Glen Manchester is probably the most successful technology entrepreneur you've never heard of. Unless, of course, you happen to run an investment bank, in which case you've probably picked up the phone to hear one of his sales pitches and been impressed enough to make Manchester's product the very first off-the-shelf IT solution your bank has ever bought.

If all went according to plan, Manchester's software made your operation leaner, quicker, more efficient, and it allowed your traders to get on with the business of trading, which for any bank making hay in the current investment climate almost certainly added a few zeroes to the balance sheet.

For everyone else, Glen Manchester is the CEO of Thunderhead, the enterprise software company he founded in 2001. Three years of impressive growth have deposited offices all over the world, doubled revenues every year and allowed expansion into other, similarly lucrative markets. Sales are projected to reach £30m in 2008. In its role as supplier to investment banking giants such as UBS, Morgan Stanley, RBS and Lehman Brothers, Thunderhead has become the largest supplier of trade processing software in the world—a position achieved almost without recognition, seemingly by stealth. "Thunderhead has this knack of doing incredibly well but remaining hidden away," says Alan Rodger, research analyst at Butler group. "It's a great technology, it understands the business need and it's there at the right time—but it's still a well kept secret."

Manchester believes his company's quiet rise to the top has everything to do with its structure. Most start-ups, he argues, have venture capital backing, and "VC firms are much more social in the promotion of their firms," he says. Thunderhead, on the other hand, is funded entirely by Manchester, from the money he made selling his previous start-up, Geneva Digital, to Canadian document company Xenos, in 1999. Without conventional VC backing, he says, Thunderhead is "slightly more under the radar". This may be true, but it's also worth considering the technology radar itself, which—for the national press at least—tends to focus on dotcom starlets and "sexier" Web 2.0 businesses. Enterprise software is hardly the belle of the ball.

Manchester insists his product is "getting sexier", but for now it's more revealing to concentrate on Thunderhead's domination of an apparently impenetrable market. Previously, investment banks had regarded the complex, back-office processes that support their credit derivative trades as a competitive advantage. As Martin Ryan, managing director of Morgan Stanley's equity division, says: "We're not heavy users of [third party] vendors, we tend to build our own stuff." That's because traditionally, the impulse to control the processing of these intricate trades was almost as powerful as the desire to generate the trade in the first place. "Culturally, there is a bit of arrogance in investment banks," says Ryan. "There are a lot of bright traders with their own requirements who want to customise off-the-shelf packages so much that they bear no relation to what they were originally sold. That leads them to think they might as well build it themselves."

That was before Thunderhead. Manchester had spotted the exponential growth of the credit derivatives market and the gap for an automated document system that bankers, rather than their back-office IT teams, could use to process the many thousands of trades being generated each day. A robust documentation system is crucial in the credit derivatives market, particularly since last year, when financial regulators began to clamp down on the industry's poor book-keeping.

"Nobody had cracked investment banking before because there was a great deal of sensitivity there," says Manchester. "We were talking to companies who didn't use a single off-the-shelf product. Everybody said we were crazy. It was unproven that anybody could develop a system that the banks considered superior to anything they could come up with."

Even Manchester, who exudes the kind of can-do insouciance typical of technology entrepreneurs, wasn't always convinced he could persuade the banks to change their ways. "We spent three years developing," he says, "from focus groups to fine tuning, to prototype to launch. For the founder, that's a lot of investment before you see your first client. From an entrepreneur's point of view, you think, 'everything supports what we're doing, but nobody's actually doing it. Is this still a good idea?'"

It certainly seemed like a good idea to Lehman Brothers, according to the US bank's vice-president, Hood Qa'Im-maqami. Lehman had been looking to reduce the time it took to process its credit derivative trades. "We had hundreds of thousands of documents a month flying out the door and our old system couldn't handle it," says Qa'Im-maqami. "We got to the point where one day's worth of trades was taking 18 hours to process, and that was just to create the documents to support the trades, forget about workflow." Thunderhead allowed the bank to reduce an average processing time of six hours to just three minutes-"the difference is that stark," says Qa'Im-maqami.

One of the unique attributes of Manchester's software is that it copes with the increasing complexity of an already complex market. The more complex the trade, the more bespoke the programming required. "If you're dealing with a multi-million dollar trade," says Manchester, "and the IT department says it will be delayed by a week or two, then that will have a big impact on your ability to do that deal." Thunderhead is designed to deal with what traders refer to as "structured" or "non-vanilla trades"—"the more complex the better," says Qa'Im-maqami.

In the intricate world of credit derivatives, the document is everything. "The terms of these contracts are vital," explains Ryan, "and if changes are made by anyone at any part of the process we need to be able to track it, because in the event of a default we need to be able to find out what happened." And as Qa'Im-maqami says, with an "un-automated" system, key facts can be changed "maliciously" as well as unintentionally. "With Thunderhead we can interrogate that data and find out who has changed what and when, and eliminate that risk." In a post-Leeson world, paranoia is minimised.

You get the impression Manchester had a bit of fun with his choice of company name. Literally, a "thunderhead" is the upper part of the cloud responsible for creating a thunderstorm. He wants a similar impact for his software—he wants to be heard. "Our North American rivals aren't too impressed with our presence," he says, with comic understatement. "But we take that as a constructive compliment. [Enterprise software] is something that the North American developers have traditionally dominated. We're reversing the trend."

Thunderhead's unique position as a dominant UK software company, located on UK soil—it's based in Elstree, Hertfordshire—is a product of Manchester's lofty ambitions. At no point has its founder ever thought about consolidation. He's never hidden behind so-called market conditions. Thunderhead launched amid the acrid fallout of the tech bubble. Tough trading conditions for any technology vendor, but Manchester saw only the positives. "It was post-bubble, a time when no-one was building technology, but actually the market was more focused on driving a return for any investment, which I thought would create a much more prudent buying climate," he says. "Companies were less keen to take a gamble, but they were keen to buy technology on the basis that it makes a physical difference to the way they run their company."

Manchester says he never considered settling for second place. In fact, his strategy has always followed Amazon's celebrated mantra: "get big fast"; worry about the consequences later. For an enterprise software company, he says, it doesn't work to think parochially. "Maybe that's what often happens with many UK entrepreneurs, maybe they think about individual niches and segments. But if it's an important sector, there will be some level of consolidation. So if you're going to have a long-term future you've got to have a system that's transportable into multiple markets, otherwise somebody from North America with much larger critical mass will beat you to it." Is that the reason that there are so few UK software firms challenging on a global scale? As entrepreneurs, have we lost the ability to think globally? Manchester believes aggression is often the best foundation. "We were very aggressive, we had a presence in North America very early," he says.

"It's surprising to you that we already have offices in Irvine, New York and Dallas, but in our evolution if we don't take it to America and make a success of it there then we won't have a long-term growth opportunity."

The pride he takes in that presence is clear. "I like competing in America—I'm rather proud of taking our technology there and making an impact. It's a very motivating factor for our British team." Ditto the group's expansion into other markets, such as commercial banking in countries as far flung as Australia, where half of all Australian loans are now controlled by Thunderhead software. The product's expansion is eased by its versatility.

As Butler Group's Rodger says: "If you're an operations manager and you're looking to fulfil marketing needs within a big financial services company, then this is a very, very good tool." But Thunderhead isn't just for financial services companies. Manchester has looked to expand into any area where complex processes demand simple, efficient documentation. The US state of Louisiana, for example, uses Thunderhead to manage its motor vehicle application, while the department of immigration and multicultural affairs in Australia now uses the product for processing visa and immigration applications.

"We're a rare animal," he says. "A global UK software firm with an ambition to be a world leader." You don't doubt his ability to get there, as he says, "we're already the industry standard in trade confirmations", but perhaps the temptation to cash those chips in when they're seemingly at their most valuable pips global domination to the post—at least for the majority of tech entrepreneurs outside the US.

But Manchester is happy bucking the trend. "We want to complete what we started," he says. "We haven't got VCs worrying about their exits—I'm the VC, which means we can take more strategic investment decisions, and look towards a more long-term strategy." Not for sale then? "No," he laughs. "And in any case, I'm unemployable now. I don't want to make myself redundant just yet."

What are credit derivatives?

Credit derivatives exist on the assumption that there is a market for risk. Risk-averse parties sell on their risk at market price to organisations that are better placed to cope with it. For example, if a bank is concerned that one of its customers may not be able to repay a loan, it might use a credit derivative to protect itself from loss by transferring the credit risk to a party with a higher risk tolerance. The contract is legally binding, hence the requirement for robust documentation.

Kicking up a storm

1965     Born, St John's Wood, London
1982     Leaves school at 17, becomes a "ghillie" in Scotland
1985     Joins Xerox as a salesman
1990     Founds document company Geneva Digital
1999     Geneva Digital acquired by US-based Xenos
2000     Becomes Xenos CEO
2001     Returns to the UK to found Thunderhead
2006     Revenue rises to £7.4m, seven-figure profits achieved