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What a year it has been. When we completed the merger of Microgen and Touchstone at the beginning of February, little did we know what lay ahead. By the time we reorganised the combined teams and rebranded the merged business to form TrustQuay in June, the world had completely changed due to COVID-19, with full lockdown resulting in 100% remote working across our 9 offices in a matter of days in March.
Merging two businesses is never simple, so I’m pleased with the progress we have made this year with the integration and how we have adapted to servicing our clients remotely during these exceptional times. As a technology business, we have been able to maintain business continuity throughout the pandemic as you would expect, but also we have been able to achieve a tremendous amount which I would like to share with you.
Even though we have been largely unable to meet in person since March, we have strived to continue our interaction virtually, running two TrustQuay Forums for customers as well as four major product webinars since late spring. In addition, the research conducted for our Future Focus Report, which we released in the autumn, provided a fascinating insight into the views within the industry, of ongoing market consolidation, a relentless rising tide of regulation and an increasing need for rapid digitalisation of our customer base.
On the product front, we were able to deliver major new developments such as an integrated Economic Substance advisory capability in partnership with PwC, as well as digital identity and address verification capabilities in partnership with GB Group. More recently, in November we launched TrustQuay Portal which allows our customer’s corporate, family office and fund clients to have a 2-way digital interaction with their entities and associated information in a simple to understand, easily managed but highly secure way. TrustQuay Portal should rapidly accelerate our customer’s digital transformation of their business as well as their client engagement, with deployment and roll-out possible in weeks, rather than the months and even years typically needed to integrate and deploy third party generic portal and workflow tools.
Despite the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, our customer implementation projects have continued at a faster pace than I would have expected this year, given that the teams have been working almost entirely from home. Since March, we have successfully delivered 21 go-lives for clients, which include 9 migrations, 8 new client implementations and 4 existing global clients adding on new jurisdictions to their existing coverage. In addition, we have welcomed 22 new customers to the TrustQuay family, again much more than I would have expected when Covid hit in March.
I would particularly like to thank all our existing customers across the world for their continued support in 2020 in this most unique of years. I would also like to thank the whole TrustQuay team for all their tremendous efforts. We have achieved a lot in this challenging environment but also recognised there is a huge amount for us to do, to help our customers digitalise their businesses next year and beyond.