iplicit secures Tech Company of the Year accolade at National MAT Awards

The prizes were presented at London’s Leonardo Royal Hotel by Gogglebox star and education entrepreneur Baasit Siddiqui. 

Judges saluted iplicit for the difference it was already making to MAT operations across the country.

They said: “Technology is extremely important to the space of education and we wanted to congratulate iplicit for their continuous innovation in helping trusts become stronger digital organisations.

“They provided extensive evidence of going the extra mile for their trusts, but also a culture of change and mission to provide amazing support in what can be a very complicated and detrimental process, if done wrong. A huge congratulation to iplicit.”

Having launched in the wider market in 2019, iplicit for Education arrived in 2023. Its mission was to free MATs that had found themselves stuck with outdated on-premise technology and no affordable pathway to a true cloud finance solution that could deliver the functionality required for MATs to continue to grow. 

iplicit's CEO, Lyndon Stickley, said: “We were thrilled to be named MAT-Tech Company of the Year, just 12 months since unveiling our product tailored for MATs. This sector is extremely important to us. 

“We saw a sizeable community of just over 1,000 MATs trapped with on-premise technology, effectively held hostage by the dominant providers of those outdated systems, with no clear pathway to true cloud finance software.  

“We set out to provide a solution, built for education, that would enable rapid migration to our modern-day software, minimal disruption to school business and most importantly it would facilitate a simple and cost-effective way to add schools as the MAT expands – something that’s not possible with the old systems in the market.” 

Many MATs also need to move to cloud-based software in order to integrate the finance with other cloud systems within the trust and to facilitate remote and hybrid working when needed – something that is simple to do with true cloud technology but nigh on impossible when trying to adapt on-premise solutions to do the same. The lack of an affordable cloud provider has also left finance teams overwhelmed with laborious manual tasks.  

Lyndon Stickley added: “We’re really excited to be a part of this sector because we see the impact we can have by bringing our modern-day technology to an audience that previously didn’t have an affordable option.” 

iplicit was launched by a team with decades of experience implementing enterprise-focused ERP (enterprise resource planning systems), all aligned with a passion to facilitate powerful accounting software for the medium sized organisation. It has achieved triple-digit growth in user numbers and revenue every year since launch, growing headcount from five staff to around 100 and generating over 20,000 daily users in the first five years. 

Its trophy at the National MAT Awards is the latest in a string of accolades for the company.  iplicit has been named Best Enterprise Accounting/ERP Software at the Accounting Excellence Awards and AccountingWEB Awards and won the Fintech prize at the Tech South West Awards in autumn 2023.  

In addition, March 2024 also saw iplicit enter the Financial Times’ FT1000 list, in which it was ranked among the top 20 fastest growing UK companies.