Antonio Mugica, CEO and co-founder of Smartmatic and British Lord Mark Malloch-Brown have announced the launching of SGO, which will become the parent company of Smartmatic, the world’s leading elections technology provider.
Mugica will remain as CEO in the new venture while Lord Malloch-Brown will sit as chairman. He will be joined on SGO’s board by Sir Nigel Knowles, Global CEO of DLA Piper, renowned entrepreneur David Giampaolo and Roger Piñate, Smartmatic’s COO.
Lord Mark Malloch-Brown
“The launch of SGO reflects our widening vision and our ambition to harness the talents of our staff outside election technologies and consulting,” said Antonio Mugica.
Mugica added that the group will continue to make substantial investments in its core business and technology but is also set to roll out in the coming months a series of new ventures based on biometrics, online identity verification, internet voting and citizen participation, e-governance and pollution control.
Founded in 2000, Smartmatic has grown into a global business, transforming elections around the world by guaranteeing total integrity of the electoral process from registration, to vote count, all the way to results proclamation, backed by unrivalled technology and project management. The company has been involved in more elections (over 3,500) than any of its competitors, including the highly successful e-voting projects in the Philippines, Belgium and Brazil; registered and counted over 2.3 billion votes in five continents, and developed its own innovative technology that sets a worldwide standard.
Antonio Mugica
Commenting on his acceptance of the appointment, Malloch-Brown said, “I saw three extraordinary assets: an elections business that could help restore faith in democracy but which despite being the largest in the world remains too little known; a network of software engineers and scientists who were not closeted in the typical IT clusters near comfortable university campuses but were out there in the field, designing products that work in every corner of the world; and third, an exciting wave of solutions with the potential to change people’s lives.”
Malloch-Brown was head of the UN Development Programme for six years. During that time he established its Democracy and Good Governance practice and made it UNDP’s leading global specialization.
“Throughout his career Mark has insisted that solutions to development challenges start with successfully empowering people through voting and participation. I cannot imagine a more committed campaigner to lead our Board and, together with Nigel and David, to represent us going forward”, said Mugica.
