Tajan — Building a Banking Software Company from Three People to Fifty

Tajan is a banking software company I founded in 2002 and led as CEO for fifteen years. Its products, from centralized identity to transaction reconciliation and nationwide ATM monitoring, served twelve major Iranian banks. It was acquired by a holding company in 2021.

The challenge

A large bank runs on dozens of systems from different vendors: core banking, card and ATM networks, branch applications, internal tools. The operational risk sits in the gaps between them. Staff juggle a separate login for every system. Transactions have to be matched across incompatible file formats. ATM fleets spread across the country have to be watched in real time. All of those gaps have to be closed without taking the bank offline, and under security and compliance requirements that banking doesn’t negotiate on.

What we built

Tajan’s product line grew into a set of platforms that sat alongside a bank’s existing systems and closed those gaps:

• Centralized identity & single sign-on. One identity and access layer for bank staff across the bank’s internal applications, in place of a separate login for every system.
• Transaction reconciliation engine. Automated matching and reconciliation of transactions across 50+ financial file formats.
• Nationwide ATM monitoring. Real-time monitoring of ATM fleets across the country.
• High-throughput SMS & workflow automation. Messaging and automated workflows for day-to-day banking operations.

Security & quality, independently certified

• Grade 1 (top) rating from Iran’s High Council of Informatics, the national body that rates software companies (2016)
• Security and software-testing lab approval for every product we shipped
• ISO/IEC 27001 (ISMS) certification, held continuously from 2016 onward

My role

I founded Tajan in 2002 and hired its first two developers. Over fifteen years as CEO I built it into a 50-person company. I never handed the technical side off as the company grew: I stayed directly involved in the design and implementation of our products throughout. In 2017 I stepped back from day-to-day leadership and joined the board, where I stayed until 2019. Tajan was acquired in 2021.

Outcome

• Products in use at 12 major banks
• At the largest single client: 4,000 ATMs monitored, systems serving 25,000 bank staff across 1,500 branches
• Across all 12 banks: roughly 20,000 ATMs, 125,000 bank staff, and 7,500 branches
• The top national rating for software companies, plus ISO/IEC 27001 certification
• Grew from 3 to 50 people and was acquired in 2021

Stack

C# · Visual Basic · ASP.NET (Web Forms) · Angular · SQL Server · MySQL