SBA

Fintech Leader

Tucked away in sleepy Castletown is probably not the first place you would look for a global FinTech (Finance Technology) leader, but nevertheless in quiet upmarket offices on the edge of Parliament Square you’ll find one.

Virtual Systems is a spin-out from EIP, a consultancy and managed service provider to the mobile phone insurance industry, set up by ex-Carphone Warehouse executives. Phone insurance is a lucrative business, and through having the captive insurer for Carphone Warehouse on the island the Isle of Man has developed world-class expertise in this niche. EIP staff travel the world helping mobile operators and insurers to set up phone insurance schemes, devise products, market them, and establish claims processes and all the logistics of replacing or repairing lost, stolen or broken phones.

Given the complexity of processing claims it’s perhaps not too surprising that it needs a sophisticated IT system to make the process efficient and join up all the business partners in the supply chain. Whilst working through the IT barriers of creating such a system at a client it occurred to EIP’s directors that it would be much simpler and quicker to bring new schemes to market if there was an IT system available off the shelf.

Thus Virtual Systems was born, in 2010, to create such a system. Starting with a single senior developer Virtual Systems has developed the CIAD system which automates mobile phone insurance claims processing. Deployed into telcos and insurers call centres, CIAD holds the Policy Database. When a customer calls in to report a lost, stolen or broken device the CIAD system requires the call centre agent to enter the customer’s answers to a few questions, and then the system takes over. Currently 83% of claims are decided automatically by the system’s Rules Engine, a huge saving in call centre and second-line time. With the claim decided CIAD then sets up the logistics for repair or replacement of the phone, actioning transactions with couriers, repairers, replacement warehouses and salvage operators, and producing all necessary correspondence to remove the cumbersome and costly administration work associated with replacing or repairing equipment.

The first deployment of CIAD was to a Vodafone partner in Europe, BITE Telecommunications in Lithuania, which enabled Virtual Systems to continue development and test with a real live customer. When the system came out of beta testing in 2013 Vodafone took a global license to use the system and have now deployed it to the Netherlands, Greece and Hungary. In 2015 Dixons Carphone came on board and have deployed into the Netherlands, Portugal and Germany. Chubb Insurance has gone live in Germany, and Regenersis (a major repairer of mobile devices) has taken the CIAD system into Poland, meaning that 2015 was a frantically busy year for Virtual Systems.

Virtual Systems’ CIAD system is clearly a success; for a small company in Castletown to engage as a supplier to so many major corporates so quickly is remarkable - but their CIAD system is the only publicly available system of its type in the world. Prior to CIAD all telcos and mobile phone insurers had to develop their own in-house systems.

Unsurprisingly the Virtual Systems team has been growing quickly, and has grown to seventeen people. Most of these are based on island, but some of the customer account managers and business analysts are off-island in order to be closer to customers. Ross Sinclair, CEO of EIP and Virtual Systems, counts himself fortunate to have been able to assemble a very high quality development team on-island.

Recruiting technical staff has been a major challenge, but to date only one of the development team has come from abroad. The company is however clearly on the crest of a wave and the plan sees it growing to around thirty people by the end of 2017, which will be tough. Despite the problems of recruiting in an environment with ICT skills shortages and minimal unemployment the company has shown strong commitment to the island and island staff, promoting them into leadership positions so that the original financial controller and senior developer are now Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer respectively.  

Growing the company will enable Virtual Systems to expand its reach into more regions and countries around the world, which is the plan, and also to introduce new functionality. Despite being the global market leader in its space the company is not resting on its laurels and there is a development roadmap to enable customers to make claims for their phones online, 24x365, taking the telcos and insurers call-centres out of the process entirely. Ross anticipates that in the near future a third of all claims will be processed without any human participation, and the system will provide a next-day phone replacement capability even if the customer has dropped it on the way home from the pub long after the call-centres have shut for the day. The company is also looking at increasing the payments processing services it provides for clients; the system already handles hundreds of thousands of direct debit payments from policyholders, but Ross clearly has an eye towards expanding that to include credit card payments.

Aside from the universal difficulty of recruiting staff, the logistics of getting off and on island is really the only other major challenge the company experiences in being on the Isle of Man. With a truly international customer base the island’s current travel troubles are frustrating, but it’s a good place to be.

On the upside, our datacentres and off-island Internet connectivity are clear advantages. CIAD is a web based system, and most customers are running on systems hosted here. Virtual Systems will supply the system to run in a customer’s private data centre, but to date their experience has been that the system runs better when it’s hosted in one of the top-class data centres in the Isle of Man, despite the remoteness of the customers.

Providing a hosted system has enabled Virtual Systems to generate collateral benefits for the EIP consulting business. CIAD processes millions of policies and claims meaning that the company has possibly the most extensive database of policy history outside of the major mobile phone suppliers, and can analyse that to generate and sell performance and risk information to insurers considering the design of new policies. Leveraging this unique information resource is one of the clear priorities for the coming year.

In summary, without fuss or ado, the Isle of Man has grown a real FinTech leader addressing a multinational customer base of major corporates, based on homegrown technology hosted in homegrown data centres - exactly the sort of technology-based economic diversification anticipated in the government’s Vision 2020 strategy. Visual Systems is proof that specialist technology development is a viable path for the island, and that we can do it on our own, without having to import business or technology expertise.

Rapid growth is never easy, and whilst the company is currently a world leader in a niche where the barriers to entry are high, it must clearly keep growing quickly or bigger players will try to muscle in to the new market that Virtual Systems has created. With this in mind, despite being profitable with a multi-million pound turnover, the company is currently arranging additional financing to fuel the rapid growth it must deliver if it is to stay on top.

You may by now be wondering why the UK does not feature in the Virtual Systems user base, I certainly was. Ross explained that the UK is amongst the most mature of mobile phone markets so the incumbent suppliers already have in-house solutions. Most of these however are not automated to the degree achieved by CIAD, so with the efficiency gains evidenced from the continental European deployments the company is starting to consider the possibility of displacing those old in-house systems. If Virtual Systems can crack the UK the company’s growth potential will be stratospheric. You can read more about EIP and Virtual Systems at http://www.eip.eu.com