The idea

Ideas make the world go round.

Some people say it's money that does it. Some people say it's residual angular momentum from the creation of the solar system.

But at Message Labs, we think it's ideas.

We had our idea in the Summer of 2024. It was one of those conversations where we railed against the iniquities of project life and in particular how difficult it was to perform automated testing for any process that included a financial message to a third party, such as a bank or a custodian.

"Just doing a visual check isn't really testing," we said.

"We're just marking our own homework," we said.

"How can we test at volume or in an automated way if we have to fire in our own hand-built responses to messages generated by our system," we asked.

"Someone should fix that," we said.

And then we looked at each other. We looked up at the bright blue sky of opportunity and felt the warmth of the sun of enterprise on our faces.

"Let's do it," we said.

And just like that, Message Labs was born.

Except, of course, it wasn't.

Like many ideas, this one was born of slow and gradual frustration. We'd been delivering financial projects for nearly a century between us, and whenever we had got to the point of testing, we'd encountered a vacuum of opportunities for genuine counterparty testing for all financial messages.

And since then, it's taken us a while to get our stuff together. We'd been experimenting separately with databases and queues or theorising about how to turn something like this into a product that clients would want and appreciate. Bringing it all together in a new company with a vision, a goal, a product and a service takes time.

But it was that conversation, that summer evening, where the unformed plans and unexecuted intentions became real and took on a clear purpose. And maybe, just maybe, we made the world spin a little faster…