DirectorInsight - Corporate Governance Analytics
Company Context
DirectorInsight was a corporate governance analytics platform where institutional investors, board members, and HR professionals could access standardized data on executive compensation and governance across 1,150+ European listed companies and 30,000+ senior executives. Nothing like it existed. The platform was later rebranded to CGLytics and acquired by Diligent Corporation, where it still operates today.
Role & Responsibility
Head of Information Technology - Designed the platform architecture, led the engineering team, and served as technical sparring partner to founder and CEO Aniel Mahabier.
The Challenge: Making Governance Data Trustworthy
Corporate governance data across 31 European equity indexes sounds straightforward until you try to standardize it. Different countries, different reporting standards, different disclosure requirements, different definitions of what counts as "total compensation." A German DAX company reports differently from a Swedish OMX company. The platform had to make all of that comparable.
The real stakes: clients like ING, ABN AMRO, De Nederlandsche Bank, and Rabobank used our data to make governance decisions. If the underlying data was wrong, the conclusions were wrong. That made data integrity the single most critical engineering challenge.
The technical challenges combined:
- Data standardization across 31 European equity indexes with different reporting standards
- Performance — users needed fast, interactive results across massive datasets spanning years of compensation data
- Data quality tooling — analysts entering data needed UX that helped them spot errors before they reached clients
- Data integrity — wrong input data leading to wrong governance conclusions was the worst failure mode
- Scaling from zero clients and 4 people to a 50-person company
Key Achievements
Platform Architecture from Zero
Joined when there was nothing — no code, no clients, just an idea and a small team. Designed the database models, processing pipelines, and application architecture that would need to handle complex compensation structures across 1,150 companies and 30,000+ executive profiles. These early architecture decisions held up through the entire lifecycle of the product, including acquisition.
Data Quality Engineering
Built tooling that allowed research analysts to efficiently enter and validate governance data. The system surfaced inconsistencies and anomalies before data reached clients. When institutional investors base governance decisions on your numbers, "close enough" doesn't exist.
Performance at Scale
Designed the architecture to handle interactive queries across years of compensation data for 1,150+ companies. The choice between real-time calculations and pre-processing determined whether the platform stayed responsive as the dataset grew. It grew substantially — multiple times over.
Pay-for-Performance Analytics
Worked with the team's mathematician to translate peer group algorithms and pay-for-performance models into a scalable platform. The algorithms were sophisticated, but they only worked because the underlying data architecture could handle the complexity of comparing compensation across different markets and reporting standards.
From Developer to Head of IT
Grew from hands-on developer to Head of IT with a team of five, including DBA's and engineers. Stayed a working technical lead — still writing code alongside the team, still making architecture decisions, still the person who understood how all the pieces fit together.
Technologies
- Backend: PHP (Laravel), MySQL
- Architecture: Data processing pipelines, pre-computation for analytics, complex financial data models
- Infrastructure: CI/CD pipeline (set up before the first paying client)
- Data: Standardized compensation data models across 31 European equity indexes
Business Impact
The technical foundation enabled DirectorInsight to grow from 4 people with an idea to a 50-person company serving major financial institutions. Broadridge Financial Solutions (NYSE: BR) took a minority stake in 2016, calling DirectorInsight "an excellent complement to our existing suite of proxy services." The platform was rebranded to CGLytics and eventually acquired by Diligent Corporation for several million euros.
What I Learned
Data integrity outranks everything when people make decisions based on your output. Performance matters, features matter, but none of it matters if the underlying data is wrong. Building systems that prevent bad data from reaching users — through tooling, validation, and UX that helps analysts catch errors — is more valuable than any feature.
Domain complexity is the real challenge. The technology was the easy part. Understanding what "standardized executive compensation" means across 31 different regulatory environments — that was hard. Working closely with the CEO and domain experts taught me that the best architecture emerges from deep understanding of the problem, not from technical cleverness.
Architecture decisions compound. Choices made when the team was four people determined what was possible when the team was fifty. Investing in solid foundations early — even when nobody was watching — is what made the platform attractive enough to acquire.
How This Experience Applies to Your Project
Building DirectorInsight from zero taught me what it takes to turn a founder's vision into a working product:
- Translating domain expertise into architecture: The founder knew governance, I knew how to build it
- Data integrity by design: Systems that prevent errors, not just detect them
- Scaling from zero: Architecture that works for the first client and the hundredth
- Staying hands-on: A tech lead who still codes earns different trust than one who only delegates
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Building something from zero?
I've done it before — from idea to acquisition. Let's talk about your project.