An Interview with Christopher Sullivan, Nymi CEO: ‘We’re Enabling True Digital Transformation While Protecting the Health, Safety, and Security of connected workers’

The Silicon Review

“We have a strong focus on what our team members are set to achieve, but also on how they achieve it. We’re actively coaching on core competencies to elevate everyone’s game and keep them challenged.”

Manufacturing, service, defense, and healthcare industries struggle to achieve the benefits of digital transformation (DX) because typical solutions have required trade-offs between security, compliance, and user satisfaction.

Besides, many companies have tried to address the needs of active workers with point solutions that failed to solve challenges in security, compliance, and user satisfaction all at once.

In light of the foregoing, we’re thrilled to present Nymi — a company that enables multiple industries to achieve zero-trust security principles and biometric authorization for the enterprise while solving a variety of challenges that impact the productivity, health, safety, and culture of the connected worker.

The company was incorporated in 2011 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada.

Christopher Sullivan, Nymi CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. How does a casual day at Nymi look like?

The ‘Nymi Way’ prevails every day. We have a team that lives the company values of being customer-driven, team-oriented, acting with urgency, leading through innovation, and having an entrepreneurial spirit. Our ‘Nymi Way’ isn’t just a poster or something we say – we hire for it, we nominate it, we live it.

Q. There are other players in this vertical. How do you distinguish yourself from the rest?

Nymi connects a worker in confidence with a workplace wearable that is safe, secure, and simple. Broadly speaking, we compete in the digital transformation space and are about integrating the worker with digital systems.

Q. How do you manage to provide flexible and affordable services to users without disrupting your scalability?

Nymi’s workplace wearable leverages a broader spectrum of cryptographic standards to connect to billions of devices without any integration. We’re a pointed solution that seamlessly enables an enterprise to strategically future-proof their business forward and beyond the challenges of today.

Q. How can wearables affect our lives? What does the future hold for wearables?

Nymi sees a world where workers are seamlessly integrated with Industry 4.0 practices. A connected worker is a human-centric approach to digital transformation that holds worker privacy, job satisfaction, health, and security at the forefront. Digitizing your workforce will improve the quality of your products and the efficiency of your operations by optimizing the security and integrity of your enterprise systems and data. Done correctly, it also gives privacy control back to your employees, while providing important data for your company’s DX efforts.

Q. ‘When people are having fun, they work together better and they produce better work.’ How do you interpret this saying?

I think that the above statement is putting the cart before the horse so to speak. We have an incredibly driven team and it’s the amazing and aligned work, vision, goals, and achievement that create fun. When hungry, humble, and smart people share commonalities and values and are working together as a unified team they can’t help but have fun.

Q. Growing the company based on employees’ passions must priority. Do you ask your employees what they are interested in doing and how they would like to see their career unfold?

Over-communication is a cornerstone of Nymi. We have a diverse group of people who are empowered and eager to use their voice and share what matters to them. We translate this feedback and passion in people programs, career growth plans, mentorship, and exposure opportunities.

Q. A good workplace stresses teamwork while still encouraging individual achievement and creativity. Does your company follow the same strategy?

That’s a hard yes. Aside from the ‘Nymi Way’, we have established thematic goals. Thematic goals cascade every three to six months and have defined individual contributions that roll down from the executive team and together throughout each functional area. Not only do we have a strong focus on what our team members are set to achieve, but also on how they achieve it. We’re actively coaching on core competencies to elevate everyone’s game and keep them challenged.

Q. Trust is a difficult attribute to measure and a delicate dynamic to maintain. How do you maintain this with your employees?

Trust is a difficult thing to establish, and not so difficult to maintain. You establish it when you’re tested and do the right thing. When you act out of service to others and make things better; people begin to trust that it will happen again.

Q. What does the future hold for Nymi and its employees? Are exciting things on the way?

We are connecting workers in a way that is safe, secure, and simple — from a regulatory and privacy perspective, and also on a human level. Unpacking the chaos of the history between humans and digital transformation – we’re creating solutions around geo-fencing, authentication, smart distancing, health and safety, biomechanics, and many more. We’re being pulled into every industry. The challenge for us will be prioritizing which ones will best serve the human race.

Christopher Sullivan: A Dynamic Leader

Christopher Sullivan (a.k.a Sully) has been working as an innovator in technology for 30 years. He has held CEO, founder, CTO, GM, and CISO positions and started and/or managed research labs three times. Most recently, he took the helm of Nymi as CEO where he leads the team with his strong background in security and an innovative vision for its future. In less than a year, Sully was based out of Toronto pre-COVID, but now works from home—or rather “works from boat”—which is docked in southwest Florida.