.

To learn more about this announcement, please visit our press release.