The Origins of Blockchain Intelligence Group and the Crypto Investigation Industry in the Era of the Pandemic

Lance Morginn, the President and Co-founder of Blockchain Intelligence Group tells us about what goes on behind cryptocurrency transactions.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Lance Morginn: We are well, thank you for asking. Thankfully none of my family has caught the virus. That said, we are all very cautious and follow all of the recommendations put out by our health officers. The other aspect of what has helped during this pandemic is that we are very busy with work, and therefore the time is going by a lot faster than it might be for others. 

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Blockchain Intelligence Group.

Lance Morginn: I am a serial entrepreneur and have founded or co-founded 20 companies. Most of them have been in the technology sector. The funny thing is, I wanted to be a pilot. Once I was certified as a private pilot, the next license I was going to get was my helicopter license. That summer, five helicopter crashes occurred in my area, four from a system malfunction, and that made a multimedia course I was looking at very appealing. Computer crashes, no big deal, chopper crashes, well, you get the point. And the rest is history.

 During one of the companies that I co-founded in 1998, I met my business partner, who asked me to help build the Blockchain Intelligence Group. We started to assemble a team in January of 2015.

How does the Blockchain Intelligence Group innovate?

Lance Morginn: We are helping to shape a new financial era of digital currencies. Our vision is to be for cryptocurrencies, what Google is for the internet. Our first service, QLUETM, lets law enforcement or a compliance officer follow the money via our graphing and analytics engine. The second service, BitRank Verified®, offers a risk score for crypto addresses and transactions. When marketing these services, we realized that education was missing for both sectors, law enforcement, and compliance departments, and we created our certified cryptocurrency investigator course. (CCI) It’s with this collection of services that we are able to help this industry grow. The more people can understand how transparent crypto transactions are; the more people will look at ways to get involved and therefore make the onramps easier.   

How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business finances?

Lance Morginn: The most obvious to me is that we are no longer able to travel and have face-to-face meetings or speak at conferences or have a physical booth. It was through those types of events that made things a lot easier to get our brand known. Because of this, it has slowed our growth rate, but we are adapting to this new norm and doing a lot more of our own webinars or webinars in partnerships with others.

Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources, and what are the lessons learned?

Lance Morginn: We did have to make some difficult choices and let some people go. They were great members of our team, and we are sad to have lost them. I think the only lesson is to expect the unexpected and have a backup plan.

How did your customer relationship management evolve? Do you use any specific tools to be efficient?

Lance Morginn: I do not know if the pandemic really changed the way we nurtured customer relationships. We added ticketing within our platform, and every three months or so collected feedback, but pandemic or not, both of these things should be done depending on where you’re at with your rollout.

Did you benefit from any government grants, and did that help keep your business afloat?

Lance Morginn: Yes, we did receive a government grant, and it did help us when looking at how we manage the funds from our treasury. The grant money was not the difference between us staying in business or not, but it certainly helped us retain some staff that we otherwise would have had to let go.

Your website?

https://blockchaingroup.io/