Management Team
George Messum (Co-Founder)
George Messum (Co-Founder)
George Messum (Co-Founder)
George's career spans financial services, payments, and a decade in cybersecurity — most recently at a Nasdaq-listed security firm — giving him a perspective that is as comfortable with regulatory obligation as it is with technical architecture. He holds an MSc in Software and Systems Security from the University of Oxford, certified by t
George's career spans financial services, payments, and a decade in cybersecurity — most recently at a Nasdaq-listed security firm — giving him a perspective that is as comfortable with regulatory obligation as it is with technical architecture. He holds an MSc in Software and Systems Security from the University of Oxford, certified by the UK National Cyber Security Centre, and it shows in how IGNISNOVA is built: rigorous, evidence-based, and designed for the compliance realities of iGaming and financial services rather than around them.
At IGNISNOVA, he leads operations, partnerships, and business development — including the managed security operations capability that gives growth-stage businesses access to enterprise-grade protection without building a team from scratch.
Hilbert Long (Co-Founder)
George Messum (Co-Founder)
George Messum (Co-Founder)
Hilbert brings over 23 years of cybersecurity experience across six continents, with senior roles at McAfee, Intel Security, and Dimension Data behind him. He has spent his career building executive-level relationships with enterprise clients across financial services and technology — and identifying the same persistent gap everywhere he
Hilbert brings over 23 years of cybersecurity experience across six continents, with senior roles at McAfee, Intel Security, and Dimension Data behind him. He has spent his career building executive-level relationships with enterprise clients across financial services and technology — and identifying the same persistent gap everywhere he worked: iGaming and regulated fintech businesses facing sophisticated threats and demanding compliance obligations, served by vendors with no real understanding of either.
At IGNISNOVA, he leads all commercial activity across the UK, Europe, and South Africa. His edge is translation — taking complex security challenges and turning them into clear commercial decisions, whether he is speaking to a CISO at a licensed gaming platform or a founder investing in their security capabilities alongside their company growth.
Our Approach
The Problem We Solve
The cybersecurity market was built for horizontal enterprise IT — not for the specific threat landscape, regulatory obligations, and operational realities of iGaming and financial services.
We find many organisations that have invested in security but are looking to take their observability and compliance to the next level of maturity. For growth-stage businesses the problem is starker still — a 30-person fintech carries the same PCI-DSS obligations as a 3,000-person bank, but the market has largely written them off as too small for enterprise solutions and too regulated for generic ones. IGNISNOVA exists to close both gaps
Who We Serve
We work with two segments, both in iGaming and financial services, across the UK, Europe, and South Africa. Enterprise and mid-market clients — licensed gaming platforms, challenger banks, payment processors, and insurtech firms — typically have security teams and technology in place, but face complexity, fragmentation, and the pressure of tightening regulatory frameworks including UKGC, MGA, FCA, PCI-DSS, and DORA. Growth-stage SMEs — scaling operators, regulated fintechs, and early-stage firms face the same compliance obligations with a fraction of the resource, no dedicated security team, and consequences for getting it wrong that are existential rather than merely costly. In both cases, our clients share a common need: a partner who understands their sector deeply, speaks their regulatory language, and is invested in outcomes rather than renewals.
How We Work
IGNISNOVA operates as a specialist partner, not a generalist reseller — everything we do is calibrated for iGaming and financial services, and we serve two sectors deliberately rather than every sector broadly. We carry a curated vendor portfolio selected specifically for the threats and compliance requirements our clients face, and we deliver independent advice on what genuinely fits each situation. Through our Managed SOC partnership, we provide 24/7 threat monitoring, detection, and response as a fully managed service — giving growth-stage businesses access to enterprise-grade security operations without building a team, and giving enterprise clients a continuous, always-on layer without the overhead of running it themselves. Across every engagement, our measure of success is the outcome we deliver for the client — not the volume of technology we place.