Simon Dix the founder of DX Compliance Solutions, speaks about the triggers for international expansion. This startup provides innovative compliance software that helps fight against crime and money laundry.

In the meantime, if you don’t know where to start your international journey, just click on the button below to be directed to our Go Global platform.

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Simon Dix is the founder of DX Compliance Solutions located in Ireland. This startup’s mission is to provide innovative compliance software to help fight against crime and money laundry. This software allows company to report back to the authorities too.

DX compliance Solutions was one of the seven startups that joined our soft-landing program here in the Netherlands.

Why are you based in Ireland?

We chose Ireland as it is a relatively small country and therefore allows us to be international from early stages. In other words we put ourselves in a position to think internationally. At the moment we have customers from seven different locations in the world. In the beginning, we looked at a smaller market segment and then we realized that in order to do that successfully, we would need to enter other countries.

Main advantages of going international

The first main thought was that if we start internationalization from the early stage, then we are reaching some form of international standard from day one. Whereas if we spend the next five or six years focusing on one single country, then it will be much more difficult to shape the product toward global market.

Do you know which countries are beneficial for your business?

Our customers are mainly banks and financial sectors. And one thing that we noticed was that these companies especially banks like to see local entities in sales presents.  Therefore, this is exactly what we are doing in the Netherlands at the moment. Luckily, in this country, people are very open to innovations and open to external forces.

Soft-landing program has been very beneficial for us as we could gather a lot of information. We were able to meet people from various ecosystem players and understand how the ecosystem works. Also we could hear some success and failure stories and understand what could go wrong and right in this market.

Additional tips and insights

I would just recommend those with similar business model to not concentrate too much on breaking down all points of individual market. But rather make an assessment of multiple markets at once by analyzing the pros and cons. Also, try to look for open and international markets like the Netherlands as opposed to countries with the fear of foreignness.

In the meantime, there are other ways to test a market before committing a lot of resources. We in uGlobally suggest that you hire an independent sales company that can check to see if the market fits your business. Then if so open a network for you before you actually move to that location.

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