“We are an ambitious company – we’re comfortable being uncomfortable”
Eddie Dillon, FCA, recounts his path the business success as the founder of growing Irish fintech CreditLogic and a finalist in this year’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards
CreditLogic founder and Chief Executive Eddie Dillon was once described as “a wild horse that needed discipline” by an early mentor who advised him to train as a Chartered Accountant to gain the structure he needed.
While highly appreciative of the training he received with PwC, his time in practice didn’t prevent Dillon subsequently taking what he describes as the “lunatic decision” to leave a good job with a pan-European bank to start his own business.
He had spotted an opportunity to improve the competitiveness of banks by simplifying their core processes. The “lightbulb moment” came when he was shown a mortgage application file for a single customer that ran to over 1,000 pages.
“It had taken about €25,000 to process and by the time the decision was made, the person was already in their home having got a mortgage elsewhere,” he recalls.
“I saw an opportunity to help banks become more competitive by simplifying and automating the mortgage application process.”
CreditLogic’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform simplifies the capture, processing and validation of customer data. Instantly deployable, it has been proven to deliver immediate benefits in the form of a 90 percent reduction in customer processing and a halving of operational process costs.
Today, six years after starting up, the company serves all retail banks, key public sector entities, non-bank lenders and over 60 other regulated businesses.
In total, the CreditLogic platform processes more than 40 percent of all new consumer mortgages in Ireland today.
The company has also expanded into Europe with customers in Spain, Italy and Greece, and Dillon was recently announced as a finalist in the Emerging category of the 2025 EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards.
CreditLogic: the early years
CreditLogic was anything but an overnight success, however. “The early years were brutal; banks are the most cautious buyers of all,” Dillon says. “No bank in Ireland had brought in an external technology provider to look after a core process before this.
“Banks are rightly conservative. They are custodians of people’s money. We’ve seen in the past what can happen when things might not have been managed as well as they should have been.”
Having worked with KBC Bank for 13 years, Dillon was aware of the uphill struggle facing CreditLogic, but the scale of the challenge was even more daunting than he anticipated.
“The business relied on me to engage banks and convince them that our product does what it says and passes security and regulatory protocols, but the proof of the pudding is when the first customer validates it,” he says.
“It was two-and-a-half years before we got our first bank customer. That was the first time in Ireland that a bank had outsourced a core process to a fintech.”
Getting to that point was difficult. “I founded the business in my early forties,” Dillon says.
“Putting it all on the line at that stage in my career was always going to be tough, but I didn’t realise how tough. We had a team of people who had subscribed to the vision, and they all had to be paid. I experienced a lot of stress in the early years.
“I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but I had great support from my wife and family. I was also lucky that another mentor, private equity fintech investor Dr. Martin Scott, came on board as our Chair. My co-founder has also been great. We can lean on each other in tough times—it’s like another marriage.”
Entrepreneurial inspiration
Dillon began his career after completing a B.Comm at UCD and a master’s degree in Edinburgh, Scotland, joining PwC in 1999 to train as a Chartered Accountant.
“I spent four years with PwC in assurance and corporate finance and that grounding in financial services audit has really stood to me; it requires great attention to detail,” he says.
“IF YOU ARE SITTING AROUND DREAMING ABOUT WHAT TO DO NEXT, IT MEANS YOU’RE NOT FOCUSING ON ALL THOSE THINGS THAT YOU SHOULD BE DOING NOW”
“That was the late 1990s during the dot-com boom and I had an absolute riot helping entrepreneurs and founders raise funds. It was a fantastic era. Everything goes through cycles, and I think we are about to go through something similar as a result of artificial intelligence (AI).
“That was the genesis of the disruption of business models and the way products are bought and sold. I see generative AI as equally disruptive in a positive sense.”
Dillon’s exposure to Ireland’s dot-com pioneers inspired him to become an entrepreneur later in his career. He also values the training he received with PwC.
“We went through a structured training process. There was great camaraderie and a competitive element to it, of course, and we learned about client-centricity,” he says.
“Nobody would ever say their first day in audit was the fulfilment of a childhood dream but the discipline, financial fluency and attention to detail I learned has stayed with me ever since.
“A core pillar of our CreditLogic strategy is financial discipline. There is hype around a lot of things but the only metric we judge ourselves on is cash in the bank. Cashflow is our unshakeable truth.”
Dillon qualified as a Chartered Accountant with PwC in 2002. “I did the exams and passed the FAE first time,” he says. “That was as much of a surprise to me as it was to the Partner I was working with.”
He left PwC shortly after to join global shipping business V.Group. “The Chartered Accountancy qualification is so sought after that I received a number of offers for newly qualified accountants,” he says.
“My career has always taken the route less travelled though, so I decided to take an opportunity to work in corporate finance for a global shipping business whose management was in the midst a highly leveraged buyout. “I ended up working for V.Group in Paris in corporate finance with a syndicate of banks. I worked on a number of bolt-on acquisitions as well.
“The management of cash flow in a highly leveraged business is critically important, particularly when you have a highly forensic private equity backer. Eventually, we refinanced the business.”
Move into banking
Then came the jump to the other side of the fence. “I turned from poacher to gamekeeper and went into banking, working with KBC in Ireland and then across the group,” Dillon says.
Having led digital transformation for KBC, Dillon gained a deep understanding of banking processes and where the pain points lay, sparking his business idea for CreditLogic.
“I was always inspired by Irish businesses that compete and grow internationally and the management teams that do it,” he says.
“I had identified an unserved financial services niche that could scale internationally, and I had identified the team that could do it. I left my job like a lunatic to pursue it. I remortgaged the house three times in the early years, so failure was not an option.
“I’m not a technologist,” he continues. “One of my great successes was convincing Gavin Bennett, my KBC colleague, to co-found the business. We headhunted a team of seven banking and fintech experts to join.
“We developed everything ourselves; that’s our secret sauce. I have been there, sitting across the other side of the table.
“I know when a technology company comes in, you expect the sales director to promise you the sun, moon and stars— and I also know that 70 percent of transformation efforts fail to meet commercial objectives.
“Banks can ill-afford to waste time, money and effort on technology that fails to deliver. Our platform is built by bankers for bankers, and it’s proven to work at scale.”
Getting that first customer was the breakthrough the company needed. “It represented a validation of our product and its benefits and gave us referability. When you have a major bank using your platform, it makes it much easier to sell to others.”
Easier, but not easy. “If it ever gets easy, we’ll have to reset our ambition. We are a very ambitious company, and we are comfortable being uncomfortable. The market opportunity for us is massive and it is international,” Dillon says.
“There are about 3,000 banks in Europe alone whose business models are vulnerable. They need to evolve and become more efficient very quickly.
“The vast majority are mid-tier banks that can’t afford multi-year high-risk transformation projects. We can help them compete by becoming more efficient. Our solution sits on top of a bank’s existing technology systems and can be deployed instantly with immediate commercial impact.
CreditLogic is a white label product. “We don’t provide people, just technology that solves problems for banks and makes people’s lives easier. The cost-to-income ratio is the key metric of a bank’s performance, and we help them move the dial on that.”
Growth and investment
CreditLogic closed a €3.5 million capital funding round in 2024 which included investment from Riverside Acceleration Capital, part of global private investment firm The Riverside Company.
“This was their first investment in Ireland. Our existing, and some new, fintech investors supported the raise,” Dillon says. “The funding will help accelerate our growth plans. We have 30 people on the team now and our ambition is to grow to annual recurring revenue in excess of €20 million within three years and to have more than 75 people in our Dublin and Madrid offices.”
Dillon’s advice to others considering the high-risk path to starting their own business is to make sure they have a support network in place, maintain financial discipline and a laser focus on their “core business”.
“The most important thing is to bring your friends and family along with you on the journey,” he says.
“Financial discipline is essential. Be wary of hype in relation to a product or an obsession with something. It’s all about commercialisation.
“Any idea is great but ask yourself: are you delivering value and is someone willing to pay for it? There has to be a ruthless focus on all areas of execution.
“There is always a list of 100 things you need to do, and you can’t afford flights of fancy or to take your eye off the ball.
“You have to be laser-focused. If you are sitting around dreaming about what to do next, it means you’re not focusing on all those things that you should be doing now.”