[imagesource: @ncino / Twitter]

Pierre Naudé may not be a household name in South Africa, but his company is making headlines across the pond in the US.

Yesterday saw Naudé’s global fintech company nCino debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and he’ll be chuffed with how things turned out.

Moneyweb reports that it was one of the most successful listings of the year thus far. The share price started at $31 a pop, but quickly rose to more than $91, which would place the company’s value at close to $7 billion (around R116 billion).

By the end of trading, the share price had settled around $70:

..Naudé did not want to comment on the success of the listing and the performance of the share price. “I was busy with a media interview when the first trades came through, and I heard the cheers from the staff. From a personal perspective, it was something very special.”

Naudé hails from a wine farm near Worcester in the Boland. He joined Boland Bank where he met Johann Dreyer, a former Springbok athlete, who became his partner at several other ventures in the US.

“I then realised America offered significant opportunities and in 1987 my wife, small baby and I relocated. I was a programmer, or a gun for hire, and travelled to where there was work.” The Naudés eventually settled in Iowa.

Having launched nCino in a tiny office with seven employees, and the financial backing of a group of bankers in North Carolina, the company now employs 900 people in locations around the world.

Naudé says he still visits South Africa regularly, and has family here, although his company does not yet have a presence in his home country:

 “We service South Africa from our London office and have built up good relationships, but we haven’t signed with a local bank. I expect that we will sign an agreement in due course, and I will be very proud if and when this happens,” he says.

Investors are certainly impressed, with some trading sites listing nCino as an IPO to keep an eye on over the next few weeks and months.

This from TMF:

nCino is a software platform that helps typically IT-deprived small- and medium-sized banks and credit unions digitize their operations and replace and/or automate legacy processes. This kind of digital transformation is sweeping the business world, and shelter-in-place orders are making the typical in-person relationship smaller banks used to thrive on especially difficult.

It’s no wonder then that nCino’s IPO was greeted with such gusto.

Rather surprisingly for a fintech company, nCino has chosen not to head to Silicon Valley, and is still based in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Naudé says the decision is based on the fact that staff turnover in Silicon Valley is too high, and North Carolina’s lifestyle still attracts a great deal of highly-qualified candidates.

Sounds like he has it all figured out.

[sources:moneyweb&tmf]