The founder and chief executive of one of Scotland's most successful financial technology firms has said it drives him "nuts" that the company has no clients in this country.

Gordon McArthur was speaking after Beeks Financial Cloud posted a hefty 25% increase in revenues and a much larger surge in profitability for the six months to the end of December. The company also announced another significant contract win since the close of the financial period.

“We have customers everywhere apart from Scotland," Mr McArthur said. "It drives me nuts but we have never had a customer in Scotland.

“There are no [financial] trading companies in Scotland, they just don’t exist, and the few Scottish banks that are left are not our clients, so it’s always been a source of annoyance for me. We are a truly global business with our head office is in Scotland and the majority of our staff in Scotland, and we have got customers from 70 countries around the world."

READ MORE: 'Runway of revenue' for Scottish firm as profits soar 44 per cent

Beeks, based in Renfrewshire, saw underlying pre-tax profits jump by 113% to £1.38 million during the first half of the financial year on revenues of £12.96m. An improvement in operating margins made the company more profitable as it turned cash generative for the first time since listing on London's Alternative Investment Market (AIM) at the end of 2017.

Growth has been organic, driven by expanding opportunities amid the shift to cloud computing. Beeks specialises in providing cloud computing and connectivity to financial markets.

“It has been one of our best periods considering that we have tipped into cash generation, which [has been a source] of heat from our retail investors, but it’s just the nature of our business," Mr McArthur said. "We have had to invest a lot of money in infrastructure to get to the point where we are at.”

He added that the company is looking forward to the coming 18 months with "a lot of good deals in the pipeline", an assertion underscored by today's confirmation that Beeks has signed a contract worth £5m over five years to provide services to one of the world's largest banking groups.

The deal is for Beeks' Proximity Cloud product, which was launched two years ago following the introduction a year earlier of the company's Exchange Cloud product.

READ MORE: Beeks bets on further growth as financial firms flock to cloud computing

“The sale cycle is incredibly long with those," Mr McArthur said. "The deal we announced this morning, our first meeting with that particular client was four years ago.

"We had to build the product and then you have a long gestation period where clients will do proof of concepts and onboarding and things like that. That period has now finished – we are now executing the pipeline as well as building new stuff.”

Referring specifically to the new banking client, he added: “It was us against a lot of the well-known names of the IT world, so it’s always good to win something like that. Even the first pass is quite a decent size contract for us, and there is more there once it is delivered.”

READ MORE: Glasgow-based Beeks Financial sees shares leap after netting major client

Mr McArthur founded Beeks, which now employs 105 people, in 2010 after a career in software and IT solutions businesses including IBM, where he worked in both financial services and the industrial sector. 

The company has expanded its headcount significantly in recent years but growth in staffing numbers is now expected to be incremental as the firm turns its attention to the possibilities of using AI to help clients make use of the large volumes of data collected on their behalf by Beeks' software. Mr McArthur said the company will remain focused on organic growth rather than acquisitions.

“We don’t look at Beeks as a big M&A player," he explained. "We build our products specifically for markets and that is what we are going to continue to do.”

Shares in Beeks closed yesterday's trading 2p higher at 175p.