Thank you to all of our staff, clients, and partners for another fantastic year. From sponsorships and certifications, to events, office expansions and exciting new products, it’s safe to say 2025 was our best year yet!
Here’s all we got up to:
- Developing our Global Presence
2025 was a big year for growth here at Options. We were delighted to strengthen our presence in APAC with our new Hong Kong office located in the main financial district.
We also expanded our offices in Chicago, London, and Cambridge further developing our links to these fantastic cities.
This was yet another year of our team going places (literally!). More than half of our team headed out to destinations including Dubai, Milan, Tokyo, Zurich, Shanghai, Auckland, London, Paris, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, New York, Toronto, and Chicago to name a few!
In total, our jet setting team completed 1,485 international journeys across 60+ different destinations.
- Launch of PrivateMind
The second half of 2025 marked the launch of our PrivateMind solution, the future of secure AI for financial firms. Powered by atNorth’s data centre in Iceland, PrivateMind delivers a fully governed AI platform designed specifically to meet the performance, privacy, and security demands of financial institutions. It enables firms to deploy AI agents securely within their own environment – ensuring that no data ever leaves the network.
Stay tuned, we’re only just getting started…
- Ahead of the Curve: Developing Our Accreditations
Options became the first financial sector provider to achieve Microsoft Solutions Partner Accreditation for Private Cloud adding to our earlier Solutions Partner designations in Modern Work, Data and AI, Security, Infrastructure Solutions, and Digital & App Innovation (Azure). Together, these designations underscore our global leadership in delivering cutting-edge solutions and integrated technology for the world’s most demanding financial markets.
2025 also included significant certification milestones for us, namely obtaining the Private Cloud Designations and Threat Protection Specialisation from Microsoft. Additionally, we acquired two new partner centre regions, Latin America and the Caribbean Region and Middle East, enhancing our global coverage.
- Deepening Our Partnerships
Our success this year was undoubtedly down to the hard work of our staff, but we wouldn’t be anywhere without our valued partners! We kicked off the year winning Equinix “Emerging Partner of the Year” for the Americas region – a huge achievement for our American cohort!
We also spent a fantastic few days at the AI for Financial Services Conference with the Digital Realty team, with presentations from Jack Funchion and Bill Mandra highlighting critical insights into the infrastructure hurdles financial organisations encounter when expanding AI capabilities.
Last month, we announced our partnership with atNorth, the leading Nordic high-density colocation and data centre provider, to host our PrivateMind solution in atNorth’s ICE02 data centre in Iceland.
And we finished the year with a bang, joining the Pure Storage team at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference. It was great to hear from Andrea Moccia and Nirav Sheth from Pure Storage on “Advancing Data Maturity for Enterprise Business Advantage”.
- Event After Event
In 2025, the Options team attended almost 30 industry events, further developing our presence from New York to Sydney and everywhere in between. Highlights included presenting our new PrivateMind solution at STAC London, STAC Tokyo, and STAC NYC to senior industry participants and attending our first Neudata events.
In addition to industry events, we were delighted to welcome our clients to 16 different corporate events across our various office locations. From happy hours to tech forums, there truly was something for everyone! It was great to further build on our client relationships with these face-to-face engagements.
Here’s to many more to come!
- Busy Year for Belfast!
Not only did we welcome over 100 new faces in through our Belfast hub, but we also participated in Belfast Pride, Women in Business and held two of our own Belfast Capital Markets Events, welcoming hundreds of local people working in the sector for an evening of networking, sharing developments and swapping ideas.
In March, we celebrated 10 years of sponsoring the SPAR Craic 10k! With over 2,500 runners taking part in the SPAR Craic 10k this St Patrick’s Day, it’s fair to say this event has become a pivotal event in Belfast’s social calendar that has been supported by Options from its inception.
And that’s not all! We were delighted to receive “Best Use of CSR” and “Overall IT Team or Company of the Year” at the Belfast Telegraph IT Awards and “Best Company to Work for – Large” at the Belfast Chamber Awards. What an achievement!
- A Decade in the Making
In 2025 we celebrated the 10-year anniversary of our award-winning Graduate and Placement Programme. Since 2015, this programme has directly recruited 270 students, 98% of whom remain with the company today. Also, did you know more than 65% of recruits through our Graduate and Placement Programme have advanced to senior management and leadership roles across key business areas including security, software development, and cloud engineering?
- Sponsorship
Following on from the success of our sponsorship of the QUB Rowing team, we were thrilled to develop our local and regional sponsorship efforts with the Cambridge GAA team as well as our sponsorship of elite athlete, Kate O’Connor. These sponsorships directly align with our commitment to support sporting talent across all levels, and we’re delighted to see what the next year holds!
Sporting achievements isn’t all we celebrate here! We were also delighted to sponsor the 2025 Irish Echo 40 Under 40 Awards celebrating young Irish and Irish American talent, including our very own Aileen Kennedy, who won the Tech Ambassador award. Congratulations Aileen!
- Giving back
We are proud to say that we aided one of our employees in her “Sight Towards the Summit” fundraising challenge, with a team joining for the climb, helping her raise over £33,000 for the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) Northern Ireland.
We were also delighted to support our very own Ciaran Liddy who raised over £22,000 for Macmillian Cancer Support by competing in the London Marathon.
And finally, our Belfast and London offices, who raised a combined £2,000 during our annual Christmas Jumper Day for PIPS Suicide Prevention Ireland and Save the Children respectively.
Good job team!
- Going Out with a Bang!
Here at Options, we work hard – but we also play hard too! We finished off the year with Client Holiday parties in our New York, Chicago, Toronto, Singapore and London offices, bringing together nearly 600 clients from over 200 different companies. We think we may still be recovering!
Happy New Year! See you in 2026.
-Team Options