TMT ID – Our New Brand

Our company has been going for just over seven years – and it’s been quite a ride.

We launched TMT Analysis in 2017. My colleague Fergal Parkinson came from a media background while I and three of our other co-founders came from a mix of technology and telecommunications. So, coming together we felt we covered the three bases of the technology, media, and telecom sector, which gave us that TMT brand name.

Our initial observation was that mobile devices were achieving the kind of primacy that meant they were going to be at the centre of digital onboarding, authentication and verification for years to come.

We weren’t wrong – as Mobile’s influence in the years since has illustrated, and accordingly we have become a strong player globally in mobile intelligence and authentication.

But seven years is aeons in the tech sector and late last year it did begin to feel like we had reached a point in our journey and our growth when it was timely to pause, to reassess and to reset.

The most obvious element that needed tweaking was the company brand name itself. And specifically with the Analysiss component of our brand. Yes, we do analyse data – we do it constantly. It underpins almost everything we do. But we do it in a microsecond, tens of thousands of times an hour. We don’t produce exhaustive data analysis reports which some took the name to indicate. And the word didn’t speak of so much of what we actually do or to what purpose. It had to go.

In contrast, the first part of the name we very much wanted to retain. TMT had become a recognised brand. Those initials said something to our customers, something positive. And we were still very much about those three prongs, tech, media, telecoms – and we liked the way that the TMT acronym they combined to form had taken on its own feeling, its own image, its own…identity.

And in that moment in the conversation, the penny clearly dropped: we are about identity rather than analysis. Identity is at the core of all our work. Who is this customer? Where are they connected? Are they behaving as we would expect? Are they trustworthy? And so on.

Authentication and verification are about establishing identity – which we do through a combination of live and historic insight into a customer’s mobile and other trusted data. So TMT Analysis would become TMT ID – a much better, more honed and, I hope, catchier, summary of who we are and what we do.

The rest of the rebranding flowed out of that one decision.

Having reached the conclusion that we wanted to tweak the way we described ourselves, it also felt a natural moment to reframe how we present ourselves. This would mean an attempt to reassess our visible profile – primarily our website but actually everything in our visual output right down to tiny details like our notebooks and business cards. If we were going to change the brand name, our thinking went, then we should simultaneously take the chance to review how all of it came across.

The designer we turned to, was Victor Martinez, an old school friend of Fergal and mine. It’s funny how things work out – we can remember being mesmerised watching him as an 11-year-old doing the most extraordinarily elaborate doodles.

Fast forward several decades and now Victor is doing a bit more than doodling. After a spell at the BBC, he’s now running one of the leading creative and design consultancies in Europe, working for any number of household name companies. So, he was the obvious place to turn for help on this.

I’ll leave it to Victor himself, to explain the thought processes behind the redesign in terms of its visuals – see his blog on the same. I was particularly intrigued by the rationale behind going green – it’s worth a read on that question alone.

But we are really pleased with the outcome – the new branding and all the stuff that comes with it. It does feel much more us. A truer reflection of what we do. And I hope it leaves us in a good place to wind up this little interlude of self-reflection and refocus our attention once more on the future.

And speaking of our future, this may also be a good time to talk about a new acquisition that we are hoping will further strengthen what is now the TMT ID brand.

Last year we purchased a company called Phronesis.

They were operating in a similar space to us – and doing good things but on a smaller scale. We will be retaining all their staff and, I hope, customers. But by absorbing them into our operation we will be able to reduce our collective overheads to keep our pricing competitive – and to further improve what we are able to do globally.

Their addition, for example, should strengthen our European data sets as they were particularly well-established in France and UK, as well as enhancing our expertise on some sub-mobile intel categories like IMEI numbering.

So, TMT Analysis and Phronesis are both now combined as a strengthened and reframed TMT ID.

It’s an exciting new start. With a pleasing new look. Looking forward to the next seven years.