About us

Read on to learn more about our founding, our history, our growth, and our ambitions.

Incept5 was originally founded in 2008 by the principals of C24, following its sale to Iona Technologies. Intended as an incubator, the ‘Incept’ originated from the RUP (Rational Unified Process) concept of Inception, and the ‘5’ as an increment to the ‘4’ of ‘C24’. (We never claimed expertise in marketing equivalent to that of our technology and engineering…)

Many will remember 2008 as the beginning of the last recession. Our early clients, Revolution Money (sold to Amex), Verify (sold to VISA) and VISA themselves were perfect examples of our vision and ability to apply innovation and modernisation to drive economic success for our clients.

What differentiated us then, and continues to do so, was our team and our culture. The team now encompasses the team from 2008, but has also grown and broadened. We have stuck together because we recognise the value of our team and the power of combining the right number of the right kind of people in the right way, at the right time. As part of this journey we have grown to offer strength in new areas. A decade ago we offered architectural expertise and ‘back-end’ Java-on-Linux - from the API down. We’ve expanded our teams to include front-end development spanning design & UX through to mobile and web UIs. QA is perhaps the hardest thing to get right from the start - we now have world-class people in this space, specialising in automated testing - and our DevOps team can run anything from a RaspberryPi cluster to fault-tolerant, multi-cloud setups bridging AWS, GCP and more.

While we lived and breathed security in the PCI world of VISA, given our cryptography credentials it was perhaps inevitable that they asked us to evaluate BitCoin in its early days. We have continued to expand our coverage of blockchain and are certain we can help de-mystify this particular minefield of hype and misinformation if you need us to. Speaking of minefields, outside of pure technology, we also have a product team who could walk you through ISO 20022 blindfolded while reciting PSD2 backwards. We are strong believers in investing in ourselves. A lot of time our personal time is spent on the ‘R’ in R&D - new languages, NFC, secure enclaves, AI, custom hardware, Java performance tuning and micro-benchmarking to name a few of the areas we’re actively investigating.

Oh and if we didn’t mention - we’re not averse to a little partying now and again. “Work hard, play hard” was more or less a mission statement from the start.