Building From the Ground Up - Ten Years of Abacus UK
Tom Cole did not join Abacus to take on a role. He joined to build one.
When Abacus decided to expand into the UK a decade ago, there was no office, no team, and no local reputation to lean on. There was a business that had earned genuine credibility in the US financial services market, an idea that Tom believed in, and the task of making it mean something on this side of the Atlantic.
As the first Abacus employee in the UK, everything that followed started with him.
The Weight of Going First
Tom’s background gave him an unusual vantage point. He spent his career working in-house at leading hedge funds, which meant he intimately knew the clients Abacus was built to serve. He understood their standards, their risk appetite, and what it would take to earn their trust. He also knew that none of that would matter until Abacus had actually earned it.
“I was confident in the proposition. The delivery, the depth in financial services, the approach to security, all of that travelled well on paper. But none of it matters until clients here trust you with their business.”
Financial services clients do not take risks on unproven partners. They ask hard questions, run rigorous due diligence, and expect evidence rather than assurances. For a firm with no UK history, the only way through was to accept that trust had to be built one relationship at a time, with no shortcuts and no substitute for performance.
What made that process possible was not just Abacus’ track record of success in the US, but the culture and conviction that it was worth bringing to a new market that Tom saw when he visited Abacus in the US before he joined.
“What stayed with me most was the strong sense of pride across the organisation. People genuinely cared about achieving the right outcomes for clients and felt a real responsibility to deliver. That is something I have been passionate about preserving and strengthening ever since.”
Building Something That Lasts
In the early years, the business ran on individual effort. Strong people going above and beyond, solving problems directly, staying close to every client and every delivery. That is the only way to build momentum when you are starting from nothing. It is also, Tom is direct about this, not a model that scales.
“I did not start out as a particularly good scale leader. My default was to stay close to the work, solve problems myself, and rely on being hands-on. That works early on, but it very quickly becomes a constraint as the business grows.”
“If I approached it again, I would move earlier to building more structure, clearer processes, and repeatable ways of delivering for clients. Not to lose that drive, but to make sure every client gets the same high standard of experience, not just the ones supported by your strongest individuals.”
That transition was also what opened the next phase of growth. A business that relies on a handful of exceptional people stays small. A business that makes exceptional delivery repeatable can scale without compromising what made it good in the first place.
A Decade of Change
Tom has a direct view of how dramatically the cybersecurity and managed IT landscape has shifted over the past ten years. When Abacus established itself in the UK, cybersecurity was largely treated as an infrastructure concern. Something for the IT team to manage, and a cost to be controlled rather than a risk to be understood.
This has changed fundamentally as targeted attacks made cyber a business resilience matter. Further, regulation raised the bar on what firms had to demonstrate and investors started asking harder questions about security posture as part of due diligence. The conversation moved from the IT team to leadership, and it has stayed there.
AI is now reshaping the landscape again, bringing both new capability for businesses and new tools for threat actors trying to compromise.
Through all of it, the gap Tom keeps returning to is one that regulation alone has not closed.
“The biggest misconception is that cybersecurity is a technology problem when it is fundamentally a business risk. Regulation and guidance have been clear on that for some time, but in practice it is still often treated as an IT issue. Until that shift is fully made at leadership level, there is always a gap between having controls in place and managing cyber risk effectively.”
What Ten Years Actually Means
Ask Tom what he is most proud of and the answer is not a revenue figure or a market position. It is the people.
As Abacus has grown, through organic expansion and acquisition, it has created opportunities that did not exist when Tom joined as the only person in the building. People have moved into new disciplines, taken on broader roles, and built careers across different parts of a business that keeps expanding what it does and where it operates.
“As we have expanded, it has not just added capability for clients. It has opened up new paths internally. That has been quite different to what I have seen elsewhere, where growth can feel more static.”
Underpinning all of it is a discipline Tom believes was one of the most consequential decisions the business made in its early years: being clear about what Abacus was not going to do.
“One thing we did early on was not fall into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone. Saying no, politely, to certain opportunities meant we did not dilute our brand, our mission, or the quality of what we deliver. Looking back, that focus has been a big part of building a strong and consistent business.”
Ten years on, that clarity has not changed. The company Tom Cole walked into as its first UK employee has grown considerably. The standards he brought with him, and the culture he was determined to preserve, are still what define it.