The acquisition of Unicorn, along with its group companies GameBrain and Socrates Training, comes hot on the heels of the acquisition of Riliance, making Access a leader in online training, compliance, and risk management in the UK’s financial and legal sectors and signals Access’s intent to be a major player in digital learning across multiple industries.

Unicorn’s high-quality digital learning suite of solutions is underpinned by the Unicorn learning management system (LMS) and focuses on helping organisations with their training, governance, risk management, and compliance needs. The solutions, which will be available through Access Workspace - a cloud based platform for collaboration and communication in the workplace - span the breadth of content, platform, and mobile-first games and apps. This means that Access will be able to support businesses in delivering on every aspect of their learning strategy.

Unicorn comes to Access with more than £10m of revenues and in excess of 1,500 customers, including key names such as UK Finance Association, University of London, Tesco Bank, and Chartered Insurance Institute. As part of The Access Group, Unicorn will strengthen its position in the digital learning space, especially in the financial services and insurance sectors. Investment will ensure a rapidly expanding content library that builds on existing training, compliance, and risk management solutions for multiple industries beyond the leadership position Access now holds in insurance and financial services.

With Access already a major player for other business-critical systems in heavily regulated sectors like education, not for profit, and health and social care, the potential for growth is significant.

Chris Bayne, CEO of Access, commented, "Digital learning is a rapidly growing market, with Europe alone expected to see a CAGR of approximately 15% between now and 2023. The UK holds an impressive share of this market, which is why we have moved to make these solutions part of Access Workspace. We know many of our existing and future clients are coming under increased pressure for training, risk management, and compliance, driven by increasing legislation and regulation in their industries. By offering digital learning through the same platform as people use to do their job every day, we believe that uptake will increase and monitoring adherence and completion will become simpler and more cost effective."

Peter Phillips, CEO of Unicorn also shares, "We see Access as the perfect home for our customers, solutions, and people. They are fully committed to helping us further develop the depth and breadth of our solutions and content library, which will make an excellent addition to the Access Workspace suite. We are all committed to making Access the company of choice for digital learning across multiple industries. With a market-leading suite of solutions, comprehensive content library, and a rapidly growing market, we see the future with Access significantly enhancing our leadership position in this space."

This acquisition, in conjunction with the recent acquisition of Riliance, will establish the Access Digital Learning & Compliance Division and further enhances the portfolio of solutions available to all customers through Access Workspace. The addition of online training, compliance, and risk management to the suite will extend connected and collaborative working to even more departments of a business, from sales, finance, HR, IT, manufacturing, and logistics to Access customers to do more of what’s important to them, all in one place.