Edition 11, Q3 2018
BEWARE THE
POISONOUS
INVESTOR
p25
Unfolding social media
p4

From FanDuel to Flick
p30

COO on Tech Nation
transformation
p40
E3CREATIVE'S
PERFECT
SIGNING
p8
FROM VIDEO
GAME STORE
TO IPO
p26
FINTECH
DISRUPTERS
101
CONTENT BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
// COLUMNS
23 Lawrence Jones on FinTech
"We're living in an age of convenience and old-school
industries like banking simply have to keep pace or risk
being left behind"
59 Gadget Gavin on unusual AI
"AI is pervading our lives in subtle ways, from flipping
hamburgers to cleaning teeth, robot bees and fighting
climate change"
75 Amber Murray on tech addiction
"It's become fashionable to say we should all give
up our phones, but I certainly won't be giving up my
internet any time soon"
04
26 08
36
// FEATURES
04 Unfolding social media
06 Life after administration
08 Why Gary Neville was top signing
11 Cover story: 101 FinTech disrupters
26 Debbie Bestwick on Team17 IPO
30 From FanDuel to Flick
32 Neymar falls for shopping app
33 Show me the money
36 Jacqui Ferguson on Silicon Valley
38 51 AI Innovators - extended edition

Saving face with AI - digital exclusive
40 Tech happens outside London
44 Tech's university challenge
46 James Caan's LinkedIn confession
58 Facebook helped my cancer fight
60 When investment goes wrong
73 Putting fun into cyber security
// EVENTS
20 The Future of FinTech in London
50 Sheffield putting steel into digital
53 Adding rocket fuel to retail
56 Survival guide to GDPR
63 Liverpool Skills Summit
70 Now is time to invest in Manchester
CONTACT US
Editor Chris Maguire: 0161 215 7144; chris.maguire@businesscloud.co.uk; @editor_maguire | Deputy editor Jonathan Symcox: 0161 215 7143;
jonathan.symcox@businesscloud.co.uk; @jonathansymcox | Katherine Lofthouse, senior writer; katherine.lofthouse@businesscloud.co.uk |
Mo Aldalou, multimedia journalist ; mo.aldalou@businesscloud.co.uk | Alistair Hardaker, multimedia journalist ; alistair.hardaker@businesscloud.co.uk |
Helena Furness, business development manager; helena.furness@businesscloud.co.uk |
Events: 0161 215 7142; andrea@businesscloud.co.uk | Advertise in BusinessCloud: 0161 215 3877; sponsor@businesscloud.co.uk |
Subscriptions: subscriptions@businesscloud.co.uk | Contributors: Jenny Brookfield | Designers: Erica Cheung, Billy Evans |
Website: www.businesscloud.co.uk | Twitter: @BCloudUK | Address: BusinessCloud, UKFast Campus, Birley Fields, Manchester M15 5QJ
The story so far...
/businesscloudmedia
@BCloudUK
businesscloud.co.uk
DISCUSSION CONTACTS
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
0161 2157144 editor_maguire chris.maguire@businesscloud.co.uk
How will you remember the summer of 2018? For me the
overriding memory will be of the parched lawns caused by
the hottest summer in living memory and the sounds of
'Football's Coming Home' as the country dared to dream
of World Cup glory in Russia.
A bit of rain has restored the brown-coloured gardens to
their more familiar green while the achievements of Gareth
Southgate's team have been swallowed up by the freneticism
and madness of the new Premier League season.
The weather and football are good metaphors for life.
Nothing stays the same forever and that's especially true for
business.
The latest edition of BusinessCloud is full of examples of
fast-changing entrepreneurs, businesses and sectors that
continue to move with the times.
The cover story is our 101 FinTech Disrupters list.
FinTech is the product of the union between finance and
technology and estimates suggest it's worth billions as a
sector. Compiling the list became a labour of love for reporter
Katherine Lofthouse as she had to whittle it down from a long
list of more than 600 companies. We're not saying these are
the only FinTech companies out there but these are 101 of
the most disruptive ones.
One of the favourite parts of my job is meeting people and
I especially enjoyed sitting down with Jake Welsh, founder
of award-winning digital agency e3creative. Like all good
entrepreneurs he's always looking to the future so when ex-
Man Utd legend Gary Neville offered to buy half his business
he had to make sure his heart (he's a Man Utd fan) didn't rule
his head. Going into business with Neville proved to be an
inspired decision for both men.
Funding is a recurring theme of business and that's
reflected in the latest edition of the magazine. Good
businesses will always be able to attract investment but
companies with flaky business plans, no trading history or
high-risk start-ups will struggle.
Evolve or die because
nothing stays the same
Chris Maguire, editor
BusinessCloud
3
However getting investment can sometimes be a curse
rather a cure. Howard Simms, chief executive of Apadmi
Ventures, said companies need to be aware of poisonous
investors. "Never jump into bed with an investor until you've
got to know them," is his sage advice.
I also had the opportunity to interview renowned venture
capitalist Jon Moulton at a roundtable I hosted in London.
He estimates around 50 of his 120 investments have a tech
link and says many funders are "throwing" money at tech
because they don't want to miss out on the next big thing. It's
the modern day equivalent to the emperor's new clothes.
Finally, I've just come back from a two-week holiday in
America and I cast my mind back to the horrific incident in
2017 when Dr David Dao was dragged off a flight in Chicago
by law enforcement officials because it was fully booked and
the airline wanted to make way for staff members. It became
a story because the incident was videoed and subsequently
watched millions of times. It would never have been as big a
story without technology.
It's a lesson Northern Rail failed to heed. They picked on the
wrong man when they decided to block commuter Nicholas
Mitchell on Twitter because he complained about its poor
services. The software engineer created a 'Northern Fail'
app, which has been downloaded thousands of times and
won praise from Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham.
Businesses that don't move with the times and embrace
technology will become obsolete.
BusinessCloud Media
BusinessCloud_Media
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
4
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
SOCIAL MEDIA
Unfolding a new era
for social media
With so many
apps proclaiming
themselves the 'Uber
of this' or the 'Airbnb of
that' before promptly
disappearing, the
public could be forgiven for being
sceptical.
However when one accumulates more
than three million users within the first few
months, it's clearly worthy of the hype.
The rise of storytelling platform Unfold
is as clear and simple as its aesthetics.
The app which allows people to create
professional-looking pages around
their camera images which can then be
uploaded to social media platforms such
as Instagram has been adding around
75,000 users a day and won over the likes
of fashion and beauty vlogger Zoella, pop
star Camila Cabello and magazine Vogue.
All this without any external investment or
marketing budget.
Co-founder Alfonso Cobo (pictured)
says his team wants to empower people
to stand out from the crowd. "The current
Instagram story tools are really limited,"
he tells BusinessCloud. "What gets us
most excited is what people create with
These days it is hard to stand out from the crowd yet Storytelling app Unfold has gained more than
three million followers without any marketing. Katherine Lofthouse interviews the founders.
Unfold and the impact of these stories.
For example, a journalist from Birmingham
recently used it to tell the story of a refugee
woman's life and job."
CREATIVITY
His co-founder Andy McCune adds: "There
are lots of apps out there to create things
from templates or add text over stories.
We've made the app in a way
that encourages people
to create full stories
rather than just
upload selfies into a
template and add
brushstrokes over
it. Something
about that
is creating a
community and
bringing artists,
influencers and
creatives together in a
cool way."
The team took inspiration from print
magazines and newspapers to put the
finishing touches to Unfold, making the app
as minimal and easy-to-use as possible.
"A lot of other apps feel difficult to use
and have too many features, fonts and
functionality," says McCune. "Whenever
we add one, we try to take another away
to streamline the process. It also takes the
pressure off the user, making storytelling
as easy as possible. We call it 'blank canvas
paralysis' when you have all the options in
the world and don't know where to start."
As the company grows it wants to stick to
its remote working model. While its
base is in New York, the duo
is ensuring the business
can thrive with its team
working anywhere
around the world.
"Part of the soul
of the company is to
be able to tell stories
and you can't tell
stories if you don't
travel or experience
new places," says Cobo.
"It's important for us that
the team is divided around the
world we've got half in the US and half
in Europe so we try to work around time
differences and languages because diversity
really adds to the product."
The 11-strong team is currently
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
5
@BCLOUDUK
SOCIAL MEDIA
" Something about
that is creating a
community and
bringing artists,
influencers and
creatives together
in a cool way."
ANDY MCCUNE
Andy McCune.
completely self-funded,
despite having been
"inundated" with VC
and investor requests,
says McCune. "We've
really considered raising
investment but opted out
because we want to build a
cash-sustainable company
and right now we have the cash
flow to do it," he says. "We're
not closing any doors but for
now we're staying self-funded
and want to continue to grow
in the most sustainable way
possible."
The founders say
expanding in a responsible
way has been their biggest
challenge to date.
"A lot of companies end
up scaling and hiring too quickly and
sacrificing their culture along the way,"
says McCune. "We've really made sure
every person we've brought on is a great
fit and that we're adding them in a way
that doesn't sacrifice culture but builds in
the direction we're trying to go."
This drive to be different is reflected
in the young company's recruitment
process, which doesn't involve the usual
'send-us-your-CV-and-maybe-we'll-
get-back-to-you' slog. "We don't care
about what experiences people had in
large companies, we truly care about
values, what they can bring to the table
and the stories they can tell," says Cobo.
"People have been reaching out to us
through Instagram rather than sending
their CV through email it's a new way
of recruiting."
When would-be employees get in touch
they're asked to tell a story through the
app. If that gets the team's attention they
arrange to chat and set a project to make
sure the prospective employee's skills
are up to scratch a tactic that so far has
worked out well for the pair. The founders
believe this method allows them to have
a better connection with their team.
VALUES
The pair also puts a chunk of its success
down to the fact that Cobo comes from
a design background and McCune is
the owner of a travel media company
with a sprinkling of advertising tech
background, meaning they have
something different to offer than the
"clich Silicon Valley entrepreneur".
"It's really represented in our
values and the way we see our
company growing," says Cobo.
"We started this with the idea
of bringing people together
through purpose-driven
stories. Because it's important
to us we truly believe we
can make a little change in
the world through these
stories, so it's something
we don't want to get
lost. The people we
add to the team are
passionate about
similar things photography,
travel, bringing people
together through social
media, design it all makes
the team what it is."
This passion is reflected in
the type of stories that tend
to do well on the platform,
which Cobo says are ones
which try to connect in an
emotional and personal way.
"Instagram allows people
to connect on a deeper level
than traditional media like
newspapers," says Cobo.
"So when people tell their
personal stories or struggles
through our platform they
can really connect with
their followers. If you follow
someone on Instagram you
really trust them and want to hear what
they're saying."
McCune says that in an age of fake
news and questionable role models,
building this trust is crucial as young
users look outside of traditional media for
inspirational figures to follow.
"Social media stories are much more
visually driven than traditional methods,"
agrees Cobo. "Newspapers aren't going
to be mainly visual but if you go through
Instagram stories 95 per cent
are. They say a picture
is worth a thousand
words and that's such
a powerful thing to
be able to have
when telling a
story."
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
6
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
SPOTLIGHT
As a tech unicorn, it
suff ered a spectacular
fall from grace when
it collapsed into
administration amid
reports of alleged
fi nancial mismanagement.
Wages had not been paid at advertising
tech business Ve Interactive for several
months, with its $1bn valuation seemingly
at odds with its accounts, according to
reports.
That was in 2017. Today Ve Global,
the business formed following a buyout,
considers itself something of a tech
'phoenix', rising from the ashes and shaking
Tech phoenix
shakes off past
Administration doesn't have to be the end of the journey. Jenny Brookfi eld looks at how global tech
business Ve Global survived its own troubles and is now on the verge of profi tability once again.
off what it went through in another lifetime.
There's been a real cultural change as the
new team at the top aims to prevent the
same mistakes and live up to the success
it believes it is capable of. And, as it refl ects
on the last 18 months, there are lessons
to be learned that could easily apply to any
tech business.
TRANSPARENCY
"There was a gear shift when the new
management team came on board,
with full transparency and acting with
integrity we hadn't had that transparency
previously," says Danny Bartlett (pictured
opposite page), international head
of communications at the London-
headquartered business, which provides
personalised online journeys for the
customers of retailers. "When you've had
1,000 people having their wages missed for
three to four months, the main priority was
to put them fi rst and that's something the
business has continued doing."
The business was placed into
administration in April 2017 following
months of uncertainty that had seen its
value slashed to 300m, the departure of
its founder and an emergency round of
fundraising. A new management team was
brought in to look for ways to turn around
the faltering business.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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@BCLOUDUK
SPOTLIGHT
" We managed to save
500 jobs and continue
the business moving
forward, otherwise
we could have gone
into the history books
as one of the biggest
falls from grace of one
of the biggest tech
unicorns." DANNY BARTLETT
Staff could have been forgiven for low
morale at that time, but Bartlett says
there was a different feeling among the
workforce.
"Leading up to the administration, the
team had their heads down and focused
on the product we're a business that's
always had great products and been
innovative and we believed in that,"
he says, adding that there was
another reason for his own
department to remain
determined. "When
you're in a position of
PR, your number one
job when things hit the
fan is internal comms.
It's a volatile situation,
there's a public persona
out there around what's
happening and staff get nervous."
The turning point for the business came
when it was purchased by a consortium of
existing investors and from then change
came rapidly, Bartlett says, recalling the day
it happened.
GLOBAL RESTRUCTURE
"The new chief executive at the time,
Morten Tonnesen, gathered everybody
on the day and said everybody would
have their salaries and that the new
management team was going to do
everything humanly possible to ensure the
company was on a sustainable footing,"
he says. "That announcement came as
soon as a conclusion was reached and
was important because staff hadn't had
transparency previously. It was important
to give them full disclosure every step of
the way, and that's the reason why we still
have hundreds of those people still working
across the business."
A global restructure took place and a
package of efficiency savings were made
to steady the ship. The main priority was
to safeguard as many jobs as possible,
although losses were inevitable, Bartlett
says. The 1,000-strong workforce was cut
to half, with a fifth of the losses coming
from the UK.
"We needed to make sure the business
was safeguarded for the long term instead
of the headlines being 1,000 jobs lost
and the business closing," he says. "We
managed to save 500 jobs and continue the
business moving forward, otherwise we
could have gone into the history books as
one of the biggest falls from grace of one of
the biggest tech unicorns."
More than one year on, those within Ve
have had time to dwell on what went wrong
and lessons that can shape the future
of the business. "We don't want to
bury the history, we want to
talk about it and that will
anchor the business now,"
Bartlett says.
The rebrand to Ve
Global has come with
a whole new set of
values and a sense of
identity. Unsurprisingly,
transparency "top down
and bottom up" is an ethos
that runs through the battle-
scarred tech business, with
communication with staff
one of the key reasons
it has begun to thrive
again, Bartlett says. A
long-thinking view is
also important.
"If you're thinking
short-term gains in a
business you're not in it for
the long haul, so you need to
put time into building a sustainable
business we're talking about a vision
going forward for three to five years at
least," he says. "We've got serious people
at the top giving their time to build this
company and solving problems."
The fact that Ve's online products help
retailers generate better online sales, at
a time when many are closing their high
street stores is a parallel not lost on Ve. Its
goal is to help businesses survive, as it did,
and it prides itself on not having lost a client
during the administration process.
Efforts have been made on
strengthening relationships between
its 23 global offices and it
continues to be open and
honest, internally and
externally.
"We're no longer a
unicorn but we're at the
phoenix stage, rising
from the ashes," Bartlett
says, adding that the
business is contributing to a
parliamentary review looking at
how it turned itself around. "It feels
like a new business with great products and
leadership and we've move into a new UK
office, which feels like a great place for a
young workforce.
"Ve did go through some bad stuff but
we're looking to break even pretty much
soon and hit profitability, which, to go from
where we couldn't have felt more down and
build it up again, is amazing."
Employees at Ve Global are kept informed.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
8
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
BIG INTERVIEW
Why Neville was
perfect signing
for e3creative
On one side of the
table was tech
entrepreneur
Jake Welsh and
on the other was
Manchester United
legend Gary Neville.
Welsh's award-winning digital
agency e3creative had impressed the
footballer-turned-businessman to
the point that he offered a significant
six-figure sum for a 50 per cent stake
in 2015.
"It was surreal to see someone
you've watched on the telly for a
number of years sat in front of you
doing business with you," recalls the
Man Utd fan. "It was a strange scenario.
My dad was ringing me up for his
autograph!"
In such circumstances it would have
been easy for Welsh to let his heart rule
his head but he wanted to be sure it was
the right thing for the business that
he founded straight from university.
"Everyone said 'don't do it'," he says.
"They knew what I was like. I'm a
control freak and they knew how much
I'd invested of my own life to get where
I am. I've lost friends, missed out on the
fun things in life. Instead, I had weekend
shifts, all-night shifts."
He sought a second opinion from a
mentor who he brought with him to meet
Neville. "The mentor had always told me
'no, you don't need it'. But I brought him
and I wanted him to see why this was
different and why my gut was saying this
was right.
"We went to Gary's apartment, we
sat down for an hour and left to get
a coffee. The mentor said 'this is the
time, this is right. The boardroom is
lonely and you're getting bigger'."
Welsh and Neville shook hands and
have never looked back. At the time of
the deal e3creative was turning over
750,000 but has since grown to 3.2m.
A lot is known about Neville, who
has combined a successful career as a
football pundit and entrepreneur since
hanging up his boots in 2011, but who is
30-year-old Jake Welsh?
Born and bred in Lancashire, he's one
of three children and quickly realised he
had no interest in following in his father
Philip's footsteps as a newspaper editor.
He didn't enjoy school where reports
described him as the "class clown". "I
wasn't a conventional child," he explains.
"I didn't like education. I was problematic
as a child. I struggled to focus on things
that I didn't want to focus on. I struggled
to be told what to do. Back in the day, I
wanted to work for Pixar. I've always loved
the process of making things. I've always
been good with a pencil and illustrating."
He lists Apple's design chief Sir
Jonathan Ive as somebody he admires
in more ways than one. "He worked
silently and then through his articulation
became a frontman," he says. Like Ive,
Welsh prefers to keep a low profile and
his penchant for wearing black is telling. "I
always wear low-profile clothes," he says.
"I'm not a suit man."
He went to the University of Salford
to study new media and design and was
quickly made redundant from his first
agency job. It turned out to be the best
thing that could have happened . The
22-year-old launched e3creative (the
three e's stand for engage, enhance,
enjoy) from his home in Lytham with
the help of his mum's credit card. It's
all a far cry from today and e3creative's
immaculate new offices in Queens
House, Manchester.
SUCCESS STORY
Welsh reels off the company's turnover
without the need to check. "In year 1
it was 47,000; year 2 138,000, year
3 365,000 , year 4 580,000, year 5
710,000, year 6 1.1m, year 7 2.6m,
current year aiming for 4.2m and next
year 5.8m."
The success doesn't stop Welsh
checking his cashflow every morning
and every night. "I think I'm still built for
survival," he says. "When you've built
something from the ground you're
constantly looking at your jar to make
Jake Welsh, left, and Gary Neville.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
9
@BCLOUDUK
BIG INTERVIEW
" Gary is up at 5am
every day. An email
will be in your inbox
by 5.15am. He's on it.
I work hard, and he
makes me feel lazy! "
JAKE WELSH
From Top: Michael Mara, right, with Ryan Giggs.
Middle: Gary Neville during his tenure as an England
coach. Bottom: Neville in Manchester United colours.
sure you're OK. I'm a guy who
checks his bank balance
every morning even
though we're doing
healthy figures. Most
people don't do that. If
we want to take risks,
Gary is the backbone of
those decisions."
Welsh had grown the
business to 15 staff when he
started working with Neville, who was
based a stone's throw away. The two got on
straight away and Welsh says Neville applies
the lessons he learned in football under Sir
Alex Ferguson into his business career.
"The phrase that he uses is 'attack the
day'," he says. "There are no truer words to
describe Gary. He's up at 5am every day. An
email will be in your inbox by 5.15am. He's
on it. I work hard, and he makes me feel lazy!
"You realise he's a businessman straight
away when he starts to tell you about his
philosophies and what he wants to achieve
in business. His drive is what motivates you
to drive even harder. Gary will always admit
he was never the best footballer. He
had to make himself the best footballer.
I've always thought the same. I'm not
the most qualified from an educational
perspective. I've never been to business
school, I've never had a real business
partner and I've been driving myself.
"That's where the similarities between
him and me come in. It doesn't matter,
just keep going."
So how does Welsh feel when people
refer to e3creative as Neville's business?
"I'm not egotistical in any way," he says.
"You can't be annoyed at a business partner
who's come into the business with a profile
and is growing it. If it was 'Jake Welsh's
business' I'd be more annoyed at that,
because it's the team that
deserves the credit.
What we need to do is
make sure that e3 is
the business, it's not
me and it's not Gary.
It is a brand that
should power itself
in its own right. It's
like Formula 1. You look
at the race driver and say
'great job'. But actually, it's the
team behind them that made
that happen. The driver takes 100
per cent of the glory and you
forget that the team spent
the night before changing
the gearbox. I don't want
to be a Lewis Hamilton. I'll
always try and push my team
out.
"The nice thing about Gary
being on board is that he never
changed our direction. He backed that
direction. I see Gary twice a month. That's
his management style. If something is OK, it
will be OK. If there's a problem, he'll involve
himself."
TRAGEDY
Despite Welsh's success, he says he'd give
it all up in a heartbeat in exchange for saving
a colleague who died of cancer in 2015. Mike
Mara gave his name to the agency's Mara
Foundation, which aims to nurture talent
and encourage people to "dream big" like
he did.
e3creative has just taken
on its first intern as part
of the foundation and
Welsh spoke of his
devastation at his
colleague's tragic
death.
"Mike's death
knocked me and
everyone for six," he
says. "I cried for weeks
and although e3creative has
been really successful I'd give it
all up for Mike. People live by his culture
and talk about him every day. The Mara
Foundation is something the entire agency
talk about to people. They thrive off it."
However he admits it could have all been
different after Mara's
first unsuccessful
job interview.
"We turned him
down because
we didn't believe
his portfolio was
strong enough,"
recalls Welsh.
"He was a graphic
designer. A year later
we ran the same interview
process and lo and behold, Mike
was there.
"I laughed and asked if he was coming
back for a second try, and he said 'I
absolutely am'. I told him again that his skills
weren't where we needed them to be and
he said: "Put me on whatever salary you
want and I'll make myself there'.
"We took Mike on and within a year he
absolutely flew. He committed himself
and worked every minute of every day. He
researched and invested his life in it."
Tragedy struck in the run-up to Easter
2014 when he felt unwell and within a
few days he'd been diagnosed with level
4 bowel cancer. He died in October 2015
and his colleagues channelled their grief
into creating a foundation in his memory
to uncover the next hidden gem.
Welsh says Mike's death puts things into
perspective and his legacy continues to
drive the direction of the business, which
has grown to 50 staff.
"If you look at our brand and model
and tone, it isn't following
the crowd," he says. "We
don't do things that
everyone else is
doing.
"My philosophy
in business is to
stay pure and not
get distracted by
what others say or
are doing. We don't
work for people, we
work with them. We
need to stay true to what
we set out to achieve."
BU
Y N
OW
20
Thursday
19
Wednesday
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
11
@BCLOUDUK
The explosion
of digital
connectivity
through our
smartphones
has changed the
way we bank, borrow and buy.
The FinTech sector has become
a magnet for start-ups and
entrepreneurs in the UK.
BusinessCloud has been on
the hunt for the nation's top
FinTech movers and shakers, the
people and companies that are
breathing new life into traditional
institutions and coming up with
innovative new ways to help
people manage their money.
From P2P lending to
crowdfunding, from RegTech
to InsurTech, fi nancial services
are no longer synonymous with
impenetrable small print, stuff y
hierarchies and high barriers to
entry.
The judges chose the top 101
FinTech Disrupters from the pool
of nominations, showcasing the
stars that are burning brightest in
the banking revolution. Katherine
Lofthouse reports.
Aicura Solutions, London
'Plug-in FinTech factory for banks'
Aicura off ers banks a faster, cheaper
way to quickly test ideas and take them
to market. The company focuses on
the fi nancial services sector, off ering
incumbents 'prototyping as a service'.
Aire, London
Aire's credit assessment service reveals the
bigger picture, predicting how borrowers will
behave in the future rather than relying on an
extensive credit history. The start-up works
with the likes of Toyota Financial Services,
peer-to-peer lender Zopa and fashion
retailer N Brown and has had $12m funding
to date.
Akoni, London
Understanding that
many companies and
charities are too small
for a treasurer but too
big to ignore active cash
management, Felicia Meyorowitz Singh
co-founded Akoni. The personalised
treasury management platform scans the
entire UK marketplace, covering more
than 300 products from 70 leading banks.
Algomi, London
Ringing in a new era of electronic
bond trading, Algomi created the
Honeycomb Network, a platform that
matches investors to the best dealer
for corporate bond trades. Recently
receiving signifi cant investment from
Euroclear, the company will also make
the hundreds of thousands of bonds
held by Euroclear in Europe available
to buyers through Algomi's ALFA
price aggregation tool. Ultimately,
the company off ers bond market
participants access to information
would be diffi cult or impossible to gain
without tech.
Applied Blockchain, London
The fi rst blockchain
company to receive
investment from
Shell, Applied
Blockchain has a
focus on distributed
ledger technology
and smart contracts for a
huge spectrum of industries. The start-up
was also selected by Shell as the winner
of a development competition for its
downstream businesses.
Join the discussion on #FinTech101
FinTech 101
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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FinTech 101
Arkera, London
Arkera is an AI
wealthtech
platform
empowering
self-directed
investors to
make investment
decisions by
connecting news content to products.
Its technology and expertise helps
fi nancial institutions increase revenues
by equipping clients with appropriate
knowledge to drive investment activity.
It has raised 8m investment to date.
Atom Bank, Durham
The UK's fi rst bank built exclusively
for your smartphone or tablet, Atom
Bank launched in 2016 with Fixed
Saver accounts and mortgages. It's
now recognised as one of the fastest-
growing banking start-ups in Europe.
BBVA made 85.4m investment into
Atom earlier this year, bringing the
total capital raised to 149m. It has lent
more than 1.2bn through residential
mortgages and business loans in less
than a year.

BCRemit, London
With the goal of creating a
'marketplace' for migrant workers in
Europe, BCRemit off ers disruptive
online money transfer services via its
mobile app, web and call centre. Mainly
targeting the Southeast Asia send
corridor, with more than $70bn in annual
remittance transactions, it gives users
access to value-added services such as
eCommerce, bills payment, mobile top-
up and even fast food delivery. The site
aims to provide the lowest transfer fees
in the market, and last year partnered
with identity confi rmation provider
HooYu to help customers get approved
faster.

Blukudu, London
Helen Mitchell co-
founded collaboration
builder Blukudu
in 2012 to help
create partnerships
between incumbent
fi nancial services,
investors and SMEs in partnership with
governments. The company has operated
a profi t every year since it was founded.
Mitchell has been involved in bringing
220m+ equity investment into the UK
tech sector.

Brolly, London
Phoebe Hugh is
changing the way
insurance works
with Brolly. Powered
by AI, it helps people
understand what
insurance they
need, fi nds the best policies and then
helps manage them simply and easily.
Hugh started her career at Aviva, where
she worked as an underwriter and product
manager before leaving to start her own
company. She has raised 1m in seed
funding.

By Miles, London
By Miles is revolutionising car insurance
with its pay-per-mile
black box and mobile
app. Members pay
a small subscription
fee to cover fi re and
theft while the car is
stationary; after that, each
trip is logged and charged via a monthly
statement. It raised 1m in a seed round
led by JamJar Investments, the venture
capital fund of the Innocent drinks
founders.
Capitalise, London
Capitalise helps fi nancial advisers fi nd
fi nance for their SME clients from more
than 100 institutional and FinTech lenders
throughout the UK. It uses in-house tech
and data analytics to identify the best
fi nancing options available. Supported
by both the Microsoft Accelerator and
Microsoft Growth programme, it was
recently identifi ed by global innovation
foundation NESTA as one of the top ten
FinTechs that could shape the future of
small business banking.
Capnovum, London
For fi nancial institutions that struggle to
keep up with ever-changing regulations,
RegTech start-up Capnovum has made
things a whole lot easier. Automating
the process with AI, the platform helps
businesses fi nd out what they need to do
to stay compliant in a complex fi nancial
landscape.
Choon, Wiltshire
Internationally
renowned DJ
Gareth Emery
created Choon to
pay artists fairly
and immediately
in cryptocurrency.
Independent artists
can use it to upload their music, share it
with others and directly be paid 80 per cent
of the proceeds from the streaming of
their material. Currently in beta, it features
mostly electronic music to date.
Azimo, London
International transfer service Azimo
makes it easier and cheaper to send
money around the world. Japanese
eCommerce giant Rakuten has just
invested a $20m Series C round into the
company, leaving it valued at several
hundred million dollars. With over 1.5m
registered customers, the company saw
triple-digit growth in 2017.
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FinTech 101
Clearsettle, London
Clearsettle's payment gateway makes
it easy for businesses to make and
accept payments from more than
140 countries through hundreds
of diff erent methods. With a single
integration, payment service providers
and merchants can instantly connect to
its networks.
Cleo, London
While many banks move toward an
app-based service, AI chatbot Cleo
will help you get rid of them. The
digital fi nancial assistant advises
users on their spending and of deals in
the marketplace while automatically
placing money into a savings account
based on what they can aff ord. Users
can send money to their Facebook
Messenger contacts via Cleo while it
has backing from big-name investors
including Zoopla founder Alex
Chesterman.
Cobalt, London
Blockchain start-up Cobalt is helping
businesses streamline the operational
costs and minimise the risks related to
processing foreign exchange trades.
Instead of creating multiple records
for the same transaction, Colbalt
creates a single view stored on a shared
ledger. It recently secured a strategic
investment from Singapore Exchange,
which operates Asia's largest foreign
exchange.
ComplyAdvantage,
London
Financial crime compliance experts
ComplyAdvantage are building
solutions to stop money laundering
and terrorist fi nancing. The AI and Big
Data-driven risk database raised $8.2m
in Series A funding in 2016 and its real-
time capability to update their list of
individuals on watch-lists has led it to
industry recognition.
CreditLadder, London
Asa Bentley set
up CreditLadder
in 2016 to help
tenants add rent
to their credit
history. Working
with Experian, his
company scans
on-time rental payments to improve users'
credit. It has partnered with the likes of
challenger banks Monzo, Metro Bank and
Starling Bank and featured on the likes of
Money Saving Expert and Radio 4.
CrowdLords, Surrey
CrowdLords exists to make investing
in property easier and more accessible
for more people. The start-up lets users
crowdfund investment in rental properties
or developments from as little as 1,000.
More than 100,000 a week is already being
invested on the platform, delivering returns
averaging between six per cent and 15 per
cent per annum.
CUBE, London
CUBE produces state-of-the-art solutions
ensuring that banking customers remain
the right side of the regulators. The
company alerts its 1.5m user base in
real-time when regulatory change
occurs. It then helps them identify the
impact on their policies and procedures,
helping them return to a compliant state
as quickly as possible.
Currencycloud, London
Currencycloud's platform makes it easy
to send and receive payments. It builds
tools for payment companies to use via
its API, enabling remittances and money
exchanges across borders. It raised 20m
in a Series D funding round led by Google's
GV, its fi rst FinTech investment in Europe,
last year, taking its total to around $68m.
Curve, London
FinTech start-up Curve is aiming to
revolutionise how people see, save and use
money. It lets users move all spending into
one easy-to-use card and app and is the
brainchild of Shachar Bialick, formerly of
Israel's Special Forces. Fully launched at the
start of this year, 50,000 people signed up
to its waitlist in addition to the 100,000 or
so users who joined Curve in its beta phase.
Delio, Cardiff
Growing across the UK, Delio creates
and delivers private asset platforms for
some of the world's leading fi nancial
institutions. The company recognises
that exciting young entrepreneurs are
desperate for a diff erent way of doing
things. Focusing on high-net-worth
clients, it helps traditional silos launch
new products and has attracted $1.4m
investment to date.

EdAid, London
Helping fi ght crippling study fees, EdAid
lets students crowdfund their education.
Founded in 2015 by Tom Woolf, a former
professional athlete and a Nike ambassador,
the platform off ers interest-free loans
with students then giving a percentage
of their early career earnings to their
backers alongside a network connecting
students with the best internships and jobs.
It also launched QardHasan, the Sharia-
compliant version of the platform, last
year, which is led by Ismail Jeilani.

Encompass, Glasgow
Regtech company Encompass was
founded in Sydney before moving to
Scotland. It has raised 4.2m in investment
as it targets the 'Know Your Customer'
market and helps fi ght money laundering.
It gives businesses real-time access to
multiple sources of global company and
personal data which it has uncovered
through robotic search.

Enforcd, London
Helping businesses identify, manage
and mitigate the conduct risks they face
through its intelligence platform, regtech
company Enforcd was a member of the
Bank of England's FinTech accelerator. It is
led by fi nancial services regulatory barrister
Jane Walshe, who previously worked at JP
Morgan.
Join the discussion on #FinTech101
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FinTech 101

Essentia Analytics,
London
In 2014 Essentia was named Guardian
'start-up of the year' after signing up
some of the world's biggest hedge
funds in its fi rst 18 months. The
company specialises in investment
behaviour analytics software that
helps investors ignore their internal
biases and boost their portfolio.

Everledger, London
Diamonds are one of the biggest
purchases most people make
but certifi cates are often forged.
Everledger is the fi rst company
to track diamonds throughout
the supply chain using blockchain
technology, ensuring they are
authentic and ethically traded.

Fidessa, London
Known as one of the 'grandfathers' of the UK
fi nancial market, Fidessa provides software
and services to 85 per cent of the world's
top fi nancial institutions. $20 trillion worth
of transactions fl ow across its network each
year and a 1.5bn takeover of the fi rm by Ion
Investment Group was recently approved by
the Financial Conduct Authority.

Fiinu, Surrey
'Neobank' app Fiinu aims to launch at the
beginning of 2019 to provide access to credit
to "the lower half of the UK's population"
which could feel pressured to take out a
payday loan. Its CEO Marko Sjoblom has
pledged to save UK consumers a total of
1bn annually on overdraft fees within fi ve
years through an automated lending robot
named Fiinuscore.

Finimize, London
Max Rofagha is the founder of Finimize,
the start-up that's making fi nance
accessible for millennials. Backed by
VC Passion Capital, the company was
originally created as a newsletter which
simplifi ed fi nancial news. With more than
200,000 subscribers and growing fast, it
has since morphed into an end-to-end
fi nancial planning platform.

FINkit, London
FINkit's toolkit is making it easier for
banks and fi nancial services to integrate
FinTech solutions into their systems.
Developed by Monitise International
and Mastercard, and now part of Finserv
following a 70m acquisition, the platform
is being used to help compliance in open
banking.

Eileen Burbidge
It's easy to see why UK
Treasury special envoy
for FinTech Eileen
Burbidge has been
dubbed 'Queen of British
VCs'. Since earning her
stripes at prestigious
companies including
Yahoo!, Skype and Apple,
she has become a partner
at venture capital fi rm Passion Capital and is
co-founder of tech start-up hub White Bear Yard.

Fiona Ghosh
Fiona Ghosh is a partner
at law fi rm Addleshaw
Goddard specialising
in complex FinTech
arrangements in the
fi nancial services sector.
She heads AG's FinTech
Group, acting for fi nancial
institutions in bringing
new payment solutions,
including ApplePay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay,
to market.

Liz Lumley
FinTech legend Liz Lumley is a global
specialist commentator across the sector.
She has spent more than 20 years working in
the fi nancial technology space, most recently
as managing director at Startupbootcamp
FinTech London and as an editor at fi nancial
services and technology newswire, Finextra.

Louise Brett
Former banker Louise Brett leads Deloitte's
FinTech operations in the UK, working with
everyone from fi nancial services clients to
government bodies and the broader FinTech
community. She sits on the board
of Deloitte's EMEA FinTech Accelerator.

Richard Crook
RBS's head of emerging technology Richard
Crook is turning his attention to the application
of distributed ledger technology, including
blockchain. Throughout his career he has
specialised in the building of fi nancial ledgers
and regulatory reporting for the largest
fi nancial service institutions.
5 FinTech champions
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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FinTech 101

FloodFlash, London
FloodFlash uses an algorithm to provide
fl ood insurance which is fairly priced
even in some of the highest-risk
locations around the world. Customers
receive a pre-agreed settlement as soon
as sensors detects that waters have
exceeded a critical depth. It recently
raised 1.9m for a nationwide launch,
including funds from previous backer and
incubator InsurTech Gateway.

Fluidly, London
Helping young companies manage
their fi nances more easily, Fluidly
analyses and learns from transactions
to highlight threats and maximise
opportunities. Combining AI with
fi nancial modelling to off er automated
cash forecasting, last year it closed a
2m seed round.

Form3, London
Payment services provider Form3 helps
users move money faster, delivering
real-time payments processing.
Last year Barclays and Angel CoFund
backed the company to the tune of
$5m in Series A funding and it has
also partnered with Starling Bank and
Tandem Bank.

Friendlyscore, London
FriendlyScore off ers free credit scores
and reports based on users' social
media profi les. Crowned most exciting
FinTech start-up at WebSummit in
2017, its biggest market is currently
India, where 21 per cent of world's
'unbanked' people reside.

Funding Circle, London
Peer-to-peer lender Funding
Circle links investors up with small
businesses, having arranged 3.4bn
of loans to almost 36,000 SMEs since
2010. With a 2bn fl otation on the
horizon, it's backed by some of the
world's leading VC fi rms and earlier this
year the unicorn appointed Bank of
America to lead one of the biggest-ever
listings of a British FinTech company.

Funding Options, London
A matchmaking site for small businesses
and lenders, Funding Options has won
multiple industry awards. Backed by the
British Business Bank, the site has helped
fi rms from across the UK source tens of
millions of pounds in fi nance in the last
year alone.
GoodBox,
Manchester
Social impact
start-up GoodBox
builds contactless
payment devices which
are intended to replace
traditional cash buckets. Working with
the likes of the Natural History Museum
and Help for Heroes, GoodBox hardware
doubled fundraising revenues during
trials.
Hello Soda, Manchester
With more data than ever at our fi ngertips
it seems like a natural step to use it to help
people get credit scores. Hello Soda helps
businesses with identity verifi cation, fraud
and personalisation by letting customers
connect their digital footprint such as
their social media profi le as part of an
application or payment process. Rapid year-
on-year growth and an expanding presence
in the US marks it out as a key player.
HUBX, London
HUBX technology
powers the London
Stock Exchange
Group's ELITE
private placement
platform connecting
high-growth
companies with its
global institutional investor network. HUBX
empowers investment professionals to
manage their workfl ows and relationships
with insight, intelligence and control.

InMyBag, London
InsurTech start-up InMyBag is protecting
a mobile generation. Partnering with
heavyweight companies such as Amazon
and Apple, it protects users' belongings
and also off ers Crashplan data recovery
service, which automatically backs
up all data stored on a computer. The
new streamlined model will replace
consumers' lost or stolen belongings
within four hours, wherever they are in
the world.

Investec Click & Invest,
London
Global wealth management giant
Investec launched 'Click & Invest' last
year as an easy way for people to invest
amounts of 10,000 or more. The
platform provides users of all levels of
experience with specialist managers to
help them take care of their investments
online.

Invstr, London
Invstr is a micro-investing app that allows
users to learn about the fi nancial markets
and trade in a fun way. Downloaded
more than 500,000 times across 192
countries, it off ers a virtual investment
game for newcomers and veterans alike,
detailed stock market and crypto market
news, data feeds and an in-app portal for
fractional share trading.

iwoca, London
iwoca lets small businesses borrow
1,000-150,000 in a couple of clicks,
basing its decisions on a business'
performance rather than just a credit
score. In the fi rst quarter of 2018 alone it
has approved 3,500 small businesses for
credit facilities, far more than any other
challenger bank, and nearly matching
HSBC's or Barclays' business overdraft
approvals. It has reached profi tability.

Landbay, London
Having recently received investment
from Andy Murray, Landbay is proving that
property is still thriving. The proptech
fi rm has raised a total of 6.4m funding in
six crowdfunding rounds on Seedrs and
passed the 100m lending milestone.
It seeks to optimise the opportunities
presented by peer-to-peer lending.
Join the discussion on #FinTech101
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FinTech 101

Lendable, London
Peer-to-peer fi nance fi rm Lendable is
the fastest-growing lending platform
in Europe and has raised a mammoth
302.5m to date from investors
including Eileen Burbidge. It provides
borrowers with decisions on loans
within 15 minutes by using automation
and technology.

LendInvest, London
Property fi nance marketplace
LendInvest off ers simple mortgages
and smart property loan investments.
The site has facilitated 1.2bn of loans
made to borrowers who have bought,
built or renovated 4,000 residential
properties in more than 120 towns
and cities across the UK. This year it
grew over 90 per cent after launching
mainstream mortgages.
MarketInvoice, London
Founded in 2011, peer-to-peer lender
MarketInvoice makes it quick and easy
for entrepreneurs to access invoice
fi nance and business loans. Over the
years it has funded invoices worth
more than 2.7 billion, boosting cash
fl ow for thousands of UK businesses.
It recently partnered with Barclays to
"transform" the way SMEs in the UK
manage cash fl ow and source fi nance,
which has been hailed as the fi rst
FinTech-bank collaboration in the UK.
Earlier this year the company secured
more than 100m funding.
Mespo, London
Personalised spending bot Mespo tells
users when they are overspending
and tries to fi x it for them. Taking ten
per cent of the savings users make,
it sends insights into their fi nances
via Facebook Messenger and does
the paperwork if they decide to save
money through the platform. It was
one of two winners of Tech City UK's
#FintechForAll competition last year.
Metafused, London
Metafused
makes AI-based
predictions for
fi nancial service
and logistics
and is said to
increase clients'
effi ciency by 20
per cent. CEO
Madhuban Kumar has VC, entrepreneur
and corporate experience in three
continents and has worked with
bleeding-edge technologies building
innovative products, including the
Barclays Oyster card.
Moneybox, London
Moneybox rounds up user purchases to
the nearest pound and invests the spare
change for them. Starting at 1, users
can invest in companies such as Netfl ix,
Unilever and Disney via three tracker
funds. Monzo recently partnered with the
site to allow its users to take advantage of
the tech. With more than $23m funding to
date, Moneybox says it helps customers
invest the spare change from over one
million transactions every week.
Moneyfarm, London
Robo-advisor Moneyfarm gives its users
tailored fi nancial advice using AI. Earlier
this year it bagged 40m in the largest
European raise of its kind, with insurance
giant Allianz among its backers. It has
26,000 active investors and its assets
under management total 400m.
Monzo, London
Online-only bank Monzo helps its
customers save with its handy app that
helps people track their spending. With
instant notifi cations when you spend, no
fees for spending abroad and the ability
to pay other accounts via Bluetooth, the
start-up has close to a million customers.
Moola, Kent
Ex-quantum
physicist Gemma
Godfrey's Moola
helps people
achieve their
money goals.
Featured by The
Times as a "route
to the best fi nancial
advice", Gemma was also advisor to
Arnold Schwarzenegger on Celebrity
Apprentice and is the money expert on
the hit ITV show "Eat, Shop, Save".
NorthRow, Oxfordshire
Founder and CEO Adrian Black is the driving
force behind NorthRow, which combines
identity verifi cation and 'know your
customer' services via a single API. It verifi es
international users for the Open Banking
Implementation Entity, which is governed by
the Competition and Markets Authority.
Oakam, London
Oakam empowers those overlooked by
traditional lenders through AI, machine
learning and gamifi cation. Last year it
secured a 35m debt investment and
says 45 per cent of its existing customers
received better pricing on their next
loan. It recently partnered with City
University, London to explore the use
of psychometric data and behavioural
science in its risk models.
Marq Millions, London
After being named 'Youngest Successful Business
Entrepreneur' by the Government of Pakistan in 2010,
Muhammad Asim came to the UK to launch Marq
Millions at 22. The FinTech company's fl agship product
Arro Money uses AI to help users set up a bank account
in three minutes in partnership with the likes of Barclays
and Mastercard.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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@BCLOUDUK
FinTech 101
OakNorth, London
Using Big Data and machine learning
to unlock the potential in SMEs,
OakNorth's ACORN platform has lent
around 1.5bn to UK businesses without
a single default. At just three years
old, last year the business accounted
for 17 per cent of all net new lending
in the UK. The business is one of the
fastest-growing fi nancial companies in
European history.
Onedox, London
Onedox is on
a mission to
revolutionise
admin for millions
of households,
claiming they
overpay by more
than 1,000 a year.
Its free digital dashboard automatically
collates disparate household account
information into one place, proactively
monitors whether customers are
getting a good deal, notifi es them when
important dates like contract end dates
are approaching and helps them switch
to better deals.
Onfi do, London
Onfi do helps websites verify people's
identities. Its AI allows users to upload
a selfi e and a photo of their identity
document using a smartphone to
complete the verifi cation process. The
site has raised $60m funding in total
and partnered with a string of high-
profi le fi rms around the world including
Deliveroo and Revolut.
Opportunity Network,
London
Opportunity Network gives SMEs
and private investors access to digital
business network rivalling those of
large corporations. Funded entirely by
private investors and business partners,
ON makes anonymous introductions
for members who meet strict fi nancial
requirements and are looking for deals
of $1m or more. It has partnered with
the likes of UBS and ABN AMRO.
Oval Money, London
Oval lets users save through smarter
means: they can round up purchases to the
nearest pound or put aside a percentage
or fi xed amount every time they make a
particular type of purchase. Launched by
the former CEO of Uber Italy, it raised 1.3m
in April, 60 per cent of which came from
individual investors on Crowdcube where
it hit its initial goal of 500,000 within 72
hours. Last year it launched a fi rst-of-its-
kind integration with Facebook, allowing
users to contribute to their savings each
time they post on social media.

Pennies, London
Every penny counts literally with digital
charity box Pennies. The platform rounds
up online payments to give the excess to
charity, raising more than 13m in seven
years through micro-donations from
Domino's, Boots Opticians, Virgin Holidays
and more. In 2017 it became compatible
with Apple Pay so people shopping on an
Apple device can donate via the app.

PensionBee, London
Pensions are both complicated and off er
an extremely delayed payoff . PensionBee,
backed by American investment giant State
Street, is the only online pension manager
that brings old pensions into one plan on any
device.

Plum, London
Plum is the fi rst fi nance-savvy Facebook
Chatbot which uses AI to allow users to
save automatically, start investing and take
control of their money without changing
their lifestyle or budgeting. It also ensures
users aren't overpaying for any fi nancial
products, such as energy bills or overdrafts,
and will notify them and help them switch if
they are.

Previse, London
Previse uses AI calculating a buyer's
likelihood of paying an invoice to
ensure corporate buyers pay their
suppliers instantly, solving the problem
of late payments to small fi rms who
rely on cash fl ow. It says that this also
opens a new 2.4 trillion global market
for funders. Previse sits alongside
funders' existing payment technology,
meaning no changes are needed.

Prodigy Finance, London
Borderless student loan provider
Prodigy Finance has lent around
$505m to more than 10,300 students
in the last decade. Nearly 90 per cent
of Prodigy Finance-funded students
would fi nd it diffi cult or impossible
to secure the funding needed to
complete their master's degrees and
80 per cent of borrowers hail from
emerging economies. Alums, impact
investors and even universities can
invest in bonds for international
students wanting to study in the UK.
Last year it raised an incredible $240m
in one funding round.

Pouch, London
Pouch's three co-founders Ben
Corrigan, Jonny Plein and Vikram
Simha started the money-saving
platform to make voucher codes
easier to redeem. Since then they
have won the Mass Challenge
Accelerator, received fi ve off ers
of funding on Dragons Den and
raised 380,000.
Join the discussion on #FinTech101
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
FinTech 101
Quint Group, Macclesfi eld
Based in the UK
but with a global
presence, Quint
powers a portfolio
of online FinTech
businesses in
the consumer
credit sector. The
Group was recently named number 33
in the Sunday Times 100 Best Small
Companies to Work For 2018 and won
the Queen's Award for Enterprise in
Innovation in 2017.

RateSetter, London
RateSetter gives people the opportunity
to earn more on their money by allowing
them to lend directly, fi lling a gap for retail
investors between low-risk, low-reward
cash and high-return, high-volatility
shares. The P2P lending platform has
topped 2.5bn in loan originations
and generated 100m in interest for
investors without any losses to investors
since it launched. It also pioneered
many fi rsts in P2P lending, including the
Provision Fund model, which diversifi es
investors' risk across all active loans and
provides protection against bad debt.

Ratio, Bournemouth
Ratio started out making price comparison
technology for fi nance websites. Having
also built a gentlemen's underwear
subscription club called Briefd and
developed an AI tool for eCommerce
websites named Remora, its focus now is
on price comparison software ProTools
and on growing Choose Wisely, its website
which compares credit and banking
services for people with poor credit
scores.

Receipt Bank, London
Receipt Bank's app uses character
recognition software and images to take
the headache out of fi ling taxes. Used by
Big Four accounting fi rms and the self-
employed alike, users simply scan their
receipts into the system. It has grown 100
per cent year-on-year and raised $65m
funding.

Revolut, London
Led by Nikolay Storonsky, unicorn
Revolut lets users set up an app-based
current account in 60 seconds, spend
abroad in over 150 currencies with no
fees, hold and exchange 25 currencies
in-app and send free domestic and
international money transfers with the
real exchange rate. It has signed up
more than two million customers across
Europe and processed more than 100
million transactions. It has also raised a
total of $336m from some of the most
notable investors.

Satago Financial Solutions,
London
Satago's cloud-
based tech
integrates with
an SME's existing
accounting
software and gives
it the same level of
credit control as
larger businesses.
Seeking to assess
and actively improve clients' fi nancial
health as well as off ering them fi nance,
it was acquired by Oxygen Finance last
year.

Seedrs, London
Crowdfunding platform Seedrs doubled
its turnover last year despite continuing
to make a loss. It funded more private
companies than any other platform in
2017 with 84.2m investment actually
delivered to companies via the platform.
In July it launched 'Autoinvest', bringing
robo-investment to early-stage private
equity sector investors for the fi rst time.

smoogs.io, London
Smoogs.io is creating a 'taximeter for
online streaming' which lets people pay in
cryptocurrency to watch online content.
The founders won a Digital Catapult
pitch-off for smoogs.io and the company
was selected in the BBC Worldwide Labs
accelerator cohort for 2016.

ShareIn, Edinburgh
ShareIn off ers white-labelled tech
platforms and compliance solutions for
online investment fi rms. Having raised
$1m in 2015 and turning a profi t in 2017,
it's now helping Troidos Bank develop its
crowdfunding platform the fi rst to be
launched by a UK bank.

Starling Bank, London
With more than six
people switching to
Starling for every
person leaving, it's
easy to see why
investors backed
the mobile-only
banking app to
the tune of 48m in 2016. It aims to raise
another 40m this year to fund a launch
into Europe and has also just launched the
fi rst portrait card from a UK bank, to be
more in line with the way consumers pay.

Suade Labs, London
Banks spend a lot of time and resources
complying with regulation that adds
nothing to their bottom line. Suade was
founded to allow them to transparently
deal with their regulatory calculations and
reporting while remaining continuously
compliant.

Skrill, London
Skrill lets users pay and send money
via the internet, with a focus on low-
cost international transfers. As of July
the company also lets users buy and
sell cryptocurrencies using the fi at
currencies available in its wallet across
30 countries. Every year the Skrill Group
processes over 150m online transactions
with a combined value of nearly 13bn.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
19
@BCLOUDUK
FinTech 101
TAINA Technology, London
TAINA or Tax Artifi cial Intelligence Network
Agent is developing software that would
allow banks to process tax forms to meet
compliance regulations in seconds. It has
designed and built the fi rst fully-automated
tax form validation engine, which is currently
patent pending.
Tandem Bank, London
CEO Ricky Knox and his Tandem co-founder
Matt Cooper recognised the need for a
disruptive bank that helped customers
solve real problems and manage their
money smarter. Tandem, which acquired
Harrods Bank in January 2018, has taken a
diff erent path to rivals such as Atom, Monzo,
and Starling by launching a credit card and
savings account before a current account.
TransferWise, London
European unicorn
TransferWise uses
a simple money
transfer platform
and borderless
accounts to make
managing money
abroad quick, easy
and painless and
up to eight times cheaper than regular
banks. Boasting more than three million
users, it recently partnered with challenger
bank Monzo.
TrustaGo.com, Manchester
CEO John Whittle, also behind the
Unshackled mobile phone retailer, has built
the TrustaGo SaaS platform as the 'jam
in the sandwich' between retailers and
consumer credit lenders. New partners can
be integrated online and off ered consumer
credit within a few days.
Vestd, London
Vestd is used by SMEs across the UK to
issue shares and options to employees and
create a more engaged workforce. The
start-up's platform automatically creates
all associated paperwork, right up to the
documents to submit to Companies House.
Voxsmart, London
VoxSmart is helping fi nancial services
protect sensitive personal information
by capturing all communications from
voicemail to WhatsApp and securely
storing it for the required fi ve years.
The start-up, which boasts global
investment banks and trading houses
among its clients, raised $7m last year,
as well as being deployed by Blackberry
across all communications.
Waymark Tech, Oxfordshire
Waymark's real-time AI tool scans and
analyses regulatory changes in fi nancial
and legal services, fi gures out which
apply to its clients and then makes
suggestions so they can stay compliant.
It also fl ags up potential confl icts with
upcoming changes so companies have
plenty of time to prepare.
Wealth Wizards,
Leamington Spa
Former farmer Andrew Firth is co-
founder and chief executive of robo-
advice platform Wealth Wizards, which
works with pensions consultants and
provides white-labelling services for the
big fi nancial services brands, rather than
competing with them.
Wevat, London
Wevat helps tourists get their VAT
refunded, letting users combine all their
purchases into one simple fee which is
cheaper than getting their refund from
every store. An alumnus of Seedcamp,
which is also a pre-seed investor in the
start-up.
WorldRemit, London
Helping migrants send money to their
loved ones all over the globe, online
money transfer service WorldRemit
provides international remittance
services to expatriates and migrant
workers. It plans to serve 10m
customers connected to emerging
markets by 2020.
Yielders, London
In 2017 Yielders became the UK's fi rst
Islamic digital fi nance fi rm to be fully
accredited by the FCA. It off ers Sharia-
compliant opportunities to invest in
residential and commercial properties
through the principles of avoiding
interest, avoiding uncertainty and
avoiding gambling.
U Account, Sheffi eld
U Account was created to serve
people who don't fi t in with banks' ideal
customer profi le and therefore suff er
high banking costs. U's simple account,
launched in 2016, actively promotes
fi nancial wellbeing and hit 3m in
revenue this year.
Zopa, London
One of the UK's oldest FinTech
fi rms, online peer-to-peer lender
Zopa has recently raised 44m
to fund the launch of a new bank.
The fi rst platform of its kind,
Zopa came to the UK in March
2005 to match people looking
for loans to people who want to
invest.
Join the discussion on #FinTech101
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
20
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
FINTECH
Greg Michel is one of
the leading voices in
the UK's FinTech sector
in his role as FinTech
and insurtech lead at
government-backed
organisation Tech Nation.
Michel has his fi nger on the pulse when
it comes to what the sector needs in order
to fl ourish and the challenges standing in
the way.
As one of nine experts to speak at our
'The Future of FinTech' event in London,
Michel told the 70-strong audience at etc.
venues in Hatton Garden that the sector
needs to be "twice as ambitious" ahead of
Brexit.
Don't ignore 'the B word'
"A lot of people still look at the UK with
envy. France and Germany can say what
they want, but when people think about
FinTech they think about London.
"However I think this is a very precarious
position. Any conversation about FinTech
or anything in this country now cannot be
accurate or fi nished without the 'B' word."
Felicia Meyerowitz, CEO of Akoni Hub,
told attendees that she isn't personally
worried about Brexit but admitted that
FinTech diversity
and 'the B word'
The importance of diversity in the FinTech sector and the uncertainty of Brexit were key
themes discussed at BusinessCloud's 'Future of FinTech' event in London,
with many agreeing that the sector should embrace 'the B word'. Mo Aldalou reports.
many others are.
"Obviously a period of adjustment
is coming and I think the concern is
more around what is the regulatory or
government position and what will happen,
as opposed to Brexit itself as an event," she
said.
"If a new set of regulations come in that
have been defi ned and you have a deadline
to work to for having
these structures
in place, then you
can do that it's
quite simple. It is
the fl ip-fl opping
that is creating the
concern."
Start-up
Akoni Hub helps
companies
maximise the return
on their investments
through what it
claims is a faster and safer platform. The
business is at the pre-revenue stage
and currently employs 12 people having
secured 1.5m in seed funding.
Tim Kimball, chief technology offi cer of
Aire Labs, says the FinTech community
"should embrace the word [Brexit]".
"I'm not worried about Brexit at all. I think
we should use the word; I don't think we
should be afraid of the word," he says. "The
reality is that, whatever it looks like, it's
coming."
'FinTech needs more women'
No discussion around the future of the
UK's FinTech sector and the challenges
that lie ahead
would be complete
without addressing
the issue of
diversity.
A recent report
produced by
research fi rm
Beauhurst found
that only 12 per
cent of 743 FinTech
companies in the
UK have a female
founder or co-
founder.
What's more, Starling Bank founder
and CEO Anne Boden MBE recently
told BusinessCloud that she faces the
same biases she did during her 30-year
banking career and says that fi nance and
technology have "huge gender divides".
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
21
@BCLOUDUK
FINTECH
Emilie Bellet is the founder and CEO of
London-based FinTech start-up Vestpod,
an 'investment pod' which she set up to
change the conversation about women
and empower women to take control of
their finances.
Bellet spent seven years in finance and
private equity investing a lot of money
for institutional investors. She says while
she was there she forgot about her own
personal finances and realised the same
thing was true for most of her female
friends.
"The men were a bit more financially
savvy," says Bellet. "They were trying to
invest their money in the stock market
and I started to look for a financial advisor. I
ended up with someone from a retail bank
and he asked me where my husband was.
I was of course furious so and I decided to
educate myself and find a way to educate
other women on the topic of personal
finances. That was really the trigger for
launching Vestpod."
Bellet is part of the NatWest Fintech
Accelerator and has big plans to
empower one million women
in finance through Vestpod.
She says her goal is to
change the perception of
the sector.
"I put women together
and talk about money,"
she said. "We get women
working in finance to come
and talk to those that don't. We
try to eliminate the jargon and change
the perception of finance. My generation
lived through the Lehman bankruptcy so
we have quite a negative image of finance
and I'm trying to change that."
Former investment banker Nicola Horlick
was dubbed 'superwoman' in the late
1990s as she juggled a top City job with the
demands of raising six children. She's now
a high-profile player in the peer-to-peer
(P2P) lending sector, leading Money&Co
and Another Crowd.
Horlick says she would love to see more
women in both finance and technology
and FinTech but is convinced that a lot
needs changing before that gap can
be narrowed.
"Women don't like finance
as an industry," she said.
"When it comes to tech,
there aren't enough women
in tech either. If you combine
the two into FinTech then you
don't end up with that many
women."
Horlick believes reducing university fees
for STEM subjects could be key to getting
more women into finance and technology.
"I think it would be a good idea, for the
economy not just for getting women into
the right places," she said. "We need more
scientists, mathematicians, and computer
scientists. A very obvious way to do that
The event was run in association with
Money&Co, Another Crowd and Tech
Nation. It was BusinessCloud's first
dedicated event in London and was
trending on Twitter.
Also speaking at the event was
Jonathan Simnett, director at Hampleton
Partners; Capitalise's managing director
Paul Surtees; Kerim Derhalli, CEO, Invstr;
James Ferretti, bank integrations lead
engineer, TransferWise; John Battersby,
head of communications and policy,
Ratesetter; and Muhammad Asim,
co-founder and director, Marq Millions.
is to charge 3,000 for somebody doing
these subjects, rather than 9,000.
"You would soon see a very large uptake
in places. You have to work with the
universities and make them offer more
places."
All about London?
London has long been celebrated as the
FinTech capital of Europe and possibly
the world but the likes of Manchester
have been tipped as future global leaders,
with political, business and academic
leaders agreeing that the city's economy
depends increasingly on the growing
sector.
Rachel Bentley, FinTech Senior Manager
at professional services firm KPMG, says
the majority of businesses she meets are
based in and around London but stresses
that "we're seeing a lot more activity and
a lot of growth in other areas outside of
London".
"I work quite closely with our teams in
Leeds and Manchester, who are seeing
a lot more activity. There is real FinTech
community building there. Leeds has got a
very strong financial services background,
and Manchester has a very strong tech
industry."
(l-r) Muhammad Asim, James Ferretti, Nicola Horlick, John Battersby.
(l-r) Greg Michel, Rachel Bentley, Jonathan Simnett, Paul Surtees.
(l-r) Tim Kimball, Kerim Derhalli, Felicia Meyerowitz, Emilie Bellet.
FinTech facts
UK FinTechs attracted record
investment of $16bn (12bn)
in first half of 2018
This was more than any other
country, including the US
England, Wales, Scotland
and Northern Ireland have
specialist FinTech envoys
ahead of Brexit
88 per cent growth expected
of FinTech firms over next
three years
Time is running out to
enter BusinessCloud's
inaugural UK Business
Tech Awards 2018.
The event will take place on
November 20th at the prestigious
Montcalm Marble Arch Hotel in
London with a total of 19 gongs up
for grabs.
It will recognise the cream of the
UK's tech sector and will celebrate
both companies and individuals.
The deadline for entries is September
24th while the fi nal shortlists will
be announced in October. A stellar
panel of 20 judges have so far been
confi rmed.
healthtech pioneer of the year
FinTech innovator of the year
ecommerce company of the year
manufacturing tech disrupter of the year
transport tech company of the year
edtech company of the year
data pioneer of the year
app of the year award
best use of innovati on
tech backer of the year
tech for good award
most impressive growth
tech company of the year (small)
tech company of the year (medium)
tech company of the year (large)
digital agency of the year
young entrepreneur of the year
tech entrepreneur of the year

lifeti me achievement award
THE 19 CATEGORIES
SEARCH IS ON
FOR THE BEST
OF THE UK'S
TECH SECTOR
Details of how to enter can be found on
BusinessCloud's website or at the following
link www.businesstechawards.com
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
23
@BCLOUDUK
FINTECH WILL KEEP GROWING
There are no two ways about it: FinTech
is big business. The sector is worth
more than 7bn to the UK economy a
figure that's increasing daily.
But what exactly is FinTech? There are
many different definitions out there but, in
its simplest terms, FinTech is the computer
programs and technology designed to
support and enable banking and financial
services.
When you think about it, credit cards
and ATMs were some of the earliest forms
of digital FinTech and now, as consumer
behaviour evolves and we become more
comfortable with our technology and
devices, we're able to manage our money
from anywhere in the world, at any time,
opening up FinTech to a much broader set of
technologies.
Just taking a quick look through
BusinessCloud's 101 FinTech Disrupters
list in this edition shows how reliant
society is on FinTech. You can now manage
insurance claims, check your credit history
weekly, make money transfers and track
accounts payments all from your phone,
instantaneously.
We often hear that traditional businesses,
like professional services firms, are lagging
behind when it comes to embracing the true
potential of business technology. Whilst in
some cases that's true, clearly it's not the
case when it comes to finance. The real proof
of just how much consumers have embraced
FinTech can be seen in the number of high
street bank branches closing.
As a business, when you have these
incredible tools at your fingertips, it makes
perfect sense to harness their potential.
Consumers are driving behaviour in their
technology use, so it's up to businesses to
keep pace with those habits.
Whilst for traditional firms embracing this
level of constantly evolving technology may
seem like a daunting task, with the right
partners and suppliers it can actually make
running the business significantly easier and
massively increase customer engagement,
making you more profitable in the long run.
No longer do financial institutions need
to send letters or wait for an in-branch visit
to engage with their customers. Email and
apps give a direct line between banks and
customers on demand.
Many Fintech businesses are prime
examples of technology being used at its
best. Ultimately, at its very foundation
technology is here to make our lives easier,
and good FinTech does just that. When you
really consider it, online and mobile banking
have revolutionised consumer expectation.
We have an absolute wealth of technical
talent and organisations in the UK ready
to help other businesses to transform and
embrace the technology that could give them
the edge over their rivals and ultimately make
their lives easier.
Blockchain is a prime example. Founded
just seven years ago, the London-based
firm lays claim to being the world's biggest
Bitcoin wallet, reportedly securing funding
from leading tech VCs and the likes of Sir
Richard Branson to the tune of around $70m.
Considering that cryptocurrencies are still
very much a new technology, Blockchain
reports to have facilitated more than 100
million transactions.
Then there are firms like Revolut, the
mobile wallet app that enables you to hold
and transfer funds in a number of different
currencies a potential industry changer,
solving the problem of having to research
rates and head into a post office or travel
agent (or last minute at the airport!) to
exchange currencies ahead of a trip abroad.
The fact that consumers are leading the
demand for FinTech speaks volumes. We're
living in an age of convenience and the old-
school industries like banking simply have
to keep pace or risk being left behind by start-
ups solving convenience problems there and
then with a simple app or card.
Ultimately though, the industry hinges on
having the highest level of security. Handling
such sensitive data, FinTech firms have
to prioritise data security and protection.
Employing the skills of ethical hackers to
identify the gaps in their security is absolutely
essential. We've seen the birth and growth of
the technology, now it's the responsibility of
these firms to protect their clients' personal
data above all else.
www.lawrencejones.co.uk/
/LawrenceJonesCEOUKFast
lawrencejonesmbe
@lawrence_jones
Lawrence Jones
MBE is the
co-founder and
CEO of managed
hosting and cloud
firm UKFast. In his
latest column he
looks at the rise
of FinTech.
COLUMN: LAWRENCE JONES MBE
BusinessCloud-TechMcr-Advert_Aug18_HALFPAGE_FINAL.pdf 2 20/08/2018 09:56:57
THE PILLARS YOU NEED TO
SUPPORT YOUR BUSINESS
Tech Manchester is driving forward its support
programme for hundreds of local tech starts-ups
in the final part of 2018.
The non-profit programme funded by UKFast has
evolved its offering to deliver help across four pillars:
n
Education: Business skills workshop series #techclass
hosted @UKFast campus; online education resources
including wakelet.com/@TechMCR and Tech
Manchester's YouTube channel
n
Support: Plug into UKFast's team of PR and marketing
specialists; access to a 12-month community-led
structured mentoring programme
n Workspace: apply for space at UKFast's new Fast
Forward co-working incubator
n
Events: 'Meet the Mentor' speed dating, mentor
training and non-executive director workshops
The autumn series of #techclass workshops includes
a valuable line-up of speakers and topics.
Check out www.techmanchester.co.uk/events for
full details and registration.
Sept 17: People and Start-ups HR (By Penny Jones HR)
Sept 18: Non-Exec Director Workshop
(By Tech MCR and NEDonBoard (use promo code
TechManchester for complimentary ticket)
Oct 1: Cyber By Design (By Secarma & Tech MCR)
Oct 8: Marketing Workshop (By Karyn Bright, GB Group)
Oct 17: Taking the Fear out of PPC
(By Giorgia Lugarini, Strike Digital Marketing)
Oct 29: Raising Equity Funding for Start-ups
(By Andrew Sloane, ADV)
Nov 12 & 26: Confidence & Public Speaking
(By Sarah Perris and Merryn Myatt of Perris-Myatt)
Nov 9 & 23: Leading to Scale Workshops
(By Know & Do Consultancy)
Schedule
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
25
@BCLOUDUK
INVESTMENT
Stay away
from poisonous
investors
Apadmi Ventures boss Howard Simms tells Chris
Maguire why tech start-ups shouldn't jump into bed
with investors before getting to know them.
Almost every
entrepreneur will know
someone who's had a
'bad experience' with an
investor and Howard
Simms is no exception.
As the chief executive of Apadmi
Ventures, Simms has overseen his fair
share of investments but has also seen
too many scenarios where the wrong
investor has "crippled a business".
"I've seen a friend of mine destroyed
because he was losing a company
he'd built for eight years, his livelihood
disappearing," he says. "Fortunately
he got through it. A shocking investor
with their own agenda was crippling that
business and its ability to progress."
Simms' best advice to ambitious
start-ups is to never jump into bed with an
investor before getting to know them even
if you need the money.
"I look at it like a marriage," he says.
"You hold hands to start with, you might
eventually give each other a kiss but you
don't get married until you are absolutely
certain. Why treat investment any
diff erent?
"Some investors are poison; you've just
got to avoid them. It's diffi cult, because
when someone is fl oating 200,000 in
front of you and you know what it means
to your business, it's really hard to say no
and walk away.
"If you need the cash then where do you
[then] go? Because you're so keen for the
cash you would shake hands with people
you shouldn't be shaking hands with. Some
investors have only got their own interests
at heartand only care about getting a
return at all costs - that's
not the right thing for the
company they're backing."
Apadmi Ventures is the
investment arm of award-
winning mobile technology group
Apadmi and employs more than 60
people in Manchester.
It specialises in backing early-stage,
highly scalable tech businesses and
currently boasts an eclectic portfolio
featuring advertising tech fi rm Bidooh,
dating app JigTalk, 'Uber for the skies' Flyt
and music streaming start-up Beatstream.
The division was founded in 2015 when
the experienced people behind Apadmi
which was incorporated eight years
beforehand saw an opportunity to invest
in tech 'ideas' that excited them.
Its best-known investment was
in intelligent market research fi rm
RealityMine, which Simms says taught them
the importance of collaboration in building
out successful companies.
He suggests that expecting a business to
succeed purely based on the quality of its
product is nave,
citing an example
of investors who
would be perfect
for a business being
blocked.
"I've seen instances
where an existing shareholder refuses to
be diluted even if an incoming investor has
got skills and expertise which add to the
business and I fi nd it bizarre," he says.
"Money is just one part of the jigsaw."
Apadmi Ventures has links to highly-
active business angels and investor
networks which means it can both access
high-calibre advice and provide tech due
diligence on the start-ups that angels are
considering investing in.
However, Simms says it's crucial that
entrepreneurs work out how they're
going to sell their product.
"You can have the best technology
solution in the world but if you haven't
worked out how you're going to sell the
damn thing then it's futile," he says. "You've
got to have a really solid route to market
and ideally you get someone on board who
knows the market inside and out."
There is a great deal of talk these days
of identifying the next billion-dollar tech
'unicorn' company but Simms says this is
"just a brilliant soundbite".
"I remember meeting a top Manchester
entrepreneur and the fi rst thing he said
to me was 'I'm building the next unicorn',"
he says. "These days you take it with a
pinch of salt."
Apadmi co-founders Howard Simms, left, and Nick Black.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
26
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
VIDEO GAMES
From video game
There can't be many
MBEs sporting purple
hair, but Debbie
Bestwick (pictured)
has always dared to
be different.
The CEO of studio Team17 has navigated
the choppy waters of the UK's video game
scene for 30 years, a journey which has
taken her from a Nottingham video game
store to a management buyout and finally
a stock market flotation which valued the
firm she founded at 217m. At the time of
writing Team17 is worth 324m only six
weeks after the IPO, which reports suggest
made her a personal fortune worth tens of
millions of pounds. However speaking to
her, it is clear that her motivations for the
IPO lay elsewhere.
"The first reason for the decision to float
was our people," she tells BusinessCloud.
"Absolutely nothing is more important
than the people within our business they
are why we're successful. This was a way
for us to give back to our employees
through incentive schemes and
shareholdings."
store to IPO
Debbie Bestwick MBE is a legend of the UK's video games industry. Her Team17 studio is the creator
of 70 million-selling smash hit Worms and is now worth in excess of 300m after a recent stock market
flotation. She speaks to Jonathan Symcox about her 30-year journey.
She may value her team above all, but
the recent success of the Wakefield-
based company has everything to do
with Bestwick herself. Her business
education began in the summer of 1990,
when she was faced with a life-changing
dilemma: work in a fruit and veg shop or
video game store. "I went for the video
game shop job and got it," she recalls. "I
couldn't believe that somebody
was going to pay me to play
video games all day! I'm
sure I was meant to
sell games, but I'd just
turned 17!"
At the end of the
school holidays the
store's owners made
her manager and soon
afterwards she helped
them sell it to Microbyte, a
chain of game stores. Microbyte's
owner Michael Robinson also owned 17-Bit
Software, a mail order games development
company in the indie 'public domain' scene.
"He looked at both businesses and said
'why aren't we a games publisher?' We
have the retail outlets where we can sell our
products and 17-Bit, which has access to
games development talent across Europe."
AMIGA YEARS
Bestwick and 17-Bit's Martin Brown were
sounded out and Team17 was born.
Between 1991 and 1994 the firm released
20 games for Commodore's popular Amiga
computer, capturing a huge 50
per cent share of the market.
Among them were Alien
Breed, Project X and
Superfrog, games a
12-year-old me copied
from my friends rather
than paying full-price in
the local Microbyte.
Bestwick accepts my
apology with a laugh: "In
those days we were developers,
QA (quality assurance) and packing
the boxes to ship them to retailers, so you
saved me a job!"
The award-winning studio had built
a stellar reputation but could not have
possibly been prepared for the impact its
bringing someone in from the operations
and budget control side. We spent a couple
of years completely restructuring the
business from the top down and returned it
to back-to-back sustainability, profitability
and revenue growth. We put the Team back
into Team17: we moved into an open-plan
office and changed the culture so that our
people were communicating again."
She doesn't regard the 'Worms years' as
lost, however. "Our industry was growing
up and we'd grown up alongside it not
only as a business, but as people too. All
those lessons, the experience, the wisdom,
the knowledge, is what has been brought
forward into what is this company today."
The firm's staff has grown from around
70 to 160 in just three years after beginning
to embrace independent developers.
Positioning itself as a creative partner,
Team17 and Bestwick herself acts as a
mentor to these start-ups and helps them
polish their games as well as publish them.
"I wanted to take Team17 almost full
circle back to where it started, but doing it
in a very different way because this time
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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@BCLOUDUK
VIDEO GAMES
Worms was famous for
its exploding sheep.
1995 release Worms would have. The hit
strategy franchise, in which rival teams of
worms armed with bizarre weapons such
as exploding sheep and banana bombs do
battle, has sold 70 million copies to date and
recently topped mobile games charts in
more than 140 countries worldwide. It put
the studio on the worldwide map but also
snatched away the creativity at its heart.
WORMS
"For the next decade we completely
changed as a business," Bestwick confides.
"Team17 went from self-financed and full
creative freedom to working on milestones.
It's like a work-for-hire mentality and not a
healthy creative environment. We became
the 'Worms creators'."
The move from home computers to a
market dominated by 'closed platform'
consoles such as Sony's PlayStation meant
that games studios had to turn to external
publishers to fund the high production
costs of cartridges and CDs. Team17
worked with more than ten publishers,
many of whom were acquired or went
bankrupt, over a turbulent 14-year period.
"There was no stability and no
consistency. In 2009 we came to a
fundamental point where life needed to
change," Bestwick explains. "Team17
had become a yo-yo business: one year
profits, one year losses. We were working
in isolation in small rooms and we'd lost the
team. That's a difficult world for studios
when you're creating new IP."
Bestwick, who was a minority
shareholder with 15 per cent of the
business, approached the other two
shareholders about a management buyout.
"This was the point when I was either
leaving or I stepped up. Ironically it was
21 years after Team17 formed it was
almost like a coming-of-age. Fundamental
for me was going outside the industry and
we had a studio," she says, in reference
to the fact that many of the early titles
were developed by freelance talent in
Scandinavia. "We wanted to build the type
of games publisher that we ourselves would
have loved to have had when we were
coming through. People are now starting
to see what we've been doing... we've had
huge success."
NEW BREED
The firm's 2017 revenues were 29.6m,
more than double the 13.5m from the
previous year. Its more recent games
include Overcooked, which won two
BAFTAs last year, and The Escapists, which
was made by Chris Davis while he worked
on a building site. "That's a game which
has sold in excess of three million units and
Chris was putting roof tiles on houses when
I met him!" Bestwick says. "We're showing
developers that you can build and publish
games and retain ownership of your IP. This
is so important for the next generation
coming through."
Bestwick is thankful that she managed
to hold on to the Worms IP despite huge
pressure from myriad publishers "I was
involved in most of those negotiations
and it wasn't easy" and says that the IPO
in May was also intended as a message to
people: "You don't need to sell."
She adds: "A few people had shown
interest in acquiring us, but I'd just got
control of this business and we were at the
start of our journey. I wasn't ready to let go.
I love the fact that Grand Theft Auto was
made in this country, but it's now owned
by an American company. We need to get
better at retaining ownership of our great
creations. We build them up, we get them
successful and then we sell. We were born
in the UK, we retained our IP through some
difficult times and we are insanely proud to
float it on the stock exchange."
Having dipped her toes into the world of
external investment in 2016 when private
equity house Lloyds Development Capital
came on board, she raised the idea of a float
to "step things up" even further.
"The IPO should help us with hiring
going forward because we've been in fast
growth for quite a while now," she explains.
"It also helps with our profile: Team17 is
incredibly well-known in the UK and across
Europe, while Worms is globally famous,
but by floating our label gets a higher profile
both within our industry and also on an
international level.
"Through the IPO I met some amazing
people that appreciated our story, our
business and what we're trying to achieve.
We have dreams, ambition and we're
learning every day."
Subscribe to our channel BusinessCloud Media
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
28
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
VIDEO GAMES
How Finland built gaming Empire
The UK games scene
has an illustrious
history matched by
few nations around the
world but there is one
major player you may
not be aware of.
With the rise of the smartphone turning
every one of us into a potential gamer, the
likes of Angry Birds have achieved huge
global success and made household names
of the development studios behind them.
Angry Birds maker Rovio's value has
dipped to around $500 million after the
floated company originally achieved the
coveted $1 billion 'unicorn' valuation, but it
remains a global success story. Meanwhile
Clash of Clans maker Supercell is worth
more than $10bn. What do these studios
have in common? They were founded
and built in Finland, a Northern European
country with a population of just 5.5 million.
"In Finland it's definitely possible to build
a gaming unicorn look at Supercell and
Rovio," Timo Soininen, CEO of Small Giant
Games, tells BusinessCloud in a FaceTime
interview. "Our growth has been quite stellar
for the last 14 months that's the beauty of
this business. If you get it right and create
a sustainable model, you can
scale very, very quickly. We
hope to become a unicorn."
Small Giant Games is
certainly attracting global
interest. The company was
shortlisted by investment
firm GP Bullhound for its
Summit Superstar Award in
Marbella this year and raised $41 million
from a range of international investors, led
by Sweden's EQT Ventures, in February.
Its rise is all the more remarkable because
it was only founded five years ago and is
already forecasting revenue of $130m this
year despite only having 34 staff. However
Soininen, who founded the company with
Otto Nieminen, admitted their current
success is a far cry from the early days.
"The first games are almost destined
to fail the team has to learn the way to
do things by banging their heads against
the wall and that is always
extremely painful," he says
as colleagues work away
behind him. "We had a really
interesting flying game
called Oddwings Escape. We
knew the landmines were
there but we stepped on
them anyway, focusing on
irrelevant things like polishing the graphics
or the core gameplay physics mechanics
which, at the end of the day, are not the
critical factors of success.
"One of the cardinal sins games
companies make is to have a super-
Home to the likes of giants Supercell and Rovio despite a population of just 5.5 million,
the Nordic country is punching well above its weight in mobile gaming.
Jonathan Symcox speaks to its next potential unicorn Small Giant Games.
Left: Small Giant CEO Timo Soininen. Middle and right: Its game Empires & Puzzles features puzzle and RPG elements.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
29
@BCLOUDUK
VIDEO GAMES
passionate original idea for a game and
focus completely on that, forgetting about
the business of games. If you have the best
game in the world but can't market it, it'll
fade into oblivion pretty quickly."
Soininen says many early casual games
were not well monetised despite boasting
hundreds of millions of players, although the
likes of Candy Crush Saga are now driving up
revenues through in-app purchases. "There
are hundreds of millions of casual gamers
who play really accessible fun games like
Candy Crush Saga and are now starting to
look for deeper experiences," he says. "We
aimed to bridge these two worlds."
Small Giant's runaway success Empires
& Puzzles has a basic puzzle-type game
in which players match symbols. Sitting
beyond that is an RPG role-playing game
where players can build bases, create
heroes and battle against other players.
"The numbers don't lie. If your
engagement and retention numbers are
bad, you have two choices: either kill the
game or try to fix them," he says. "That is
painful when you've put blood, sweat and
tears into the project."
It built an analytical model around
whether people were downloading the
game from the App Store and Google Play
landing pages then engaging with it, plus
how long they played it for and whether
they were spending any money. Once
the money started coming in, it began
to invest more heavily into 'direct
marketing' advertising
on Facebook, through
Google Services and
inside other games. It
spent $20m on this
last year.
"The good thing
about these kind of
games is that they're
like living organisms:
you can and should
update them all the time,"
he says. "We see a pretty long
future for the game. We are always
adding new content and features, offers and
seasonal events."
Tapping into the Finnish ecosystem was
key: the founders and CEOs of these huge
gaming companies meet every month over
breakfast to compare notes and help one
another out. Soininen jokes that Finns are
"very humble people" so, to ensure no one
sits at the head of the table, they ensure it is
round in shape.
After achieving 15m downloads and
1.1m daily active users, Small Giant plans
to spend about $80m on user
acquisition this year.
"Our name reflects the
belief that in today's
modern world when
you have the right
technology, tools
and ecosystem in
place, you don't
need that many
people to do really big
gigantic things," he says.
Small Giant is working
on another game which it is
hoping will achieve similar success: "If
that works as well as this one, we could go
even faster: we're testing it rigorously both
internally and with consumers.
"We might kill it before it sees the light of
day, but let's see!"
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BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
30
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
APPS
In May Paddy Power
agreed to merge with
US fantasy sports
betting site FanDuel as
it targets the US sports
betting market.
It followed a landmark decision by the
US Supreme Court that overturned 1992
legislation that banned sports betting in
most states. One man with more than a
passing interest in the development was
Rob Jones, co-founder and chief product
offi cer at Edinburgh-based Flick, an app
which allows users to share documents,
videos and images between any smart
devices with a simple 'fl ick'.
The 36-year-old Welshman is best
known as one of FanDuel's co-founders ,
which grew into a unicorn employing 450
staff across fi ve global offi ces. He also
co-established creative digital agency
Insight Studios, news prediction platform
Hubdub.com and Groopit.com.
But Jones' career might have gone in
a very diff erent direction. "My parents
pushed me into sports quite heavily,"
he recalls. "I played a lot of cricket and
football. I also played rugby alongside
Welsh rugby star Mike Phillips - he's one of
my best mates from school.
"I realised very quickly that I was never
going to be a professional [footballer]. I
played against Premier League players
Following
in the steps
of a unicorn
such as Joe Allen and realised early on
that I'd reached my peak in football."
APPLE DREAM
Jones' fi rst company, Insight Studios, was
a design studio in Wales that fi tted around
his training. He studied product design at
Cardiff University with a dream to work at
Apple. "I realised that web technology was
an area that I was fascinated in," he says.
He worked with fellow FanDuel co-
founder Tom Griffi ths (pictured) on a
social networking site called GroopIt,
where they met Nigel Eccles.
"He had a really good idea in
Hubdub [which eventually
pivoted to become
FanDuel]," says Jones.
"We had a designer and
a technical person in
our make-up, and that's
what he needed. He
(Eccles) convinced us to go
and launch the company with
him out in California back in 2007.
"Hubdub was a prediction
market where you used
virtual money to place
bets on the outcomes of
news stories, such as a
Donald Trump election
victory, and see the odds
evolve over time. The
markets were really accurate at predicting
the outcomes of things.
"We realised that to scale that business
was going to be a mammoth task. We
raised a million dollars and had a really
successful launch but then it started to
decline over time. Users were falling off .
"We realised that we needed to pivot
into a business that had real money off the
bat. We wanted to have something where
people paid up front that would allow us to
have revenue from the start. We took all
of the knowledge at Hubdub and looked
at all the areas where people were
using virtual money to trade
on news stories, and a real
hotspot was sport; people
using virtual money to
predict the outcome of
events in sports. One of
the fascinating areas was
fantasy sports. We had
about three months runway
left."
FANTASY
FanDuel was born.
Although fantasy sports
remains relatively
unknown in the UK it's
big business in the US,
where it is played by 60
million people. "It's tiny
Rob Jones is best known as one of the co-founders of fantasy sports company FanDuel, which at one
point had a $1.2bn valuation and has just been bought by Paddy Power. Now he's returned to the world
of tech start-ups with the launch of his new social screen-sharing app Flick. He spoke to Chris Maguire.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
31
@BCLOUDUK
APPS
" To give you a sense of
scale, we had to hire
almost 120 people
in the space of a few
months just to survive
that growth." ROB JONES
here," explains Jones, "but it's a way of
life over there."
The likes of ESPN, Yahoo and CBS
all have platforms used by millions of
people to pick fantasy sports team at the
beginning of the season. "You sit in a draft
and pick up your favourite players turn
by turn, and you stick with that team the
whole season," says Jones. "All FanDuel
did, in essence, was condense that all
down into one weekend. You could pick a
team for this weekend's games and then
you'd note the winner at the end of it. We
also focused on the mobile aspect of it as
the larger sites were all large desktop and
web applications.
"The real difference was that instead
of a snake draft, where you take turns in
choosing players, we allowed the users
to pick the best team they could within a
salary cap. You pay to enter a contest, so
you could play one-on-one against friends
or you could play against thousands
of people for weekend games. We had
tournaments that had millions of dollars
for a first-place prize.
"To give you a sense of scale, we had to
hire almost 120 people in the space of a
few months just to survive that growth,"
he recalls. "Every year our pinch point was
the NFL season. It was the biggest sport
for us, so we knew we had to ramp up our
hiring, our spend and our acquisition.
Going through that hyper growth was just
incredible. One of my favourite moments
early on in FanDuel was actually being in a
bar in New York and seeing FanDuel being
used by one of the patrons in there they
had no idea that we'd built it, but he was
shouting at the TV screen because he
wanted his team to do well and had his
mobile out tracking his team. It's great to
see a product in
the wild like that
and being used by
such a passionate
user base.
"That's what
I love doing -
bringing a product
to life that didn't
exist before, and
creating a whole
new way of doing
something."
MERGER TALK
A lot of Jones' time at FanDuel was
dominated with talk of a proposed merger
with rivals DraftKings. "It made sense that
instead of fighting against each other
for acquiring customers, that we'd go
up against the bigger companies
like ESPN and Yahoo and
CBS," he says. "It made a
huge amount of sense
for us not to compete
against each other and
actually make daily
fantasy sports try and
out-pace the seasonal
fantasy sports. The
signals were really positive
that that was going to go through
and unfortunately, it didn't. It was very
challenging."
It was also expensive. According to
TechCrunch, FanDuel raised $416.2m.
Jones, who said they spent the final raise
very quickly in 2015, says he has taken the
lessons into his new venture Flick.
"Flick is basically social screen-sharing,"
says the entrepreneur. "You can screen-
record your phone and beam it out to a
group of friends: for example, you might
play a mobile game and share it with your
friends live through Flick. There's a lot
of design decisions and execution to be
done with it, and there are a few technical
improvements we need to work on to
make sure the experience is amazing
and as fast as possible. We also wanted
something that would be global - FanDuel
was focused mostly on North America.
There's a few really attractive things
which make it potentially a much bigger
company than FanDuel. We're really
excited to see how it takes off.
"When we think about the product that
we're going to launch, you're going to be
at this for three or four or five, six, ten
years of your life, so pick something that
you're innately passionate about. Also,
pick a big market: investors will always
look at how big the market is. If you even
take one or two per cent market share,
is it going to be big enough for
them to get a good ROI? Many
companies I see in the UK
only focus on the UK
market, when there's
nothing stopping them
targeting the US."
Jones also says tech
start-ups shouldn't forget
to have fun. "Pick people
on attitude and positivity, and
make sure that you can sit next
to them on a flight for 12 hours and just
enjoy the ride," he says. "The one thing I
can guarantee you is there will be loads of
roadblocks and low points, so the team
around you has to be prepared for that;
especially the early founding team.
"The makeup of the initial team is
somewhat different to the employees
you hire as you scale later on you need
maker mavericks at the start, then later
you need specialists to help steady the
platform and technology. The risk profile
is very different at the beginning when
nothing is proven, compared to later on
when you have traction."
The entrepreneur recently closed
a substantial seed round, giving the
company a two-year runway to develop
the project.
Jones said they now have a team of
developers and designers in place in their
office in Codebase, Edinburgh's leading
tech incubator.
Flick co-founders Nigel Eccles, left, and Rob Jones.
>> Check out our featured lists including 51 Tech 1sts at businesscloud.co.uk/featured-lists
ECOMMERCE
Fast-growing shopping app Wish has been touted as the next Amazon
and signed up World Cup stars Paul Pogba and Neymar to reach an
international audience. Mo Aldalou reports on how the initial campaign
featured footballers who were not even playing in Russia.
An advertising
campaign featuring
footballers set to miss
out on the World Cup
does not seem very
shrewd but then
Wish is not like other businesses.
Founded by two former Google and
Yahoo employees, Peter Szulczewski and
Danny Zhang, the shopping app has been
building an eCommerce empire on the
back of selling clothes, electronics and
beauty products at dirt-cheap prices
from 1 watches to 190 TVs.
It may boast a valuation of $8 billion
with projected annual sales of $2bn and
75 million monthly active users but
there's nothing like the endorsement of
football royalty to really put a business
on the map.
The company came up with the idea
of an advertising campaign ahead of the
World Cup called #timeonyourhands
and enlisted the support of Wales wizard
Gareth Bale as well as fellow stars Robin
van Persie (Netherlands), Gigi Buff on
(Italy), Claudio Bravo (Chile) and Tim
Howard (USA) none of whom featured in
Russia this summer.
It featured a series of light-hearted
videos showing each player sitting at
home in isolation as the World Cup plays
out in the background until they stumble
across the Wish app to discover new
hobbies that transform their summer.
Within hours the videos had clocked up
tens of millions of views thanks to the
players' large social media followings.
As a fi nal punchline to the campaign,
Wish added two players who were
indeed playing in the World Cup: France
playmaker Paul Pogba and Brazil superstar
Neymar.
upon
a football star
Sam Jones, managing director of
brand marketing and partnerships at
Wish, admits the company had to "tread
carefully" around the sensitive topic but
says the risk was worth it.
He tells BusinessCloud: "We thought
this was a strong concept, but we did not
know how the players missing the World
Cup would respond to a concept that was
centred around their nation not qualifying.
"We considered approaching the
biggest stars from world football to star in
a TV commercial (such as Lionel Messi and
Cristiano Ronaldo), but this just felt too
easy, and would not set Wish apart.
"There is such fi erce attention for
eyeballs during the World Cup so we knew
we had to do something very diff erent
to avoid being missed. How can you
compete with Nike or Adidas unless you do
something diff erent?"
The idea for the campaign was born
in February when Jones and the head of
platform advertising Hassan Yahya started
exploring marketing ideas for 2018 while
attending an event at Half Moon Bay near
San Francisco.
Creative director Martin Rossetti was
then tasked with executing the campaign
with the fi lming taking place over four
weeks in Manchester, Madrid, Paris,
Amsterdam, LA and Turin.
"We ensured that all players agreed
to post their elements of the adverts on
their social media feeds adding to the
authenticity of the campaign," Jones
says.
Wish generated more than $1 billion
in revenue for the fi rst time in 2017 and
expects to double that fi gure in 2018
sparking reports that the fast-growing
platform could rival the likes of Amazon in
the future.
The eCommerce fi rm also has over one
million merchants on its website, off ers a
selection of over 200 million items and is
sitting on a war chest of over $1 billion in
funding.
But despite its global success, Jones
admits the company is still in the early
stages of its brand strategy and that its
focus is on building legitimacy and trust.
"We are a new platform, selling less-
known goods straight from the factory
in China which means products are
inexpensive," he says. "We want to
become the default consumer global
platform for all, specifi cally for value-
conscious shoppers."
The start-up is now the No 1 Android
shopping app in the US and nearly 40
other countries.

BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
32
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
#timeonyourhands for USA keeper Tim Howard, left, and Wales star Gareth Bale.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
33
@BCLOUDUK
INVESTMENT
From crowdfunding
to angel investors
and good old
bootstrapping,
Jenny Brookfi eld
looks at the
diff erent funding options
available to tech businesses.
Mums networking app
entrepreneurs Katie Massie-Taylor
and Sarah Hesz have used a variety
of funding streams to fund Mush
with each requiring an approach
diff erent to the last.
The duo, who met in a playground in
London, found the huge start-up costs of
getting their idea off the ground meant
they needed to seek funding from the off .
"We had quotes for building the app
at 50,000 but once you've built it you
need engineers contracted to sort out any
issues or change any parts of the app you
thought were a dead cert," says Massie-
Taylor. "In the early days we paid ourselves
a tiny amount which didn't even cover
childcare costs, and there was marketing
spend, but the rest went on the
tech."
Launched in May
2016, the Mush app
gives mums a fun,
free way to make
friends after the
pair found parenting
was easier when
they were there to
support each other.
They raised 250,000
from seed investors in
2016 via the SEIS network
(Seed Enterprise Investment
Scheme), which off ers tax benefi ts to
those investing in early stage companies
that meet certain HMRC regulations. This
involved several months of contacting and
pitching to about 60 potential investors,
resulting in 22 investing.
Six months after launch, with 30,000
mums using the app, the duo decided
to launch a campaign on Crowdcube for
650,000, which required a diff erent
fundraising approach.
"Crowdfunding is less about
spreadsheets and far more about
sentiment and emotional
pull," says Massie-Taylor,
adding that the four-
week campaign
built momentum
as more and more
people started to
invest. It eventually
raised 142 per cent
of its target.
"It was quite
an intense month
because we had to be on
call to answer questions from
investors even if they were investing
10, they might have a question they want
answering. It's quite a gamifi ed process. I
remember being out for dinner and being
notifi ed a cheque for 45,000 had come in,
which was an incredible feeling."
n Mix it up
"Diff erent stages required
diff erent routes"
On the money
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
34
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
INVESTMENT
In 2018, Mush raised a further 2m
from VCs. Where crowdfunding was all
about story-telling, the VC route was
all about data, Massie-Taylor says.
"We needed an introduction to get
through the door and then we'd pitch,
followed by lots of questions it was
a lot more mechanical and process-
driven than what we'd done before,"
she says.
While it's been a steep learning
curve, the friends have ensured they
were prepared for each stage by
talking to others who have fundraised
and taking advice where they can so
they know how to pitch to different
audiences.
"A large part is also about assessing
whether a potential investor is right
for you as well as you being right for
them your whole aura has to say 'I'm
not desperate for money'," she says,
adding that each choice of funding
stream came at the right time for
Mush.
"At the second phase our metrics
weren't good enough to raise from
a VC, but we had such adoration and
adulation from people that we knew
our app and our story would resonate
with Joe Public, which is why we
crowdfunded."
For Boostify founder Jonathan
Thirkill, there was never any
question about the way he would
fund his Leeds-based business.
"I've never formally looked for
funding, I was always in a position
where I didn't want to relinquish
control and I was never interested
in going for VC backing where
they would have taken more of
the business than I had," says
Thirkill.
The business began in 2013 with
a live chat product he built and
licensed to previous employer Age
Partnership, an equity release broker
based in Leeds, where he was head of
conversion. Realising he could do the
same elsewhere, Thirkill decided to
pursue his dream of running his own
company shortly afterwards.
Since then, growth has come
organically, allowing him to
regain full control and
avoid "being dictated
to" when it comes
to the direction
of the business,
which has evolved
into a conversion
rate optimisation
platform. Coming
from a development
background meant the
only costs in the early days
were on his own time. The knock-
on effect of this is that growth can
be slower than if you'd had financial
backing. "It's worked for us but I would
say there's a trade-off, which, in tech,
is the speed of development," he says.
"If I were to get funding tomorrow and
hire five new developers I could ship
our product faster, like others who are
VC-backed. To combat that, it's always
been about how we can outsmart the
competition in terms of thinking more
detailed and creatively."
That's meant spending time
developing one product before
taking it to market and, once revenue
starts to come in, going back to focus on
developing a different product. Currently
a team of three, headcount is expected to
grow by five by the end of 2018. "Growth
prospects for this year are good and
we're taking on new clients," he says.
"We're now in a position where
we've got the platform,
which has taken years
to develop, but if
someone wanted to
develop that now
it would cost them
1m. Instead of trying
to sell a half-baked
product we've put the
time in ourselves and
we're taking it to market in
the way we want to."
Marketing automation platform
Force24, another Leeds tech business,
founded in 2010, bootstrapped due to a
combination of a lack of external funding
opportunities and an appreciation of the
advantages of bootstrapping.
"What it did was focus our minds on
making money rather than spending
money, which is important," says
commercial director Nick Washbourne,
adding that the business began with a
minimal viable product tested by users.
This, coupled with consultancy work,
meant working closely with the target
audience while developing its product.
n Bootstrapped
"We didn't want to lose
control"
" Crowdfunding
is less about
spreadsheets and
far more about
sentiment and
emotional pull."
KATIE MASSIE-TAYLOR
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
35
@BCLOUDUK
INVESTMENT
"In some ways it was difficult at
the start without money, but that
does encourage you to problem solve
really well and make good commercial
decisions," he says. "We were able
to build a product based on clients'
requirements and ambitions and that
continues to steer our innovation.
If we'd had investment we would
have had our heads down building a
product and thrown lots of developers
at it. Instead we used a strong team of
agile developers and that's been the
way forward for our business."
The business is about to go into
a round of series A funding, its first
ever outside investment, which
Washbourne says will be necessary
to realise ambitious growth plans. It
plans to double turnover to 5m and
increase staff from 37 to up to 70 by
the end of 2020, with the investment
concentrated on sales and marketing.
"We've built up a solid business but
we're at the point where we need it to
accelerate growth," he says. "This is
the best time to do it because we're
more attractive to private equity
investors and we can retain more
control. A lot of companies might fall
by the wayside with this approach but
we've been successful and there have
been lots of advantages."
" It's worked for us but
I would say there's
a trade-off, which,
in tech, is the speed
of development. If I
were to get funding
tomorrow and hire
five new developers
I could ship our
product faster, like
others who are
VC-backed. "
JONATHAN THIRKILL
Snapchat video advertising
entrepreneur Timothy Armoo says
he has the perfect relationship with
the business angels that invested
in Fanbytes. Founded in 2014 in
Nottingham, the business enables
brands like Universal, Warner and
Sony to target 'generation Z' via
Snapchat influencers.
Though he won't reveal how much the
business has raised in the three years since,
he says he looked for investment right from
the start because "we wanted to come out
of the gate flying".
"To us, it was vitally important that we
operated with speed and raising enabled
us to move quickly with little fear," Armoo
says. "We chose the angel route primarily
because it's far friendlier than other routes.
Our investors were strategic in the sense
that they could open considerable doors for
us in that early process."
The business has never gone through
the conventional fundraising process,
instead taking investment from friends and
previous contacts, including a friend who
had set up an investment firm at the right
time. "Subsequent fundraising has also
followed a similar path of just serendipity,"
Armoo says. "For example, one of our
investors came about because
one of his portfolio companies
had become the number
one trending app in the US
through our company; the
founder then introduced us
and he ended up investing.
We've been very fortunate in
that in investor conversations
we've never really needed money,
so we've had a position of strength."
For that reason, Armoo has been able to
carefully choose those who could bring the
most to the business through operational
experience and connections important,
he says, because of his young age. This paid
off early on when Fanbytes netted deals
with Universal and make-up brand Charlotte
Tilbury thanks to investors' contacts.
"There was a lot I didn't know, so I was
interested more in investors who were
then able to be mentors and both help in a
personal and a professional capacity," says
the 23-year-old.
It's a strategy that has worked ever since,
with the angels offering a guiding hand while
allowing Armoo to retain control. Working
with investors that have grown companies
to hundreds of employees has addressed
the business's weak spot personnel and
hiring, which can be a challenge, he adds.
"Our investors act as a downwind board
to our decisions enabling us to consider
factors we hadn't considered initially," he
says. "That to us is the perfect relationship.
As we are young and understand the
industry better than our investors, we
make decisions based on where we see the
market going and then our investors help
us with understanding the strategic and
operational implications of this."
Though he wholeheartedly recommends
the angel route, he does caution over
timing, suggesting Fanbytes perhaps
took investment too early. "I think there
is significant value in waiting as much as
possible because it's a forcing function for
you to think creatively about how to solve
problems," he says. "I certainly think that
being flush with cash has meant that we've
been silly with money at times trying to
spend our way out of problems as opposed
to creatively attempting to solve them.
"With angels you get flexibility,
a warmer relationship when
things are sour and, in most
cases, get to keep more
of your company."
n Angel
"Friendly and flexible"
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
36
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
WORLDWIDE
How accidental
technologist made it in
Jacqui Ferguson worked alongside eBay and
Hewlett-Packard legend Meg Whitman after
modest tech beginnings in Scotland. She tells
Katherine Lofthouse what she has learnt.
It's hard to believe
that someone who
"accidentally fell"
into tech would end
up working in Silicon
Valley alongside the
CEO of Hewlett-Packard, but that's
exactly what happened to Jacqui
Ferguson (pictured top).
The Scottish tech guru spent three
years as Meg Whitman's (pictured
bottom) chief of staff before serving
as CEO for HP Enterprise's UK, Ireland,
Middle East, Mediterranean and Africa
business, which employs 10,000 people,
for a further three years.
All this from modest beginnings back in
Scotland when, having joined KPMG as a
school-leaver, she was asked to build the
fi rm's alumni database and so taught
herself programming language SQL from
a manual.
"Silicon Valley was amazing but a
bit surreal," she tells BusinessCloud.
"Everyone works in the same industry
there, so your neighbour works for
LinkedIn or Facebook it's how I imagine
it feels to work in Aberdeen where
everyone's in oil."
" We're starting to see
tech centres here but
Silicon Valley is unique
in the way it has its
own ecosystem which
is able to nurture
those ideas as well as
the capital to invest
in them." JACQUI FERGUSON
Whitman is a former president and
CEO of eBay and candidate for governor
of California who resigned as CEO of HP
Enterprise earlier this year. She called
Ferguson out to the West Coast of America
in 2012, a year after taking over at the helm
of HP.
At that time Ferguson was a key fi gure
in HP, which had acquired her previous
company Electronic Data Systems for $13.9
billion in 2008.
"Working with Meg was like fi ve MBAs all
at once," says Ferguson. "She has a pace
about her, she's very good at getting to the
nub of the point and her strategic critical
thinking is excellent. For her, taking the job
at HP was about re-establishing a Silicon
Valley icon."
Ferguson says she'd love for the UK,
where she is now based, to develop its
own Silicon Valley although she
acknowledges that everything
was not perfect on the West
Coast of America.
"One of the myth
busters for me was I
assumed all innovation
was coming from Silicon
Valley but when I arrived
there I realised it was
people going there with ideas
they weren't all being thought
up there," she says.
"We're starting to see tech
centres here but Silicon
Valley is unique in the way
it has its own ecosystem
which is able to nurture
those ideas as well as the
capital to invest in them.
"It is hard to live out
there there are so many
billionaires and the cost of living
is incredibly high. But it's not pricing people
out when they're young and don't have
a lot of money they do things like share
accommodation or sleep in motorhomes in
order to be part of it all."
Ferguson is now a non-executive director
at several STEM companies, including
Tesco Bank, and an advisor to the Scottish
Government.
"Charles Darwin said 'it's not the
strongest that survive, it's the adaptable'
and the tech agenda is really important for
many companies," she says. "The reason
I've been brought on for the majority of
the companies I work with is my tech
experience. The question is how can they
use tech in their businesses to change as
the world is changing around them?
"Tech gives us the ability to do things
more easily, faster, better it creates new
opportunities in ways we just weren't
able to do in the past. Every
business will be a tech
business in some form
in the future. Even in
the last fi ve years the
largest companies in
the world have gone
from oil to tech."
A key part of driving
tech into the future is getting
more women involved. "Role
models are very important," she
says. "I don't mean people
like me because frankly
I'm a bit long in the tooth
but role models like my
daughter, who's 23 and
doing a PhD in physics.
Women who are closer
to their age, but are
breaking into science and
tech careers."
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
37
@BCLOUDUK
INVESTMENT
Are investors
throwing too much
money at tech?
Renowned venture capitalist Jon Moulton speaks to Chris Maguire about his successes,
failures and his concerns with "too much money" being chucked at the UK's tech sector.
It's not often you hear
one of Britain's most
high-profi le private
investors openly admit
to his "spectacular
failures" but it's the
sort of honesty you come to expect
from Jon Moulton.
The straight-talking venture capitalist
is arguably best known for his successes
with household British brands including
Goldsmiths and Parker Pens, as well as
setting up private equity fi rm Better Capital
in 2012 after leaving Alchemy Partners.
"I've had some huge successes, some
spectacular failures and a lot of fun," is how
Moulton sums up his 30-year tenure and
he's showing no signs of slowing down.
Moulton, who famously led the 50 million
buyout of Parker Pens in 1986, describes
his investment and subsequent exit as a
delightful win. "A huge amount of money
and a delightful management team," he
says. "Took the company from losing 30
million a year to making 45 million you
don't do many of those."
But the 67-year-old has also endured his
fair share of knocks, including the high-
" As you stick more
and more money in,
unless you actually
generate more deals
to consume that
money, the returns
will inevitably get
worse." JON MOULTON
profi le collapse of Better Capital-backed
parcel delivery fi rm City Link, which entered
administration in December 2014 leaving
thousands of jobs at risk.
The turnaround fi rm also acquired a 90
per cent stake in fashion brand Jaeger in
2012 and sold it at a loss in 2017.
"I've had failures all over the place: the
biggest failure was probably Newbridge
Networks," he says of the company founded
by Welsh-Canadian billionaire Sir Terry
Matthews. "I made four-and-a-
half times my money in three
years but if I'd just waited
another year it would
have been 72 times the
money."
Moulton has also
been an active tech
investor over the last
three decades, having
backed peer-to-peer lending
marketplace Funding Circle "very
early on", and estimates that around 50 of
his 120 current investments have a link to
technology.
"I've had huge successes in some tech
areas," he says. "Some deliberate and
some accidental."
But the private equity baron says the
return on investment in technology is
relatively "poor", particularly in the UK, and
fears that it could become worse.
"Too much money and too few deals is
something that worries me and I see more
and more money being chucked at it," he
said. "The historic returns in tech investing
in the UK are probably single digit even low
single digit on average.
"As you stick more and more money in,
unless you actually generate more deals
to consume that money, the returns will
inevitably get worse.
"I see things like EIS, SEIS, ECT and
Patient Capital initiatives as actually
threatening there, because if you put
in money that doesn't need a return,
doesn't want a return then you'll actually
put good assets and good people into
crap businesses and that's bad for the
economy and bad for the investor."
Moulton also believes that there are
too many unrealistic valuations
in the technology sector and
says he often receives
several business plans
in a single day fi ve of
which he disposes of
immediately.
"Occasionally I will
be wrong because
sometimes tech
companies really do hit gold
but most of the time I'll be fi ne
passing on stuff that looks to be ten times
the valuation it should be," he says.
When it comes to what attracts him to
a business, Moulton admits it's a diffi cult
question to answer.
"People make money or fail to make
money because of good businesses,
good management, a degree of luck and
the environment they operate in," he
says. "All of those things can play a part."
Other speakers on the roundtable included
Norman Molyneux, chief executive,
Acceleris Capital; Peter Leather, head of IP &
commercialisation, UCLan, and programme
director of the Lancashire Investment
Readiness Programme; and Rohit Mateur,
senior vice president venture capital, Barclays.
n
38
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
51 AI INNOVATORS
n AdBrain, London
Adbrain uses AI to identify and
track consumers across their
devices to better target them
with advertising. The company,
which was founded in 2012, was
acquired by ad buying platform
the TradeDesk in 2017. Based
in London, the company has
raised a total of 12.5 million in
investment. CEO and president,
ex-Google account director
Gareth Davies, graduated from
the University of Leeds and now
lives in San Francisco.
n Aire, London
Aire's credit assessment service
reveals the bigger picture, predicting
how borrowers will behave in the
future rather than relying on an
extensive credit history. The start-
up works with the likes of Toyota
Financial Services, peer-to-peer
lender Zopa and fashion retailer N
Brown and has had $12m funding
to date. Aire uses machine learning
to evaluate people's lifestyle,
career and fi nancial maturity and
create a predictive credit score
which fi nancial institutions then
use to assess borrower's risk. The
London-based company, founded
in 2012, has secured a total of
9.1m in investment, was founded
by ex-RBS analyst Jon Bundy, ex-
JPMorgan mergers and acquisitions
analyst Aneesh Varma, and ex-Rolls
Royce and Wonga engineer Dr. Srini
Sundaram.
UK's 51 AI
Innovators
revealed
Artifi cial
intelligence
is disrupting
the world of
transportation,
marketing, fi nance and
health and the UK is at the
forefront of the revolution.
BusinessCloud set out
to shine a light on the
companies that are doing
amazing things with
AI, whether they have
developed their own AI
tech or simply adopted it
into their processes in a
unique way.
The response to our
campaign was massive and
we whittled our list of 'AI
Innovators' down to 51 with
the help of industry experts.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
@BCLOUDUK
51 AI INNOVATORS
n Arria NLG, London
Arria's core technology, Arria NLG,
analyses large sets of data and
translates the information into
natural language. The company,
founded and based in London, has
offices in New York, Aberdeen,
Auckland and Sydney. Arria NLG
floated on London's Alternative
Investment Market (AIM) in
December 2013, but was later
delisted when it moved operations
to Australia.
n ASI Data Science, London
Founded in 2014, privately held
company ASI Data Science works
across verticals to allow businesses to
use AI. The London-based company
has built AI for products for retailers
which provide recommendations and
product categorisation, but it is most
notable for its collaboration with the
Home Office, where it developed an AI
that can spot extremist propaganda
videos.
n Babylon Health, London
Babylon Health a mobile-based
healthcare, allowing doctors to
diagnose and prescribe medication
to patients. Its AI doctor chatbot has
been designed to recognise the way
that humans express their symptoms.
The company's technology powers
the NHS 'GP at hand' app which
connects patients to a GP via
videocall. Founded in 2013 and based
in London, the company has raised a
total of 65m from 2016 to date.
n Benevolent AI, London
Founded in 2013, the company's has
created an AI which speeds up of
medical discovery. The technology
analyses large scientific research data
sets, alongside scientists, to create
its own hypotheses and insights.
The company's AI is being used to
develop new medicines for hard to
treat diseases.Headquartered in
London, it also has a research facility in
Cambridge and now has offices in New
York and Belgium.
n BioBeats, London
The company, founded in 2013,
creates software which identifies
stress patterns using smartphones
and wearable device sensors after a
collaboration with Google. Its Interim
CEO, ex-Moonpig MD Iain Martin joined
the company in November 2017.
40
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
51 AI INNOVATORS
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
n Bloomsbury AI, London
With a mission statement to help
people gain "direct access to the
knowledge they need", the firm's
co-founder Sebastian Riedel also
co-founded previously mentioned
Factmata. In July 2018, Facebook
confirmed its acquisition of the
London-based start-up.
n Causaly,London
The technology generates a
visual flowchart with the potential
causes and effects of diseases
to find new cures. Created by the
London-based company, which
also has an office in Athens, it has
received 750,000 in funding to
date, and has partnered with the
likes of Harvard University and the
University College London's School
of Pharmacy.
n Celaton, London
Set up in 2004, Milton Keynes-based
Celaton uses machine learning and
AI to filter and organise incoming
fax, email, social media and post
correspondence. Their inSTREAM
product analyses customer
correspondence, supplier invoices,
employee HR documents, and
insurance claims and learns how
to organise and prioritise it. The
company has seen a 30 per cent
year on year growth and has clients
including Asos, Virgin and Carphone
Warehouse.
n Codec, London
The company, set up in 2015,
identifies the text, images and
videos that will engage well with
online audiences and can make
recommendations for creatives
before production begins. The
business, whose customers include
Unilever, Universal Music Group and
Barclays, has raised 3 million in
funding to date.
n Concured, London
Concured is the world's first AI-
powered content strategy platform
that provides marketers with a data-
driven content strategy that resonates
with their audience. The London-based
firm, which also has offices in New York,
Montreal, has worked with the likes of
SKY, Staples, Barclays, and Nationwide.
Founded in 2015 by ex-Idio SVP
Tom Salavat, the company raised an
undisclosed amount from five investors
including digital media and tech
investment firm Ascension Ventures.
n Cortexica, London
Now in its 10th year of operations,
Cortexica's technology was
developed from the Bioengineering
Department of Imperial College
London as the result of research to
reverse-engineer the human visual
cortex. The company has used its
tech to enhance retail experiences
and has partnered with Cisco on
government-funded, real-time video
analysis which ensures construction
workers are wearing the correct
personal protective equipment.
n Cyberlytic, Belfast and
London
Cyberlytic uses AI to analyse and
respond to cyber-attacks without
human interaction. The company,
founded in 2013, has had contracts
with the Ministry of Defence and
GCHQ which led it to develop the
'Cyber Threat Profiler', aiding military
analysts in identifying dangerous
cyber-attacks. Co-founder and CEO
Stuart Laidlaw has helped the company
to raise 935,000 in funding to date.
n Desktop Genetics, London
The company, which has developed
a core technology called DESKGEN
AI, is using the tech to re-engineer
the human genome. The firm's tech
is used by over 1,800 organisations
which has led it to receive prestigious
industry awards and a total of 52
million in funding.
n DigitalGenius, London
Founded in 2013, the company's
AI sorts incoming message by
putting the system 'on autopilot',
understanding the customer's
intention to solve a query faster. The
company has received 20 million in
funding from six rounds, beginning
in 2016. It was founded by Dmitry
Aksenov.
n Ditto, Manchester and
Leeds
Ditto's technology addresses the
fundamental shortcoming in so-called
'black box' AI in which systems are
unable to explain its own reasoning.
The company has this year raised
4 million in funding. CEO Rick
Turner spent 21 years at Empiricom
Technologies before joining the
company in 2017.
n Dream Agility, Greater
Manchester
Founded in 2011 and based in Greater
Manchester, this multi-award winning
ad tech platform for eCommerce
businesses optimises product listings
for Google and other paid search
channels. Dream Agility's machine
learning 'AdTech' platform and
inventory dashboards are designed
to optimise Google performance. The
firm was founded by ex-SKY gaming
director Glyn Powditch and 'Flirting for
Dummies' author Elizabeth Clark.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
@BCLOUDUK
51 AI INNOVATORS
n Eigen, London
The company's tech scans and
recognises documents to find
patterns in text and gives accurate
answers to unique questions. The
London and New York-based firm
is research-led, using the latest
methodologies from applied physics,
mathematics and machine learning
to improve the product. To date it has
raised 13 million in funding.
n Energi Mine, Manchester
Oldham-based Energi Mine uses AI
and blockchain technology to help
buyers to manage and purchase
electricity and gas, and analyse
energy usage data. The company,
which has $140 million of energy
under management across Europe,
has raised 17 million from two
initial coin offerings (ICOs) of its
'energitoken' in 2018.
n Factmata, London
Set up in 2017, Factmata aims to be 'a
cross between Wikipedia and Quora',
fostering a community of users for
fact-checking and marking of new
articles, from which the AI can learn.
The company's CEO Dhruv Gulati
successfully secured investment
from famous US investor and owner
of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban,
who is rumoured to have run for
President.
n Featurespace, Cambridge
Cambridge-based Featurespace
provide an 'adaptive behavioral
analytics technology' which is
designed to reduce fraud and risk
in financial services and gaming.
The company was co-founded by
the late Cambridge professor Bill
Fitzgerald, who conducted ground-
breaking work into the field of signal
processing. Founded in 2005, it has
raised a total of 29 million since
Fitzgerald set up the company with
co-founder and CTO David Excell.
n Gyana, London
Started at Oxford University,
scientists Joyeeta Das and David
Kell want to create a "digital
representation of the world", using
data big data and AI. Its range of
products measure customer pattern
and find expansion opportunities
and future potential for retailers
and businesses. Founded in 2015,
the company has been used by
organisations around the world
including the Ministry of Defence
to map human movement and the
weather.
n Hubble, London
Launched in 2015 by Tom Watson,
Tushar Agarwal and Rohan Silva,
former advisor to David Cameron,
Hubble uses AI to power an online
marketplace to match businesses
and entrepreneurs looking to rent
office space with those who have
it. The company, based in London,
describes itself as the 'World's First
AI Office Broker' .
n Humanise AI, London
The Humanise.AI chatbot for the
hospitality industry which hands
off to a human when it is confused.
Transforming the guest experience
and increasing hotel revenues, the
company was founded by three ex-
IBM Watson employees in May 2017
and recently raised its first Seed
Round.
n Jukedeck, London
Jukedeck is using AI to
revolutionise making and consuming
music. The software, which writes
music completely on its own, gives
creators instant access to music
which has never been used before.
n LabGenius, London
LabGenius is using AI to develop
new biological products in
partnership with world leading
multinationals. The company,
based in London, has developed
'EVA' - an AI-driven 'evolution
engine' which it is using to develop
radically new protein materials and
components. Founded in 2012,
the company now comprises
of synthetic biologists, data
scientists and engineers, has
secured 2.8m in funding to date.
n LivingLens, Liverpool
Since its launch in early 2014,
LivingLens has been translating
human behaviour into insights.
It provides video data mining
technology for leading brands
such as Unilever, Vine and
Carphone Warehouse. The
highly-rated market research
disrupter has attracted significant
investment, including a 1 million
funding package in 2015.
n Loop Me, London
LoopMe describes itself as the
first company to 'close the loop' on
brand advertising attribution for
offline sales. The company, based
in London, uses AI and mobile
data to optimise ad placements
in real-time. Founder and CTO,
ex-Vodafone Netherlands service
architect Marco Van de Bergh
founded the company in 2011.
The company now employs over
100 people and has secured 15.3
million in funding.
42
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
51 AI INNOVATORS
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
n metafused, London
Metafused makes AI-based
predictions for financial service
and logistics and is said to increase
clients' efficiency by 20 per cent.
CEO Madhuban Kumar has VC,
entrepreneur and corporate
experience in three continents and
has worked with bleeding-edge
technologies building innovative
products, including the Barclays
Oyster card.
n Miralis Data, Lancaster
The company, based in Lancaster, has
worked with the likes of Co-Op and
Europcar to make processes more
efficient through artificial intelligence,
machine learning and simulation.
Owner and MD, UK Bathroom Store
director and ex-Fat Media Managing
Director Michael Gibson established
the company in 2016.
n Mooshoot CVE, London
Uses AI, along with other tech, for
counter-extremism/terrorism,
such as targeted ads. Founded in
2015. The Google-backed, London
startup uses AI to identify vulnerable
people online based on the videos
they watch and the social media
profiles they follow. Founder Vidhya
Ramalingam studied anthropology
at Cornell University and migration
at Oxford. Her company's pattern-
deducing abilities can find users at
risk of online extremism and deliver
counter-advertising.
n NumberEight, London
Founded in 2016, the software lets
users' devices predict where they
are through a mix of AI and sensors
and react accordingly, for example
'commuting from work to the gym
on a crowded bus'. Last year the
London-based company was one
of six chosen to help transform
the capital into a 'smart city' using
Transport for London's data.
n Onfido, London
Onfido helps websites verify people's
identities. Its AI allows users to upload
a selfie and a photo of their identity
document using a smartphone to
complete the verification process. The
site has raised $60m funding in total
and partnered with a string of high-
profile firms around the world including
Deliveroo and Revolut.
n Peak, Manchester
Founded by Richard Potter, who was
previously an equity analyst and
business turned commercial director,
this Manchester-based start-up
provides subscription based AI to help
businesses grow their customer base
and improve business efficiencies. The
company, founded in 2014, has worked
with clients including E.ON, Global
Radio and Morrisons. It has offices in
Manchester, London and Edinburgh
as well as Jaipur and Brisbane. To date
it has received 5 million in funding as
part of its quest to get every company
working within the data economy.
n Phrasee, London
The London-based company founded
in 2015 uses AI to write marketing copy
that is 'better than humans.' Founded
by Parry Malm alongside COO Victoria
Peppiatt -who ran her own marketing
agency - and chief scientist Dr Neil
Yager, the company has to date raised
1M in funding. The company works
with major clients including Gumtree,
Domino's, eBay and Virgin Holidays
and has reported growth of 622 per
cent and 346 per cent in its second and
third year respectively.
n Pixoneye, London
Founded in 2014, Pixoneye offers mo-
bile photo gallery analysis to help brands
understand their customers better,
segmenting them into advanced user seg-
ments. The company, which has its com-
mercial base in Soho London, has raised
9 million from five funding rounds since
2015, which includes investment from
Santander's InnoVentures capital fund.
n Popsa, London
Founded by Liam Houghton and Tom
Cohen in 2016, Popsa is an app that uses
AI to automatically curate, design and print
a physical photobook from a user's photos.
The company's 'printAI' algorithm uses
information stored within the photo and
facial detection to the most appropriate
photobook layout in a few tenths of a
second.The company has to date raised
3.8 million in seed funding.
n ProFinda, London
Founded in 2011, ProFinda is used by
companies that want to create and
automate employee profiles. The profiles
form a database which allows users to
search for professionals based on a holistic
view of the employee's skills, knowledge,
and goals. The company, based in London,
has received 4.8 million in investment,
with ex-IBM director David Kelly as an
investor, while CEO and founder Roger
Gorman has spoken at The White House.
n Prospex, London
Prospex uses artificial intelligence to
generate sales leads. The company,
which was founded in 2015, built its own
AI engine, called 'LOMi' which deliver
10 leads per day for small and medium
sizes business. The start-up, which was
developed behind closed doors over the
course of two years, is accepting beta
registrations.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
@BCLOUDUK
51 AI INNOVATORS
n Ravelin, London
The technology allows companies to
import its client's payment data in real
time, inspects the data using AI, and
block suspicious activity. The company,
which was founded in 2014, has
received a total of 4.3m in funding from
investors including Barclays Accelerator.
n Red Ninja, Liverpool
The start-up, based in Liverpool
Science Park, has developed an AI-led
technology which directs traffic lights to
change in favour of emergency vehicles,
allowing them through congested
streets. Founded in 2011 and led by
CEO Lee Omar, the company led the
Life First Emergency Traffic Control
(LiFE) project with 222,000 grant
from government arm Innovate UK.
n Ripjar, Gloucestershire
Ripjar's 'Torch' AI-based threat and
financial crime detection platform is
designed to detect complex fraud,
money laundering and other financial
crimes across large data sources. The
company, which has raised 3.8M to
date, has partnered with Dow Jones
Risk and Compliance and LexisNexis
on the product and was mentioned in a
speech by Theresa May during the World
Economic Forum in January of this year.
The Cheltenham-based company was
founded in 2013 and founded by Jeremy
Laycock, previously a software engineer.
n Senseye, Southampton
Senseye's technology makes use of
AI and machine learning to predict
machine failure in the manufacturing
industry. The company takes
information from existing Industrial
IoT sensors and platforms to
automatically diagnose failures and
predict the remaining useful life of
machinery. The Southampton based
company was founded in 2015 by
Alexander Hill, Dan Reid, Rob Russell,
Simon Kampa and has secured 4.8M
in funding.
n StatusToday, London
The technology provides a dashboard
which tracks employee's wellness,
including signals of overwork and peak
hours of productivity. The company's
artificial intelligence builds a searchable
history of all company activity and
makes sense of it. It was recognized as
Europe's Best AI Startup at AI Summit
and has raised $3.9M in see funding.
n Synap, Leeds
Leeds-based e-learning and quiz
platform Synap provides an education
which uses AI to create personalised
multiple choice quizzes based on
student's strengths and weaknesses.
The two founders, James Gupta and
Omair Vaiyani were medical students at
the University of Leeds, have helped the
company to raise over 200K in funding.
n Tractable, London
Its AI looks can assess photos of
damage and predict repair costs
for disaster recovery and insurance
purposes. Since the company was
established in 2014 by machine
learning graduates Razvan Ranca
from Cambridge and Alex Dalyac
from Imperial College London, beside
ex-Goldman Sachs Adrien Cohen, the
company has received $34.9 million in
early-stage venture funding.
n Volume.ai, Wokingham
This AI agency, founded in 1997,
develops humanoid robots, virtual-
and augmented-reality solutions
and conversational AI platforms for
the likes of Castrol, Dell and Virgin
Media Business. Based in Wokingham,
Volume's Conversational AI Platforms
are built on its proprietary framework,
the 'Digital Concierge application'.
In 2018 the company was voted as
an outstanding place to work on
the Sunday Times 100 Best Small
Companies to Work For list.
n Wefarm, London
WeFarm uses AI to connect small-scale
farmers to crowdsourced farming
information. Labelling itself 'the internet
for people with no internet', it uses
simple mobile phones to connect some
of the 500m smallhold farmers around
the world; many are offline and miles
from the nearest village. The service
has 191,000 users in Kenya, Peru and
Uganda and has sent more than 5.2
million texts, hosted 57,000 questions
and received 97,000 answers. Earlier
this year it received $5 million in
additional seed funding, taking its
total to $6.6 million.
n Wiraya, London
Marketing technology company Wiraya
uses machine learning to predict
and customise what, when and how
businesses communicate with their
customers. The cloud-based platform
empowers companies to engage in
a real-time dialogue and send the
right messages to the right people
at the right time. Founded by Gustav
Lagercrantz in 2008, Wiraya raised
approximately 3 million in funding.
n Wirewax, London
Wirewax is behind an award-winning
media tech platform which allows
people to create engaging video
experiences. The company uses
artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically
make people, products and scenes in
videos touchable and clickable. Wirewax
was founded in 2009 by Dan Garraway
and Steve Callanan and operates from
a UK office in London.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
FACIAL RECOGNITION
Saving face
Did you know that
the UK is known
around the world as a
'surveillance state'?
CCTV cameras are
everywhere in our towns
and cities, with total numbers estimated
at between two and six million and 11,000
on the London underground network
alone. Depending on the city you spend
time in, your image could be captured
between 70 and 300 times per day.
The majority of these cameras are not
connected to the internet and do not
store footage for more than a few days
but facial recognition could soon see
them upgraded into one of largest mass
surveillance networks in the world.
At present, there is no legislation
regulating the use of CCTV cameras with
facial recognition in the UK, allowing it to
be quietly rolled out. A code of practice
published by the Home Offi ce suggests
that any facial recognition should be
'proportionate to the stated purpose'
and should require human intervention
before 'decisions are taken that aff ect an
individual adversely'.
with AI
However the results to date are rather
worrying. When cameras scanned faces
at events such as London's Notting Hill
carnival and last year's Champions League
fi nal in Cardiff , matching them to existing
police photographs such as mugshots in an
eff ort to identify wanted criminals, the tech
wrongly identifi ed innocent people
in 95 per cent of cases.
Not-for-profi t human
rights group Big Brother
Watch, which obtained
the fi gures through
freedom of information
requests, described this
fi gure as "staggering".
Even worse, the Metropolitan
Police wrongly identifi ed
innocent people in 98 per cent of cases
102 in all through facial recognition, with
just two people correctly identifi ed, neither
of whom was a wanted criminal.
South Wales Police, which made 2,685
'matches' between May 2017 and March
2018 with 2,451 false alarms, said the
system has improved over time. "When we
were learning how to use it... some of the
digital images we used weren't of suffi cient
quality," said deputy chief constable Richard
Lewis. "Because of the poor quality, it was
identifying people wrongly. They weren't
able to get the detail from the picture."
Seeking to set people at ease over the
use of the tech, he added: "The operator in
the van is [sometimes] able to see that the
person identifi ed in the picture is
clearly not the same person,
and it's literally disregarded
at that point. On a
much smaller number
of occasions, offi cers
went and spoke to the
individual... realised it
wasn't them, and off ered
them the opportunity to
come and see the van.
"At no time was anybody arrested
wrongly, nobody's liberty was taken away
from them."
However Information Commissioner
Elizabeth Denham (pictured above), whose
offi ce enforces the privacy-led new General
Data Protection Regulation, described it as
"a real step change in the way law-abiding
people are monitored as they go about
their daily lives".
Facial recognition technology is being used by UK police to monitor shopping centres,
festivals and sports events after a quiet roll-out. Alistair Hardaker considers the
implications for privacy and speaks to Cortexica, which is using artifi cial intelligence
to identify suspicious behaviour without identifying people.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
@BCLOUDUK
FACIAL RECOGNITION
" There is a lack of
transparency about
its use and a real risk
that the public safety
benefits derived
from the use of facial
recognition technology
will not be gained if
public trust is not
addressed." Elizabeth Denham
"There is a lack of transparency about
its use and a real risk that the public safety
benefits derived from the use of facial
recognition technology will not be gained if
public trust is not addressed," she said.
Whilst finding a balance between public
safety and smart surveillance is a problem
which seems to concern politicians
more than technologists, one
company may have found a
practical alternative.
Alastair Harvey
(pictured right) is chief
solutions officer at
London-headquartered
Cortexica, which was
spun out of Imperial College
after years of AI research. He
describes himself as an advocate
for the recently introduced GDPR, which
seeks to protect the privacy of EU citizens'
data, and says his firm's tech can improve
surveillance capability while decreasing the
need to collect any personal information.
"We don't do facial recognition or
anything to do with identity," explains
Harvey. "It's not about identity. It's all
about preventative measures monitoring
actions and spaces."
The company uses artificial intelligence
to detect suspicious behaviour in public
settings purely from the way people move.
"We recognise actions," explains Harvey.
"Put together with the scenario, those
actions can move towards predictive
analytics."
The company, which was set up in 2008
and has raised $9.2 million in funding to
date, uses AI with 'computer vision' to
process footage captured by cameras and
interpret the live video feeds. The tech
has primarily been used in the retail sector
to date: 'findSimilar' allows consumers
to discover items for sale based on
photographs they have taken of products
and clothing. Cortexica has worked with the
likes of Macy's in the US and Very.co.uk.
Now the firm, which has offices in New
York and San Francisco, is looking to enter
the field of public sector surveillance
with its 'action recognition' tech. "It's not
going to quite be Minority Report, but it
has the ability to see potential dangers,"
says Harvey.
The AI, which can be attached to
existing CCTV cameras, intelligently
monitors surroundings and the people
within them. The software is trained on
video clips of people acting suspiciously,
which it makes it possible to detect
behaviour and contextualise it. When an
outlier in a public space is spotted,
the AI can alert security. In
practice, this could be
someone acting a way
that stands out from the
majority of pedestrians.
The hope is that
the technology can
detect the difference
between "people all
running together happily"
and people "running in panic from
something", says Harvey.
"The next big area [for the company]
will be expanding on public safety by
being able to see that there is a person
who is walking against the flow of
people with a red backpack, for
example. In the next camera,
he hasn't got the backpack.
Where's the backpack?
We can track that now.
"We've got a number
of public sector enquiries
from around the world
concerned with safer cities."
Harvey believes that the
company's AI is not yet better at spotting
these potential threats than a human
CCTV operator. Instead, the AI offers
its value by working and thinking like
someone at the helm of security camera
around the clock without ever getting
distracted. "If you've got 500 cameras, how
many people does that require? People
make mistakes, they go to the loo, they
sneeze," he says.
The technology is also being applied to
construction, where it can ensure
that workers are wearing
the correct protective
equipment. On building
sites, where items such
as hard hats are required
at all times, Cortexica's AI
can check that workers and
site visitors comply with the
safety codes. "We've trained
the AI to recognise items like
oxygen tanks and hard hats. The objects
are being identified and tracked in real
time. From that you can create alerts and
alarms."
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
40
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
BIG INTERVIEW
We want to grow
tech firms across UK'
Chief operating officer MB Christie explains vision of new national
body Tech Nation following merger of Tech North and Tech
City UK and tells Jonathan Symcox that growing tech
firms shouldn't need to move to London.
How do you solve a
problem like London?
It is a good one to have,
in many respects: as a
financial powerhouse
and international centre
of technology, the capital is essential to
keeping the UK relevant on the world stage
as our breakaway from the European Union
looms.
However its magnetism can work
against the regions, which struggle to
compete in terms of gaining investment
and building the enterprise companies of
the future. After the success of Tech City
in building London's reputation as a tech
tour de force, the Coalition government
launched Tech North to accelerate the
growth of digital businesses in seven cities
across the North.
Its funding coming to an end was a "key
moment" for the future of both Tech City
and Tech North, according to MB Christie.
Formerly of Tech City, Christie is now chief
operating officer of the merged body Tech
Nation, which launched in April and has a
remit extending to all parts of the UK.
"The government recognised that it
needs a positive good news story about
where we're going to and tech has been
one of those great stories it can use," she
says with regards to Brexit. "Digital and
digital talent in particular is an arms race
every country is trying its best to keep that
momentum going.
"Brexit was a great moment to say 'hey,
things are going to change pretty radically
here so if we do not uncover the great
talent and the stories coming from tech
entrepreneurs across this country, we're
not going to stay in a leading position'."
US-born Christie first tasted the world
of business while working as a foreign
correspondent for the San Francisco
Examiner in the Czech Republic. Then in
her mid-20s, she began a company that
produced phone directories "because I
needed a phone book and there wasn't one
because the revolution had just happened!"
hiring a 13-year-old to build her first
database.
"That's how I got into digital," she
explains. "Microsoft wanted to create a
website for the government in Prague and
was referred to me because I had all the
contacts that's when I started building
websites. I learned from the ground up how
tech works."
DOTCOM BOOM
She later sold up and became product
director at QXL, Europe's first online
auction business and "one of the darlings
of the dotcom boom" before it lost 99 per
cent of its share value as the bubble burst.
Following stints at The Stationery Office
and as product director at RightMove,
where she was involved in the firm's IPO,
she got back into journalism with the
Financial Times and was the architect of
the successful paywall system introduced
on the paper's website.
Fast-forward a decade and she was
central to the year-long discussions which
preceded the decision to merge Tech
City with Tech North. Announcing the
consolidation, Chancellor Philip Hammond
and Prime Minister Theresa May committed
around 25m of funding over four years to
support ten bases outside London. "You
always want more [funding], but it's a good
start," says Christie diplomatically. "We also
need to build up our commercial revenue,
which is always a challenge."
The decision to form Tech Nation
and support the entire UK received
widespread praise while also raising
concerns about whether the North of
England would continue to get the same
level of attention. However Christie says
this is a unique opportunity to build a truly
MB Christie factfile
Produced Czech phone
directory following revolution
Product director at trailblazing
online auction firm QXL
Involved in RightMove IPO
as product director
Architect of Financial Times'
website paywall system
Central to merging of Tech
City UK and Tech North
ENTER NOW
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
41
@BCLOUDUK
BIG INTERVIEW
1
4
6
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national network of tech entrepreneurs
and businesses. "We decided to focus on
transforming the country from a collection
of standalone clusters into a strongly
networked, productive and internationally
recognised tech nation," she says.
"Up to now I'd say we grew organically.
This gave us a chance to step back and
think about how to structure ourselves to
achieve our goals over the next four years
instead of the next 12 months. It's made a
huge diff erence."
She says Tech North is the "blueprint" for
Tech Nation's UK-wide plans. For example
the Northern Stars concept, where 20 tech
start-ups pitched for support and ten were
successful, will be extended nationally
under the brand 'Rising Stars'. "We don't
want to duplicate local things that are
really great in these areas competitions
in places like Bristol, for example but how
can we plug into those and help raise their
profi le and get them involved in a national
competition? Meanwhile other areas don't
have these competitions, so how do we
start the ball rolling?
"It's the same with Founders Network
how do we do that across the entire
country? These questions are core to
building those connections."
A key aim of Tech Nation which shares
its name with the exhaustive annual report
detailing the performance of digital clusters
around the UK is to help companies grow
where they live rather than feeling they
must move to a big city when they reach a
certain size.
"When these guys get to a certain
size say 40 to 50 employees they feel
like they've hit their natural ceiling in that
particular place and have to make a life
choice: should I have to move to London or
Manchester? How am I going to make that
next leap?
"Our aim is to connect them with others
who can help them do that without leaving
the local community but
also feeling part of a national and
international network."
Over the next two to three years Tech
Nation plans to double the size of its
staff from 40 to 80, with entrepreneur
engagement managers in each of the
ten cities seeking to connect their
communities together as well as to other
areas. The main hubs will be in London
and Manchester, but other key staff could
operate out of regional offi ces.
NEW MISSION
Christie says that the main challenge to
date has been to convince staff which
worked within Tech City and Tech North
with the new mission. "We had the same
vision of making the UK the best place to
start and grow a digital business, but we
had been approaching that with slightly
diff erent modus operandi," she says. "The
Tech North team was focused on doing
that within certain Northern boundaries and
the Tech City group was looking nationally
but with much more focus on the scaled
businesses which tended to be more in
London.
"The challenge for those in London is
getting them much more out and about and
thinking about how we run our programmes
so that they're as easy for someone from
Edinburgh or Liverpool to attend as from
London: do we do more webinars and
livestreaming? Or more roadshows?
"It's a rethink for everybody. The water
has risen across the board: now that we're
not constrained by geography, we can think
across the whole country."
Clusters making up new Tech Nation network
1 Edinburgh
2 Glasgow
3 Newcastle
4 Leeds
5 Sheffi eld
6 Manchester
7 Birmingham
8 Cambridge
9
London
10
Reading
11 Bath
12
Bristol
13 Cardiff
14 Belfast
Visit Businesstechawards.com to nominate in 19 categories
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
43
@BCLOUDUK
TRANSPORT
Northern Fail
Northern Rail picked the wrong man to block on Twitter
when frustrated commuter Nicholas Mitchell complained
about its poor services. Alistair Hardaker speaks to the
software engineer about how he took his revenge.
A quick search for
#NorthernFail on
Twitter on any given day
will give you an idea of
the disruption suff ered
by train commuters in
the North of England as people take to
the social media platform to complain
of delayed and cancelled trains.
But how many of these people are able
to make a real diff erence?
One of the thousands of voices of
complaint this summer belonged to
software engineer Nicholas Mitchell
(pictured above, right), who at one point
found his train from his home in Urmston to
Manchester Piccadilly cancelled for three
days in a row. "There were back-to-back
cancellations each day. There were two-
to-three-hour gaps with no trains," he tells
BusinessCloud.
The delays continued,
and so did his tweets until
Northern Rail blocked his
account from sending the
company messages. That
triggered the 31-year-old
to take action by creating an
app that would eventually
lead the train operator to be
criticised by the mayor of
Greater Manchester and even
in Parliament.
Until recently, the exact
scale of the problem was
impossible to measure as cancellations are
only shown on the Northern Rail website
and app before a train's original scheduled
arrival with the record then disappearing
from view.
With the blessing and help of his
employer Shaping Cloud, Mitchell spent
12 hours developing the 'Northern Fail'
app. Free to download, it combines three
publicly-available datasets to record the
total number of cancellations or
part-cancellations on any given
day since the app was fi rst
launched in May.
A look at the app shows
that in the last two weeks
(up to August 7th) there have
been 836 full cancellations,
890 part cancellations and 754
services with reduced carriages. "It
highlights their incompetence by simply
showing the data," Mitchell says.
The app was launched before the
infamous Northern Rail timetable change,
which resulted in scores of additional
cancellations and delays, leading to a media
storm. As a result, Mitchell's app would be
downloaded more than 12,500 times.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy
Burnham even tweeted Mitchell to say: "You
have done everyone a service and exposed
the scale of this failure. Well done."
Off the back of the app's success, Mitchell
became the reluctant face of the movement
to improve rail services, appearing on BBC's
The One Show and turning down several
more media opportunities.
Mitchell, who bears a passing
resemblance to singer Ed
Sheeran, has also received
widespread support from
frustrated commuters, and even
received a message from one of Northern
Rail's own drivers.
"He contacted me on Facebook to give
me a pat on the back and said I should keep
up the good work," explains Mitchell. "He
said even he and his drivers rely on the
app for up-to-date information because
it's more accurate than their own control
signalling system. If the data's out there
but it's not understandable or
easy to use, then it doesn't get
people going."
Shaping Cloud founder
and CEO Carlos Oliveira
(pictured above, left) agrees:
"That accountability and
transparency, it became a
rallying eff ort."
The company has created a
piece of software called Spinr
which connects applications
with public sector data. "The
whole thing really gathered
momentum; we were surprised
by how much it took off , but it emphases
that organisations and the public sector
should appreciate that the data they hold
can be turned into something much more
powerful," says Oliveira.
When BusinessCloud contacted Northern
Rail for comment, it denied that the app
had had any impact on the improvement in
services.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
44
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
EDUCATION
The university
Universities offer a wealth of knowledge and facilities
to help boost your tech business. Jenny Brookfield looks
at how partnerships can aid growth and, in turn, address
future skills gaps.
challenge
Staff and students
at Edge Hill
University were able
to walk the corridors
of their new 27m
building before it
was even built all thanks to their
state-of-the-art tech facility.
Architects working on designs for
the new Catalyst building brought
it to life using the university's own
CAVE (Computer Augmented Virtual
Environment), a room-scale virtual
reality projection system.
It's the only facility of its kind in the
UK and it's available for businesses to
take advantage of, yet the university
says it is still trying to encourage
companies to take advantage.
"People tend to look at a university
and don't always see the opportunities
available, but we're keen for businesses
to come in and have a look at the CAVE
and what else we can offer," says
Sophie Garrett, knowledge exchange
and enterprise coordinator at Edge Hill.
The VR facility, which has 4k resolution
screens on three walls and the floor,
allows up to 10 people to experience the
projection together, giving a much more
accurate sense of space than head-
mounted displays.
In the case of the Catalyst building,
where previously blueprints would have
only given a hint of what was ahead,
architects and stakeholders were able to
hold design meetings in the space to plan
exactly how the space would be used.
In August 2017, while the steel frame
was still being erected on the construction
site, more than 100 staff members visited
the CAVE to explore their offices and
admire the views of the foyer and the
roof terrace. The building was visualised
at different stages of the design: first the
bare structure, then with furniture, and
finally with a virtual crowd.
The project was so successful that
Liverpool-based ABW Architects and
Terence Kiney Associates Consulting are
now looking at ways to take advantage of
the technology for future developments.
The facility could be offered to businesses
as a service for a fixed rate or in a joint
research and development project to
benefit the university too. In the latter
case, grant funding is often available that
the university could help apply for.
"We have a few demos to show people
but basically any product a business
wants to build for real they could first build
virtually to get a better feeling of what it
would look like before they start producing
it," says Nik Bessis, head of the computer
science department. "We would like to
see more businesses using it and we're
always actively looking for businesses that
could be interested. We offer help with
developing projects so there's a very low
barrier to entry."
CAVE
The CAVE (pictured left and on opposite
page) is just one example of the many ways
a business could tap into a university's
expertise, whether it's through equipment
it could otherwise not afford or knowledge
from students and academics. Edge Hill
offers expertise in Big Data, data science,
data analysis, data visualisation, STEM-
related subjects and natural language
processing.
George Lancaster (pictured right),
university business centre coordinator
at Leeds Beckett, agrees those outside a
university aren't always aware of what's
on offer. "Businesses tend to know about
the expertise within universities but not
necessarily how it can be applied to them,"
he says. "Leeds Beckett is very good at
engaging with the business community
and applying our knowledge to provide a
commercial benefit. We are able to open
up more opportunities to businesses."
Its Leeds Digital Hub has helped
spread the word. When a business gets
in touch, Lancaster's team carries out a
diagnostic to identify how the university
can help. It could be that mentoring from
industry professionals and academics
is suitable, while research projects,
workshops, peer-to-peer learning and
support in funding are also available. For
a longer-term relationship, a knowledge
transfer partnership (KTP) sees a graduate
associate embedded into the business to
work on a strategic innovation project with
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
45
@BCLOUDUK
EDUCATION
" We have lots of
successes of people
coming in with
products not quite
ready for market and
our team gets those
products ready."
JOHN LONSDALE
funding from Innovate UK.
BIGGER PICTURE
There is no set length for a business
partnership, but typically a business will
move on due to the nature of their growth
once they reach a certain size, Lancaster
says. "We had one company based with
us for its first four months and it grew so
rapidly it outgrew our offices," he says.
"They now have more than 150 employees
but still come back to us for support on
specific projects."
Another business won a competition
run exclusively for members of the
university business centre and,
as a result of the publicity,
went on to secure a six-
figure investment to
accelerate growth. "A
lot of businesses have
commented on how we
help them to focus on
the bigger picture and
open up opportunities to
expand and grow rather than
get bogged down in the day-to-
day running of a business," Lancaster says,
adding that there are also benefits to the
university. "It provides some fantastic
opportunities for our students and
graduates, many of which are currently
working on projects for businesses in our
Digital Hub, giving them some amazing
first-hand experience of working in a fast-
growing tech company."
Software developer Infinity Works was
one of the first business to join the Leeds
Digital Hub and believes this was key to
its early growth. It provided office space
to meet clients and potential employees,
and the chance to meet like-minded
businesses, some of whom remain mentors
to founder Paul Henshaw today. Now with
offices in Leeds and London, it has seen its
partnerships with Leeds Beckett, Durham,
Newcastle, Huddersfield, Lancaster and
York universities grow.
"Hooking up with different universities
has been a real source of support for
spreading the word about what we do
because, in Leeds, we're in competition
with lots of big heavy hitters," Henshaw
says. "We go in and speak to students who
want to work in tech when they graduate
and that's been incredibly valuable." Infinity
employed eight graduates in 2017 and will
take on a further 12 in 2018.
Henshaw has become an entrepreneur in
residence, supporting students who have
business ideas, which he says is
his way of giving something
back. When the business
began four years ago,
he found it difficult to
strike up a relationship
with a university,
perhaps due to the size
of his organisation then.
Yet these links are now
commonplace.
END PRODUCT
"It took a while for the message to resonate
I think but universities have a responsibility
to give people help into employment
when they leave, so it's going in the right
direction," Henshaw says.
At the University of Central Lancashire,
too, students and academics get
involved with businesses that come
into its Innovation Clinic. "We have lots
of successes of people coming in with
products not quite ready for market and
our team gets those products ready," says
John Lonsdale, director of innovation and
enterprise at the university. Away from
the actual products, there's also support
in other areas. UCLAN currently has a big
focus on leadership in tech companies and
productivity at the top, with professional
development courses available for
managers to ensure they get the best out
of their teams. Of course, once a business is
connected with a university there are other
knock-on benefits, including networking
with others in their field.
"We recently opened a centre for
SME development to encourage more
companies to come to the university
and engage with us because we're well
aware that some companies don't think
universities are for them," Lonsdale says,
adding that more than 500 companies are
already involved in the centre. "We're trying
to make ourselves more approachable and
show how we can help."
Then there's Unite Plus, a placement
scheme that offers businesses 140
hours of student time. This partnership
working ensures course content remains
relevant and up-to-date, leaving students
well-placed to solve skills gaps once they
graduate. A two-year KTP with Leeds bed
manufacturer Harrison Spinks explored
the use of advanced biomechanics
technologies in running shoes to reduce
the impact forces experienced by athletes.
It allowed the business to launch footwear
products into two different markets,
led to them developing a new research
and development lab, and the graduate
enlisted by the university to lead the project
accepted the position of head of research
within the business.
"There's an underlying philosophy in the
university that we see teaching, research
and innovation, and enterprise as being
linked," Lonsdale says. "If we've got good
links with businesses then that means our
academics are keeping up-to-speed with
developments in the sector."
Dragons' Den star and serial entrepreneur James Caan CBE has
a huge following on the networking platform after opting to
embrace it. He explains to Jonathan Symcox why the recruitment
industry needs innovation to survive.
With 3.1 million
followers and posts
which attract
thousands of
interactions, serial
entrepreneur James
Caan CBE is a master of LinkedIn.
He has more followers than former
US President Barack Obama and former
Prime Minister David Cameron and was
named LinkedIn's second most influential
voice of 2017. So it may come as a surprise
to learn that the former star of Dragons'
Den initially feared the professional
networking platform would ruin his
recruitment business.
"One of the key
differentiators in any
recruitment business
was the contact
database it had," he tells
BusinessCloud. "When
LinkedIn started to
become more popular
it initially scared me into
thinking it would ruin my
business. Suddenly everyone
had access to the candidates in
our database, whom we'd spent years
nurturing. I decided that as I couldn't do
anything to stop it, I'd embrace it."
Caan, who sold his first recruitment
business Alexander Mann for 260 million
in 2013, uses the platform to share advice
with his followers, such as 'How to use
nerves to your advantage' and 'How to
smash a group interview'.
"LinkedIn allows me to easily
communicate with relevant audiences,"
he says. "I used to write for a newspaper
column; however, I wouldn't get feedback
on how it was received other than the
odd verbal comment if someone I knew
had read it. On LinkedIn I instantly get a
response on whether people like it or not.
"That's powerful and far more engaging.
It opens up the dialogue for career
development and professional progression
for the benefit for all, and allows people
to build relationships quicker. My
activity on LinkedIn helps
me generate ten new
opportunities a week."
This is a natural
extension of
Caan's current
focus Recruitment
Entrepreneur, which
he founded in 2014 to
"help others learn from my
failures and avoid the pitfalls
that are often unforeseen in the
recruitment industry". The seed capital
arm of his London-based private equity
firm Hamilton Bradshaw, it has so far fast-
tracked the careers of 23 founding CEOs.
He explains: "I had challenges in my
career where having someone to not just
financially back me, but to also mentor me,
would have saved me from making bad
decisions. I wanted to help other budding
entrepreneurs to fulfil their aspirations and
run their own recruitment company." One
of Europe's fastest-growing recruitment
businesses, Recruitment Entrepreneur has
16 portfolio firms and is now focusing on
Manchester and the North West.
Caan says technology has changed the
landscape considerably since he grew
executive headhunting firm Humana
International to 30 countries in the 1990s
before selling it.
"My first office when setting up Alexander
Mann was in a small cupboard with a
phone and a book of contacts," he says.
"Technology is definitely an enabler to
rapidly scaling a company. The recruitment
industry needs innovation to survive and to
operate at a higher value level."
Caan says LinkedIn means he no longer
carries business cards "other than when
necessary in certain cultures" and that
artificial intelligence is the next frontier
in recruitment. He recently invested in
graduate recruitment app Debut, which
helps companies connect directly with
graduates and has attracted 120,000
prospective candidates in two and a half
years.
"I believe we will see dramatic change in
recruitment businesses as AI starts to take
over more labour-intensive admin related
tasks: sourcing, qualifying, interviewing
and engaging with, and initially nurturing
candidates will increasingly become more
automated.
"Apps like Debut are becoming the new
norm."
I thought
would ruin
my business
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
46
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
SOCIAL MEDIA
>> More exclusive interviews at businesscloud.co.uk
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
47
@BCLOUDUK
BLOCKCHAIN
Billboards that
know what you want
Manchester firm Bidooh has harnessed the power of blockchain
to deliver micro-targeted advertising and offers to people in
shopping centres. Jonathan Symcox reports.
Imagine walking
through a shopping
centre on a hot day.
What might be on your
mind? Buying sun
cream? Or a pair of
shorts, perhaps?
Then, as you approach a digital billboard,
it flashes up an offer for just the product
you need. Welcome to the future.
In fact that future is already here thanks
to Manchester start-up Bidooh, which is
delivering micro-targeted 'out-of-home'
advertising through smart sensors and
facial analytics.
Formerly known as Offer Moments,
the firm has now harnessed the power of
blockchain to allow advertisers to
publish an ad on specific digital
billboards within minutes
and accurately measure
who has viewed each
message. CEO Abdul Alim
expects the firm to become
the gold standard in offline
advertising in the coming
years.
"Advertisers are probably
wasting 70-80 per cent of
their budgets on advertising
which is not relevant to the
people seeing the ads,"
he tells BusinessCloud.
"Our tech picks up your
demographic profile, such as
your age and gender, and curates
the advert in real-time to match
it. It allows advertisers to
choose what they want to
market to different demographics.
"If a male aged 16-25 walks past the
billboard and the temperature is more
than 16 degrees, the billboard may
automatically advertise a pair of male
shorts at a nearby shop to them. This type
of targeting exists in the online world, but
it's very rare to find it in the offline world."
The firm has trial billboards in locations
across the North of England and Midlands
and has already installed thousands of
screens across Europe. Its ambitious
plans are to deploy 5,000 screens in the
next 12 months and 50,000 within three
years which, if achieved, could put its
annual revenues at 50m-plus judging by
the trials to date.
The decision to pivot the
business and use blockchain
to ensure full transparency
is intended to both
allay 'Big Brother' fears
and allow advertisers
full control over their
campaigns: they only pay
for the amount of time that
their advert is displayed to a
potential customer.
"The blockchain allows
us to be transparent with
the information we're
collecting, the billing and
the viewership," says
Alim, who co-founded the
business with friend and
blockchain developer Shahzad
Mughal. "We do get scrutinised
a lot, and get a lot of mild
attacks, because of the
nature of our platform
and this allows people to
see that we're totally open
and transparent with what
we're doing."
Bidooh has launched an ICO to allow
investors to pre-buy advertising space.
Its lead investor is long-term Manchester
United non-exec director Michael Edelson,
who has overseen 20 stock market
flotations, while Howard Simms, CEO of
Apadmi Ventures, is also an investor.
The idea is that while it would cost a
business a penny for every ten seconds
of advertising if paying in traditional fiat
currencies, using the Bidooh tokens would
make it 28 times cheaper and negate the
need to pay "extortionate" transfer fees.
Alim hopes that the big players in the
industry such as JCDecaux and Clear
Channel will one day look to his platform.
"There's frustration because everyone's
talking about blockchain but no one knows
how to implement it," he says. "We are
now the ones implementing it. Every
industry will have a blockchain which
they will adhere to. We're trying to build a
blockchain implementation which will be
the definitive resource for all advertising-
related platforms.
"With hindsight we should have started
out down the blockchain route when we
started two years ago. It would have been
less work for us and we would have been
able to deploy our systems faster. Being
first in any marketplace is crucial."
Top: Alim, right, with co-founder
Shahzad Mughal. Middle: Trial
billboard in Manchester's Great
Northern complex. Bottom: Pitch@
Palace winner Alim meets Duke of York.

BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
50
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
REGIONAL REVIEW
When the chief
information offi cer of a
300 million-turnover
broadband provider
describes Sheffi eld's
tech scene as one of
the North's best-kept secrets, you
sit up and pay attention.
Plusnet's Adam Low admits he knew
very little about South Yorkshire's digital
and tech credentials until he moved there
18 months ago. He has since "fallen in
love" with the city but admits that fi nding
talent can still be challenging. And he's not
alone.
According to Tech Nation's most recent
stats on Sheffi eld, the city boasts digital
tech business turnover of 745 million and
is home to over 22,000 digital tech jobs.
But although Sheffi eld is home to a
number of promising tech businesses
from telematics technology provider The
Floow to video game developer Sumo
Digital, fi nding and retaining talent can still
be a struggle for many businesses.
Putting the steel
in digital
Sheffi eld is shedding its 'steel city' image and forging a new reputation as a growing digital
and tech hub but recruitment is still a major challenge for start-ups. Mo Aldalou reports.
A number of the city's movers and
shakers attended our latest tech
roundtable to discuss Sheffi eld's digital
credentials and their challenges.
Plusnet employs 1,400 staff across its
headquarters in Sheffi eld city centre
and offi ce in Leeds, but Low
(pictured right) says fi nding
talent can still be diffi cult,
particularly when trying to
fi ll senior roles.
He says: "It does feel
like there's a fi nite pool
of resources especially
around some of the older
technologies. You do see the same
old names come up time and
time again and they seem to
move between companies
every two to three years.
"It took me 14 months
to fi nd our new head of
software engineering
and there were no
limitations around the
package so it wasn't a question of money
but just sourcing the right experience."
Sheffi eld 'poster boy' Dr Sam Chapman
is co-founder and chief innovation
offi cer at telematics software fi rm The
Floow, whose life-saving technology
reduces road accidents.
"Our biggest challenge
is that we're actually
in a market that's still
changing," Chapman said.
"The whole market we're in
is evolving at a really rapid
rate and we have to stay on
top of that."
The fast-growing company
operates from offi ces in Sheffi eld
and Detroit in the US, and
now employs around 120
staff .
"Another problem we
have is just keeping up with
our rate of growth in terms
of the building we're based
in," Chapman (left) added.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
51
@BCLOUDUK
REGIONAL REVIEW
" We need specialist
skills and it tends to be
London that attracts
that skill set, with
higher wages, making
it harder for a small
start up to attract the
talent it needs to the
North." LAURA SMITH
The roundtable at KPMG.
we are and what we are".
"You hear about
Manchester, you hear
about Leeds, you don't
hear about all the things
that are going on in the
Sheffield City Region," he
added.
Alex Letts (bottom) is just
one of many entrepreneurs in
the region trying to change
that. As the founder and
'chief unbanking officer'
of FinTech start-up
U, he's determined to
reach the millions of
Britons with poor credit
scores. Letts launched the
UAccount in October 2016 to
provide those underserved by
retail banks with a fixed-fee,
digital current account
alternative and the
promise of no penalty
fees or hidden charges.
Although the start-
up faces the same
recruitment challenges as
other tech businesses, U has
managed to grow to a 70-strong
team of full-time and part-time staff and
is on track to hit a turnover of 3 million
this year.
"We want to serve that underserved
segment and help them get from where
they are today to a place where they've
got their finances better organised, their
credit rating improved and the ability to
live their lives without a continuous debt
spiral and charges," he said.
Mike Maddock (right, top) is the
managing director and co-owner of high-
performance engineering design firm
Performance Engineered Solutions (PES),
based at the Advanced Manufacturing
Park in Sheffield.
Sharing his recruitment experiences,
Maddock says: "We have a principal
engineer we recruited and it took us 18
months to find him. I'm actually driving to
Coventry to meet a potential candidate
who we've been courting for about two
years."
Although Maddock acknowledges the
skills gap in the region, he believes that
tackling the skills alignment problem is
more crucial.
"Technology is moving so quickly that
courses don't align to what businesses
require; by the time students come out of
the 'sausage machine' to the other end,
companies are having to retrain them
and I think that's the biggest challenge in
terms of any business," he says.
NECESSARY EVIL
Craig Such, managing director of tech
firm Azzure IT, insists that recruitment
is the company's biggest challenge. He
admits that he "hates" using recruitment
firms to find candidates but describes it
as "a necessary evil".
"We even find that recruitment
companies get approached by candidates
who actually want to work for Azzure,
so that's the biggest frustration for us
that they feel they have to go through an
agency," he says.
Although finding the right candidates
can be difficult, retaining the talent you
already have can prove to be
even more challenging.
Such added: "I think it's
all about culture but you
won't get away from the
fact that some employees
will move for an extra 5,000
or less because for some of
them it's just about the money. If
we look at what we offer our staff,
it's all about the extra things
we do, added benefits. For
some people that doesn't
appeal to them."
For Laura Smith
(right), co-founder of a
two-woman operation
called Slanted Theory, the
challenges of recruitment are a
little different.
"For a small start-up we
need people that can
hit the ground running
because we have a number
of projects that are
happening and not enough
people to do it," she says.
"We've had interest from
international candidates but
they lose interest once they hear
about the risks of joining a very small
start-up.
"We need specialist skills and it tends
to be London that attracts that skillset,
with higher wages, making it harder for
a small start-up to attract the talent it
needs to the North."
According to Maddock, Sheffield needs
to move past its 'knives, forks and steel'
legacy and "start moving forward to who
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BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
53
@BCLOUDUK
XXXXXX
RETAIL
How can traditional retail businesses
use technology to compete with
rivals both in eCommerce and the
wider sector? Alistair Hardaker
reports from our roundtable.
The UK high street
is showing cracks.
A three-pronged
attack on traditional
retail from Brexit
uncertainty,
eCommerce competition and soaring
business rates is threatening brands
which seek to do 'business as usual'.
The collapse into administration
this year of Toys R Us and Maplin has
highlighted the need for businesses to
adapt to customers' changing shopping
habits. Meanwhile Maplin's full rebrand in
the last months of its operation which
sought to highlight its in-store expertise
also shows the importance of resisting
panic.
One company which is providing
technology to help customers benefit
from staff expertise is GoInStore, which
uses live video to connect staff in physical
locations to website customers. "For us,
the best companies to work for are those
that invest and can afford to innovate
early," says business development
manager Jeremy Dodd. "They spend time
working out what the best solutions are."
Dodd, who was speaking at
BusinessCloud's 'Adding Rocket Fuel to
Retail' roundtable, sponsored by PRWD,
suggested that adopting new tech
needn't mean making a large investment
if businesses look to find "technology
partners that are at a certain stage where
there is a mutual benefit to working
together".
"Find someone that could do with your
expertise and experiences," he says. "You'll
make their product better and get a
better product from them."
Adding rocket
fuel to retail
Dream Agility CEO Elizabeth Clark
agrees that small, strategic investments
in technology could be just as effective
as a large overhaul. "Don't follow the
trends find the good little pockets of
tech out there that benefit your business,"
she says. "If you do what everyone
else is doing, you have no competitive
advantage. There's some fantastic stuff
going on, especially in the retail sector."
Clark's Google shopping platform
has built a presence in Australia,
Atlanta, France and South
Korea. Almost half of its
business is now international.
Highlighting the global
nature of technology, she
says Brexit is an opportunity
for many businesses to find new
markets. "Thirty per cent of our
business comes from Australia
without an office there
we've never even been
there," she says.
Keith Hanshaw, managing
director of the Leather Satchel
Company, has an online store
which operates in multiple
languages and currencies. "If
[the government] wants to
bring retail back, they need
to change the way we rent
retail shops," says Hanshaw,
who also has a flagship store in
Liverpool's Albert Dock.
"We need to go away from a
fixed amount and make it a
percentage-led cap."
David Judge, managing
director of Cormar Carpets,
believes that retail business
owners with shopfronts have to widen
their view of the "shopping experience".
"When people start thinking of doing
up their house, you've got to help them
through that entire journey not just
the capacity at the end of it to buy the
carpet," is his view. "In my trade, people
have a business model that is now failing.
They either provide too much product
and it's confusing, or alternatively it's
an enormous cabin. Customer
experience has to be defined in
the broader sense. If you pick
up those touchpoints with the
consumer, you can win easy."
Karl Sandor, CEO of
eCommerce clothing business
The Killing Tree, advocates a
focus on "lifetime customer value"
over "quick wins for immediate
gratification".
Echoing the sentiments of
PRWD founder Paul Rouke
(see next page), he says: "If
you can look ten years down
the line, you want to have that
customer buy from you multiple
times rather than just make a
one-off purchase."
The other attendees were
Matt Carr, director, Carrs
Pasties; Rebecca Rhoades,
founder, Rebecca Rhoades;
Andy Poar, director, Eat My Logo;
Chris Moran, head of IT delivery,
Advanced Supply Chain; and Paul
Rouke, founder, PRWD.
From top to bottom: David Judge,
Jeremy Dodd, Karl Sandor and Keith Hanshaw
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
54
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
RETAIL
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is the world's richest person with an eye-popping
fortune of $150 billion but it didn't happen overnight. PRWD founder
Paul Rouke explains how Bezos' eCommerce empire was built to Alistair Hardaker.
's golden rule
and 2017 to $10bn as companies are
attempting to buy audience growth rather
than refi ning their customers' experience.
During the same fi ve-year period, the
average conversion rate remained
stagnant at three per cent.
Gathering feedback from brand
advocates on the eCommerce journey
could help companies build a better-
performing website and also save them
cash in the development phase as they
don't waste time creating "technical
builds, complexities, and features that
people might not want".
'Customer-centricity' should begin at
the highest level of business operations,
according to Rouke. "Have someone on
your board that represents the customer,"
he advises. "Until that happens, the
customer will be secondary to the
product.
"In my experience, genuinely
thinking about the end customer and
understanding what they are looking
for in such a competitive marketplace is
timeless."
This year Amazon's
Jeff Bezos overtook
Microsoft founder Bill
Gates at the top of
Forbes' Rich List.
The world's fi rst centi-
billionaire with an eye-popping fortune
of $150bn at the time of writing, Bezos
has added an incredible $77bn in just 16
months.
Yet the foundations for his eCommerce
empire were laid way back in the mid-
to-late 1990s with one golden rule: if the
customer comes fi rst, they will return.
"It's not all about the sell it's about
trying to build longevity," says Paul Rouke,
founder and director of optimisation at
Manchester-based PRWD, a digital agency
which helps eCommerce businesses
improve revenue. "Bezos said that he'd
never expect a customer to come up to
him and say they wished the prices were
a bit dearer, or that they should take a bit
longer to get the products to them."
To quote Bezos himself: "Customers
want low prices, fast delivery and vast
selection. I know that's going to be true
ten years from now. And so the eff ort we
put into spinning those things up will still
be paying off dividends [in a decade]."
Speaking at BusinessCloud's 'Adding
Rocket Fuel to Retail' roundtable, Rouke
says the tycoon prioritised customers'
immediate needs over those of the
company. "It's a lesson a lot of retailers
need to think about. What is relevant to
customers now that could be relevant in
ten years' time?"
He paints a bleak future for businesses
which attempt to predict what their
customers need rather than actually
asking them and says most online retail
businesses mistakenly believe that having
a polished product their website, for
example will automatically result in
greater traffi c.
"They think about the product and
services, but that is an insular view,"
he explains. "They need to get better
traffi c and genuinely look at the online
experience."
Refi ning this online experience is an
elusive idea for many, which discard an
intricate approach in favour of simply
ripping out an old website and replacing
it with a new one. "Companies think that
their website needs an overhaul so they
have a new one built which looks fantastic
then it goes live and the conversion rate
actually goes down. That old website may
have had some really great strengths,
despite not looking too great."
However leaving the website alone
altogether could also see your conversion
rate the percentage of visitors who buy
a product go down. Rouke terms this
"decay rate" and says spend on digital
advertising with the likes of Google
and Facebook doubled between 2012
"Customers want
low prices, fast
delivery and vast
selection. I know
that's going to
be true ten years
from now."
SPONSORED BY
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
55
@BCLOUDUK
ECOMMERCE
Tell your story
to compete
with Amazon
American social media 'rockstar' Brian Fanzo
tells Mo Aldalou that the key to competing with
eCommerce giants is relatability.
Brian Fanzo knows a thing or two
about connecting businesses to
millennials.
His company iSocialFanz has helped
launch digital and influencer strategies
with some of the world's most iconic tech
brands such as Dell, Adobe and IBM, as
well as the fast-growing Ultimate Fighting
Championship sporting franchise.
The American has spoken
at many of the world's
biggest tech events,
including SXSW,
CES and Mobile
World Congress,
and is also a tech
podcast host.
This 'translator
of geek-speak'
says no eCommerce
start-up has a hope of
competing with the likes
of Amazon unless they can
get their customers to relate to
them.
In a world where the pace of disruption
is becoming increasingly difficult to keep
up with, Fanzo is confident that the secret
lies in embracing change and a new kind of
consumer.
"There's an interesting stat that says 75
per cent of millennials would rather buy an
experience than a product and what that
really means is that people don't want to
buy what you do or what you're selling,
they want to buy how it enables their
lives," he says.
" If you want to compete
with Amazon you have
to do the things they're
not doing way better
than them and the
biggest piece of that
is telling your story."
"Even when you're picking a hotel,
you're not actually picking the hotel;
you're picking the experiences that you're
going to have at the hotel. It's really about
focusing on the experience that your
company or start-up enables rather than
what you're making."
Fanzo, who flew in from the US to speak
at Newcastle Startup Week, says the only
chance that start-ups have of
competing with giants like
Amazon is the ability
to relate to their
customers.
"If you want to
compete with
Amazon you
have to do the
things they're not
doing way better
than them and the
biggest piece of that is
telling your story," says the
straight-talking social media guru.
"Relatability is the future of marketing.
No one can really relate with Amazon, the
logo or the brand or even Jeff Bezos.
"Instead of looking at Amazon and
trying to compete product-for-product or
price-for-price, think about how you can
relate with somebody.
"What's going to inspire somebody to
get in their car or jump on the train and
go to some bricks-and-mortar business
rather than get something in two clicks?
It's that connection with the person; it's
that ability to relate with the story."
According to Fanzo, a crucial part of
being relatable is 'being human'.
"If you mess up you need to be okay with
admitting that you messed up and be
really good at customer service," he says.
Fanzo, who describes himself as a "change
evangelist", also believes that businesses
need to change their mindset when it comes
to adopting new technology.
Building a website should not be about
distancing yourself from the customer
but rather about shrinking that distance,
he says.
"The old days of saying 'if I build it they
will come to me' no longer exist," he says.
"In 2018, if you build a website, launch a
Facebook page or create a Twitter account
nobody is coming.
"So what does that mean? It means
there's a little bit more work to get our
content and conversations in front of
people but that work will pay off tenfold."
Podcast: The North East needs to shout louder
businesscloud.co.uk/podcasts & soundcloud.com/businesscloud
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
56
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
GDPR
Survival
The world didn't end
when the General Data
Protection Regulation was
introduced on May 25th but
many UK businesses cannot
afford to take their eye off
the ball. Jonathan Symcox
reports on the first months
under GDPR.
If some of the news
reports flying around in
April and most of May
were to be believed, the
world was to change
forever following the
introduction of the General Data
Protection Regulation.
The new laws protecting the personal
data of individuals within the European
Union and the European Economic Area
carry the threat of a potential 20 million
fine or four per cent of annual turnover,
whichever is greater, for those who do not
comply.
It is no wonder that business was quaking
in its boots. However May 25th came
and went and it seemed GDPR was less
meltdown, more Millennium Bug.
So what have we learned from the first
months under GDPR? We brought a panel
of experts together to answer that question
and also ask: what do businesses need to do
next to avoid falling foul of the legislation?
NO 'BIG BANG'
As head of legal and company secretary
at Manchester-based UKFast, Nicola
Frost (pictured top) was responsible
GDPR
guide to
for overseeing the cloud hosting firm's
approach to GDPR compliance a process
which began two years before it replaced
the Data Protection Act.
"We started off with an audit of how
secure the products were and the data
everybody had and where was it stored,"
she said. "We were lucky because we have
our own servers, a lot of techies at our
disposal and we don't really outsource
anything. All our systems talk
to one another and access is
locked down.
"We then spoke to every
team and delivered bespoke
training per department.
We went past May 25th and,
whilst there was so much
activity, nothing really changed
because things were working as they
were."
Elizabeth Clark (pictured
bottom) is CEO of Dream
Agility, an award-winning
adtech company based
in the Lancashire town
of Ramsbottom. She cast
her mind back to the final
days of the 20th Century, when
the world seemed convinced that an IT
meltdown would ensue at midnight on
December 31st 1999 a fear that proved
unfounded. "I honestly think it is the
Millennium Bug of the moment," she said.

NEED-TO-KNOW
Clark agreed with Frost that awareness of
data location and restricting access to it is
crucial to compliance. "Not everybody
has access to everything, only to
the bits they need to do their
jobs it's 'need to know'.
If we hold information on
a client whom we are no
longer working with, we
lock all that down so you
can't just browse and come
across it.
"When we set the company up
we made sure we had systems
which talked to each other
so we wouldn't need to
download any Excel
spreadsheets [for example]
which might end up
somewhere else. I think a
lot of small businesses do the
same when they start out."
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BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
57
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GDPR
Mel Carlen, head of IT
services at outsourced
communications provider
Moneypenny, added: "In
a big corporate, it's always
some other department's issue
whereas when you're a smaller
business which has grown
that accountability is easier
to control and replicate."
GET THE BUY-IN
Carlen whipped out an
orange sash during the
roundtable emblazoned with 'DPO
Queen' which stands for data protection
officer as well as a card reading 'Let's
chat about GDPR'.
"In the lead-up we did lots of talks
about GDPR but we also had the 'king'
and 'queen' sashes. We could do all the
compliance and the due diligence and the
boring stuff but actually it's the people
who make or break it. [Props like these] are
what bring it alive for our people. If they
then engage with it, they become less of
a risk."
One business that is helping companies
identify potential GDPR threats is the DDC
Group. Its analytics tech identifies the
threat level of every piece of data within an
organisation: a name and address might
only be a zero on the scale, for example,
but if linked to a bank account it might
become an eight then a nine if a driver's
licence is also included.
"Someone working in a marketing
department [for example] might not know
how to secure data or even where it is,"
its co-founder and MD Jan Trevalyan said.
"The weakest link within an organisation is
the people, without a shadow of a doubt.
Do they know where every single piece of
data is on their system? Some will but it
isn't their job, so you can't trust to that.
"Our tool makes the jobs of the
compliance guys and the legal guys as
easy as possible. It's all right putting
the legal system in place, signing all the
documents and having electronic security;
but if you don't where the data is, you're in
trouble."
A BIG FINE IS COMING
The Information
Commissioner's Office is
responsible for overseeing
GDPR in the UK and did an
excellent job of limiting the early
impact of the new era of data
protection. It prefers to work
with companies on a roadmap
to compliance rather than
threaten them with big fines.
However Paul Knight,
partner at national law firm
Mills & Reeve, said: "I do think
the ICO will now be focusing its
resources on breaches by high-profile
companies and looking for an opportunity
to issue a fine that will make people sit up
and take notice... I think it's the fines that
will make people take data protection
seriously again."
Trevalyan agrees that the ICO will be
"looking to make a statement". His
company indirectly employs 5,000
people across the world so he
has a clear view on how GDPR is
viewed in a variety of countries.
"We're looking at this from a
very UK-centric point of view:
the American strategy is 'let's
wait until someone gets fined and
then we'll do it' because they get the
actuaries on it which look at the
actual percentage risk against
the fine and the level of data."
Kristina McGuirk, marketing
director at UKFast, pointed
out that the ICO is investigating
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica
over the data-sharing scandal which
engulfed the social media giant earlier
this year. "I think that social media
platforms are going to be a big target [for
the ICO]," she said.
WATCH OUT FOR CHANCERS
Companies were also told to stay alert
for 'chancers' who deliberately try to
identify data breaches in a bid to try
and get compensation. "There will be
people breaking the law down and looking
at different angles to make a case,"
Trevalyan said. "I don't know how they'll
make money on itbut I do think it's
inevitable."
Knight, who heads up the commercial,
IP and IT team at the Mills & Reeve
Manchester office which hosted
the roundtable, added: "There will
undoubtedly be data security breaches
happening every day in lots of different
organisations, most of which will
be very low risk and should
be low profile. There will
be people who are riding
on the back of that and
testing the waters to try
to get compensation.
"Companies must
ensure they are only collecting
personal data that's necessary
for what they want to do
and only storing it in
particular, secure places."
From Top to Bottom: Mel Carlen,
Jan Trevalyan, Paul Knight and
Kristina McGuirk.
The roundtable at Mills and Reeve.
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58
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
HEALTH
Facebook
helped my
cancer fight
University lecturer Dr Bex Lewis found social media had
an "overwhelmingly positive" impact on her battle against
breast cancer. She is now fighting back and spoke to
Jonathan Symcox about her experience.
For those of us who
have witnessed or felt
its devastating impact,
the word cancer
instantly strikes fear
into our hearts.
The cruelty of the disease is magnified
by the nature of the treatments, which
amount to poisoning the body to get rid of
the cancerous cells and can stop the lives of
sufferers in their tracks.
There is much talk around how
technology might help cure cancer in the
future, particularly given advancements
in data analytics and artificial intelligence
but tech is also helping in other ways. "I
don't know how I would have coped ten
or so years ago when there was no social
media, the medicine was rubbish and there
was no Netflix," Dr Bex Lewis, who recently
won a battle with breast cancer, says with
a smile.
Sussex-born Dr Lewis, 43, is a senior
lecturer in digital marketing at Manchester
Metropolitan University and expert on
the digital landscape. BusinessCloud
caught up with her after she spoke at an
#HonestTalks event focused on social
media run by Fourth Day PR in Manchester.
"I spend a lot of time on social media
already so it's a natural environment for me
I tend to see it as a space where I live part
of my life. And cancer has now become part
of my life," she explains. "It allowed me to
" I don't know how
I would have coped
ten or so years ago
when there was
no social media, the
medicine was rubbish
and there was no
Netflix." DR BEX LEWIS
deal with it stage by stage, particularly the
Facebook groups I was a part of. I found it
quite cathartic."
In 2016 there were 163,000 cancer-
related deaths in the UK alone, almost
12,000 of them women who had breast
cancer. Survival rates are improving but
still only 50 per cent of people are still
alive a decade after being diagnosed.
Dr Lewis' cancer also spread into her
lymph nodes and shoulder but she has
been NED No Evidence of Disease
since September. She has endured
surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy,
and is now beginning a course of hormone
treatment that will last ten years.
The Facebook groups allowed her to
connect with other people in the same
situation, which had the effect of keeping
her both calm and informed. "The first day
I was told I had cancer, I had to go home
and decide if I wanted fertility treatment,
a lumpectomy or mastectomy, and
whether I wanted to stay in Manchester or
go and live with someone else elsewhere
in the country to look after me.
"When I was on the groups, I could say,
'right, I'm starting chemo next week, what
are the things I really need to know?' And
someone would tell me, 'take a drink with
you, paint your nails black to stop them
falling off...' I found it overwhelmingly
positive: it's a mix of information and
being with other people.
"If you just looked at the other stuff you
can find online, you'd be terrified because
you only see people vomiting and their
lives coming to a halt. I wasn't physically
sick once. I also froze my head so I haven't
lost my hair. It really throws people when
I tell them I've only just finished cancer
treatment because I don't look like it."
She says there was no question of her
"hiding" her cancer. "Once I'd told work and
my Mum and a handful of friends, I put it
publicly on Facebook the same day because
I don't think it's something you can hide. I
know some people aren't 'out' with cancer,
but I don't know how they do it. I had two-
and-half months off work for chemo then
three-and-a-half weeks off for radiotherapy
and I've had to adapt my duties."
Posting regular updates on social media
meant she didn't have to explain her
situation "300 times" to people she knew:
"I took back some of the control over
what I shared."
intelligence, most people jump to
the conclusion of a Terminator-style
dystopian future where we become
assimilated by Star Trek Borgs and
continually add new members and
technologies to the collective.
This is indeed a terrifying prospect
and one we may reach one day if we don't
get the adoption of AI right.
interim, AI will pervade our lives in other
more subtle ways.
AI is becoming a central part of Purple's
business so I've done some digging to
places where it is being used
FLIPPING HAMBURGERS
Flippy caused quite a stir when it was
deployed in Cali Burger, Pasadena
as a test before a planned
rollout across restaurants
nationwide. From the videos
it looked to be very adept;
however it couldn't keep up
day and the poor chap has since
hung up its spatula until production
CLEANING TEETH
Forget gun-toting killer robots of the
future it could be our toothbrushes
which rise against us.
intelligent toothbrush which will track
how well and how often you brush your
COLUMN: GADGET GAVIN
Unusual AI
you didn't see coming
teeth. A kids version is coming soon,
which may well prove worthwhile!
ROBOT BEES
The decline of bee colonies is a global
problem and, although there is a lot
of grey matter being expended on
potential solutions, it is already having
an impact on crop production.
Enter the robot bees: a miniature drone
with horse hair and ionic gel that can
perform the job of pollination.
Early work on this came out of Japan
robot bees. Perhaps these little guys will
not too distant future.
FEEDING AFRICANS
Cassava is a crop in Africa that provides
food for over half a billion people daily.
Although considered a 'hardy' plant that
can withstand harsh weather conditions,
it is prone to disease.
PlantVillage, a research and
development unit at Penn State
University, has created an app called Nuru
Swahili for 'light' which enables
farmers to identify diseases
within the plant.
Farmers simply wave
their phone in front of a
cassava leaf and, if the
plant has a disease, the
advice on the best ways to
manage it.
FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE
Technology has a crucial role to play in
all greenhouse gas emissions every year
and deforestation has accelerated due to
rampant logging.
Rainforest Connection is a group
of engineers and developers focused
on building technology to help locals
protect their land from illegal logging.
scalable, real-time detection and alert
system for logging and environmental
conservation in the rainforest.
solar panels, called 'Guardian' devices,
have been hidden in trees throughout
threatened areas, and continuously
monitor the sounds of the forest,
sending audio up to cloud-based servers
over the standard mobile network.
DRUNK TAXI PASSENGERS
Uber may be working on a technology
that would detect if users of its app have
had a little too much to drink.
Last month, the taxi giant revealed
a patent application that outlines a
system that would be able to identify
if someone using the app is displaying
"uncharacteristic behaviour".
Potential data sets could include typos,
the angle in which the user is holding their
phone, walking speed and more.
If the theoretical AI system does detect
that someone is acting in an unusual way,
it would enable Uber to tailor its services
accordingly, such as directing users to a
better-lit pickup location, or matching
users with a driver who has been trained
to deal with drunk passengers.
Self-confessed geek Gavin Wheeldon has given his gadgets a break for a few
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
59
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Read more columns at
businesscloud.co.uk/opinion
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
INSIDE TECH
What happens when
investment goes wrong?
Securing funding for your tech business can seem like the hardest part but what happens when your
investor relationship breaks down? Luke Massie is the founder of Vibe Tickets and had a spectacular
falling out with his original investor Matt Newing, founder of Elite Group. Chris Maguire reports.
At the start Luke
Massie's relationship
with his investor Matt
Newing appeared to
be a marriage made in
heaven.
The seeds of their association can be
traced back to 2013 when a then 20-year-
old Massie launched Vibe Tickets to disrupt
the secondary ticket market.
He wanted to create an ethical ticket
marketplace that allowed fans to exchange
tickets for face value. He approached
Newing for advice via Twitter, went in to
pitch to him and was advised to focus on
a mobile app as opposed to a website
proposition. Newing was sufficiently
convinced to invest an initial 200,000.
Perhaps the founder of Chorley-based
Elite Group saw a bit of himself in his quick-
talking prodigy. Newing knows how to
make money. When he was 17 he bought a
container of imported gents' Russian cycles
for 15 each and sold them for 70.
In 2012 I interviewed him and it was one
of my most entertaining encounters. The
then 39-year-old tycoon told me: "I feel like
a mosquito in a nudist camp because I don't
know where to sting first."
Their relationship grew and Newing
ended up increasing his investment into
Vibe Tickets to closer to 600k. Massie, now
aged 25, went from strength to strength,
regularly sharing a stage with Sir Richard
Branson and winning a clutch of awards,
including being listed in the European edition
of Forbes 30 under 30.
Then, on April 30 this year, Vibe
Tickets went into administration. Massie
immediately bought the company back
securing 22 jobs in the process but as
the details began to unravel it became
clear his relationship with his one-time
mentor was over.
The story focuses on three individuals
Massie, Newing and fellow investor Scott
Fletcher (pictured opposite page), who is
the founder and chairman of ANS Group
and Vela Technologies plc. At the outset
I should say I know Massie, Newing and
Fletcher pretty well and I like all three.
Some time after Newing first got involved
tech entrepreneur Fletcher pumped in
500k and Vela Technologies Plc joined the
party for 400k, which helped fund Vibe's
growth, including the opening of a London
office in addition to their base in Lancaster.
Fletcher started ANS Group in his back
bedroom in Manchester at the age of 22
and helped grow it into a 50m turnover
business. He's since invested in a series of
tech businesses and is passionate about
entrepreneurship.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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INSIDE TECH
The coffers of Vibe were boosted
further by another 200k in 2016 through
a crowdfunding appeal, where investors
could part with as little as 10. Vibe Tickets
was the rising star of the industry.
So what went wrong? The answer
depends on whose interpretation you
choose to believe.
Massie insists he was "backed into a
corner" and had no choice but to place the
company in administration and rubbished
claims it was planned as "ridiculous".
"It couldn't have been planned because
I had an agreement that 1.6m of funding
was coming from shareholders - that's
where all my energy and focus was," he
told BusinessCloud. "The suggestion was
that I planned on the company running
out of cash to close it down and then buy
it back at a fraction of the price of what
it's worth so that I could get rid of all the
shareholders so that I'd have 100 per cent
of the pie and have a go again.
"No one in their right mind would want
to go down this route and to have it
portrayed that this was plannedit was
anything other than that," he said. "I'm not
hiding and I've got nothing to hide."
As a result of the administration
process, Newing and Elite Telecom,
Vela Technologies Plc and Fletcher lost
600k, 400k and approximately 500k
respectively. Both Vela Technologies and
Fletcher have agreed to invest in the new
business but Newing won't be parting
with another penny. Massie said he sought
independent legal advice before calling an
emergency board meeting, during which
he asked investors to inject 150k into
the business to keep it afloat. But due to a
"very restrictive" shareholder agreement
that was in place, the existing backers
refused to provide any additional funds
until new legal documents were drawn up
to give them equal rights on the board.
Massie told BusinessCloud that he
resorted to borrowing and selling personal
assets including Bitcoin to help foot the
bill. "I had 24 hours to try and find the cash
I wasn't willing to give up on it," he says.
Newing confirmed to BusinessCloud
that he'd tried to buy Vibe Tickets out of
administration but lost out to Massie, and
claimed "red herrings" and "spin" had been
put out there in the light of the very public
fallout. Recounting what happened he said
things came to a crunch at the emergency
board meeting where Massie asked
investors to inject 150k into the business
to keep it afloat while a 1.6m funding
round with the then current shareholders
and investors was closed.
'SMOKESCREEN'
Newing said: "Of this, I had committed 75k
which was almost double what my pro rata
shareholding would have equated to (I had
circa 20 per cent).
"This was on the table right up
until the moment Cowgills
were brought in by the
directors which they
had no option to do
given the subsequent
unwillingness of Luke
or other investors
(Fletcher/Vela) to similarly
commit. It would have only
taken a further 75k to keep
everything going.
"I made an offer of 150k (to buy the
business out of administration). If accepted,
this would have seen all creditors including
HMRC adequately covered."
The administrator's report claimed
Massie originally tried to buy the business
back for 30k but eventually succeeded
with an increased offer of 160k, enabling
him and the other shareholders to "enjoy
the spoils for themselves".
Newing said claims that the legal
structure was hindering further investment
was a "smokescreen" and said Massie's
announcement that he was giving
away shares in his new company to his
original crowd investors did "nothing
to compensate the many other small
investors who had backed Luke and the
business from as far as back as June 2016."
Newing added: "At the insistence of
Luke, Fletcher and Vela, we all agreed
in October 2017 to make the giving of
investor consents as streamlined as
possible so that Alex Cliffe, the 'investor
director' could give or withhold
consent quickly on behalf of
the investors.
"However - and
this is the other red
herring - there had
not been a single
occasion when Luke
or the management
had to approach any
of the investors for their
consent, which is evidence in
itself of both just how much scope
Luke and the management had within the
legal documents to get on and run the
business.
"The next red herring is all this talk about
how the current legal docs were deterring
other external/institutional investors from
coming on board. Absolutely rubbish! That
simply isn't what happens in the real world.
"Forget me and my position, small
shareholders are key to funding new
businesses and start-ups so should be
treated with respect."
Fletcher sprang to the defence of Massie
on LinkedIn. "I was a large investor in Vibe
and continue to back Luke," he wrote.
"I can say with 100 per cent certainty
this wasn't Luke's fault other than being
naive when he was just 20 and signing
up to ridiculous terms via an investment
agreement."
So what happens next?
Massie insists the "product is in the best
place it's ever been" and Vela Technologies
Plc and Fletcher have both pledged another
200,000 and 500,000 respectively in
the new business. He also says he's in final
talks now with an investor in London.
Meanwhile Newing has been left out
in the cold. What's clear is the episode is
a salutary tale of what can happen when
securing funding in tech goes bad.
VIBE TICKETS TIMELINE
2013
Company founded by Luke Massie
2015
Matt Newing invests initial 200k
2016
Scott Fletcher invests 500k
Vela Technologies invests 400k
200k crowdfunding raise
2018
Vibe enters administration
Massie buys company back
for 160k
Vela Technologies pledges
200k
Fletcher pledges 500k
Investment accelerates
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EDUCATION
Why business
must close
tech skills gap
Education initiatives are
only part of the solution
to the UK's widening
technology skills gap, with
businesses urged to play
their part. Alistair Hardaker
reports from our Liverpool
City Region Skills Summit.
There are concerns
that the UK's tech
success story could be
slowed if the shortage
of technical skills is not
addressed but are
businesses playing their part?
Recruitment and the skills gap are
regularly identified as the number one
challenge for businesses. Education
initiatives are crucial to ensuring a pipeline
of future talent, while getting young people
'work ready' is absolutely critical for our
future economy.
The government's apprenticeship
levy on companies, introduced
in April 2017, has led to a 25
per cent drop in apprentices,
fuelling demands for reform.
However a stellar panel of
experts at our Liverpool City
Region Skills Summit said the onus
remains on business to plug the
gap and that starts with school-
age children.
"It's down to tech businesses
to go in to schools and say 'look
at what we're doing'," Dean Ward,
co-founder and chief technical
officer at fast-growing tech firm
Evoke Creative, told the 80-strong
audience in Birkenhead. "New
starters need real-world
experience."
Evoke Creative, which
produces interactive screens for
the likes of McDonalds, has taken on 12
work placements this year including
people as young as 15. "I'm doing
a lot more work at a school level
From top to bottom: Dean Ward, Asif
Hamid, Sandra Kirkham and Robyn Dooley.
to engage and inspire kids at a younger
age because we're losing a lot of people
from STEM careers. The work that we're
doing with some of these international
brands is inspiring for them."
Ward works with universities near the
company's headquarters in Wirral to take
local students into his business and have
them work on its live projects alongside
full-time staff. "The responsibility is on
businesses to give something back," he
said.
Asif Hamid, CEO of The Contact
Company and chairman of the Liverpool
City Region LEP, agrees. "Let's be
blunt: the education system in
the UK is totally disjointed. Once
you've gone to college and you
are 16 or 17, that's it you're
too far gone," he said. "We have
to get into schools at the age of
10, 11 and 12 when there is a passion
to learn and to change.
"Schools have a curriculum
given to them by Ofsted, and
their one focus is Ofsted. The
reality is that schoolchildren are
not going to be work-ready."
Sandra Kirkham, managing
director of Progress to Excellence
Group, added: "We need to
identify the skills gap, and
plug it, from when our young
children go into nurseries.
There are already development
gaps at that stage, and those
gaps just get bigger and bigger."
Kirkham's company offers
training and assessment for
organisations and delivers
apprenticeship training in the
workplace. "If we are going
to have economic success
in this region and nationally, we need to
innovate and in order to do that we have
to upskill. Let's not forget the ground floor.
If we don't use education and training as
a social mobility tool, we will not become
prosperous."
Robyn Dooley dropped out of college at
the age of 16 and launched the Innovators'
Hub since rebranded as OH to offer a
training programme for people aged over
18 who want to work in the digital creative
sector. She prefers the proactive term
'opportunity gap' to 'skills gap'.
"Skills are developed through
opportunities, and if we were to honestly
ask ourselves whether or not those
opportunities exist for people to develop
the skills which industry is crying out for
they're few and far between," she said.
The other speakers were Dr Edward
Harcourt, pro-vice-chancellor of external
engagement, Liverpool John Moores
University; Amanda Willis, group head of
HR, Peel Ports; Peel Ports apprentice Lewis
Wooding-Smith; Rechelle Davis, founder/
creative & operational director, Energy
Fairies; Sally Shah, lead commissioner:
place and investment, Wirral Council; and
Rob Tabb, head of service, Liverpool City
Region Combined Authority. The event,
held at The Contact Company's offices in
Birkenhead, was sponsored by Progress to
Excellence Group and Peel Ports.
How is Liverpool producing 'work ready' talent?
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BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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XXXXXX
A Muzmatch
made in heaven
Dating app Muzmatch, an alumni of San Francisco's
Y Combinator accelerator, is targeting the 400 million
Muslims looking to marry. Alistair Hardaker reports.
Many young Muslims
struggle to find a
lifelong partner of
similar religious
background and so are
turning to a dating app
in their hundreds of thousands.
Shahzad Younas (pictured above, left)
and Ryan Brodie (right) founded Muzmatch
in 2015 because other dating apps did
not take factors such as family, culture,
tradition and religion into consideration.
The London-based firm which has an
additional team in Bangladesh now boasts
more than 500,000 members and has
facilitated marriages in 112 countries.
"I'm a Muslim and so are a lot my friends,
so I understand the dynamic," CEO Younas,
a former computer science student who
spent nine years at financial services firm
Morgan Stanley, tells BusinessCloud.
"Everyone talked about how difficult it was
to find a partner. It was a real no-brainer to
launch the app."
CTO Brodie, a former software engineer
at ASOS, believes that its success to
date has been helped by Younas' deep
understanding of the issue. "From day one
we've been very mindful of feedback from
the community and respecting what they
think and need," he says. "We've built a
platform with a wide set of features and
depending on your level of religiosity, you
can shape the matches for you."
The app asks for the user's age, location,
profession and education. It then requests
their level of religiosity which can be
specified with a slider and how many
times a day they pray.
"It's intentionally subjective," says
Younas. "It gives you a rough guide of how
someone else self-identifies. There are so
many different cultures within the Muslim
world including Arab, Pakistani and Indian.
They are quite different, and many people
want to search along those lines."
The pair says that 15,000 people around
the world have found their partner on the
app and 60 people per day get in touch with
a success story. But with an estimated two
billion Muslims around the world and 300-
400 million single and looking to marry, the
potential audience seems limitless. "It's
not just Muslims in western countries, in
Muslims in Muslim countries," says Younas.
"These changes and shifts in attitude
[towards modern methods of finding a
partner] are happening just as much in
those countries as they are here.
"Our users travel to different countries
to get married. We had one person in
Indonesia who married someone from the
Netherlands, and another user from India
marrying someone from Saudi. The last
one was Zimbabwe and South Africa."
A dating app hoping to marry off its
paying user-base might not seem like
good business, but the co-founders find
that happy couples are the best PR. "A
Muslim wedding happens very quickly after
the engagement, between three and six
months," explains Brodie. "It's an incredible
PR vehicle for us because everyone at
these huge weddings around 600 people
knows that the happy couple met on
Muzmatch."
Last year Muzmatch spent four
months in the prestigious Y Combinator
accelerator in San Francisco which has
helped the likes of Airbnb and Dropbox
become market leaders. Y Combinator
was joined by New York-based investor FJ
Labs and London-based company builder
Hambro Perks in a 1.5m seed funding
round earlier this year. "The point of the
funding round was to accelerate our
growth to start putting a budget behind
marketing and own the market," Younas
explains.
Brodie adds: "We refer our plans for the
next 12 months as 'global domination'.
In the Western market, including the US,
UK and Canada, we're already the biggest
player. Now, it's time to bed-in to different
regions internationally."
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CLOUD
UKFast has launched new public cloud business
ClearCloud, which 29-year-old managing director
Mathew Bibby says will help "level the playing field"
between SMEs and enterprises and create more
competition. Mo Aldalou reports.
If you're looking
for help with your
accounts, recruitment
or improving your SEO
rankings, there's no
shortage of advisers
that a small to medium-sized business
can turn to for support.
But can the same be said when it comes
to finding help to bridge the gap between
the worlds of tech solutions and business
objectives? Unless you have the financial
resources of a blue chip or FTSE 100
company, Mathew Bibby says the answer is
often 'no'.
The former Amazon Web Services global
architect is now managing director of
ClearCloud, a newly launched subsidiary
of cloud hosting firm UKFast. The start-up
supports public cloud offerings from AWS
and Microsoft Azure, along with UKFast's
own dedicated eCloud Hybrid and eCloud
Private solutions.
Put simply, Bibby says the company
acts as a "trusted adviser" to help SMEs
understand what tech solutions they need
to meet certain objectives or overcome
specific challenges.
"We'll work with you collaboratively to
understand how your company can remain
relevant over the next ten years and how
the technology solutions that you build or
use can allow you to compete in an ever-
growing, disruptive market," says Bibby.
"The reality is that margins are going to
shrink, you have to become quicker and
more responsive to your customers. To do
that you may need to consume technology
in a different way and you may also need to
change things more frequently."
The tech entrepreneur has a background
in banking and tech consultancy, having
" I realised that there
was this paradigm
shift in technology
over the last few
years and that there
was going to be a big
shake-up in the cloud
services market."
MATHEW BIBBY
started his career as an engineer looking
after online banking systems in his late
teens, before making the move into
architecture where he helped design
systems. Bibby then returned to more
consultancy-based roles, where he worked
with boardroom members and directors
at enterprise companies to help them
understand their objectives and translating
them into technology solutions.
"I realised that there was this paradigm
shift in technology over the last few years
and that there was going to be a big shake-
up in the cloud services market," he says. "I
wanted to get involved in that early on so I
worked as a global architect for Amazon for
two years."
PEOPLE CHANGE
At Amazon, Bibby worked with tier one
investment banks and enterprise clients,
working out how they were going to
use Amazon's cloud platform to deliver
"business-critical, secure, confidential and
regulated workloads" a challenge which
Bibby says is tougher than it sounds.
"It's all about technology, people and
processes," he says. "You can have a
technical conversation with an engineer
about how to achieve something and
that's relatively simple but the people
aspect is less so.
"With cloud you don't just experience
a technology change, you embark on a
people strategy change. The skills you need
to deliver cloud projects are different and
more complex but you typically require
fewer people, therefore people worry
about their jobs. You're not just having a
debate about technology; you're having a
debate about how to deliver. You go into
these banks and they've got thousands of
colleagues managing lots of servers and
physical data centres. There's ownership
and accountability there. With cloud you can
build that in a third of the time and half the
cost in the same secure way but it needs a
few teams of eight people. It doesn't need
1,000 people sat in an office somewhere."
Bibby says ClearCloud's ideal target
customers are SME businesses across all
sectors, with the entrepreneur planning to
use his enterprise background to help "level
the playing field".
"I want to bring the rigor and maturity
of how enterprises deal with technology
which is very structured to SMEs," he says.
"If you're a large FTSE 100 company you can
afford to go to an KPMG or Accenture for
advice but if you're an SME then you can't.
"I want to take all that knowledge and
package it up so that it's affordable for
smaller businesses to consume. They'll have
the same-level solutions and that creates
a level playing field and more competition
and I think that's healthy for the economy."
ClearCloud is based at FastForward, Tech
Manchester's accelerator space at UKFast
Campus.
Bridging the gap between
tech and business
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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@BCLOUDUK
ECOMMERCE
Putting
bricks-and-mortar
back in eCommerce
How do you compete with the likes of Amazon? Hero is helping businesses
do just that with its app. Alistair Hardaker reports.
The ongoing march of
eCommerce seems set
to squash traditional
retail businesses
beneath its Amazon-
shaped boots but one
business is using technology to
help us rediscover the joys
of real-life shopping.
By avoiding costly
overheads such as
renting pristine shops and
training up shop fl oor staff ,
eCommerce websites are
able to undercut many bricks and
mortar stores on price. However this
can be at the cost of a unique and personal
shopping experience.
London-based Hero, which boasts clients
including Harvey Nichols, is a retail app
which strives to bring the personal touch
back to eCommerce by connecting in-store
assistants directly to online customers.
It is a refreshing change from a trend
towards online purchases which has seen
high street footfall drop to fi ve-year lows
this year. "When you need help and advice,
Amazon isn't necessarily the right place
to go," Hero CEO Adam Levene tells
BusinessCloud. "It is fantastic for buying
but very poor for shopping."
Levene says that a considered purchase
like expensive jewellery, furniture or clothing
does not always lend itself well to online
shopping because there are too many
questions. "We're helping businesses go
up against the likes of Amazon by doing the
one thing that Amazon can't do because it
doesn't have bricks and mortar stores."
Using a phone or tablet, knowledgeable
store staff can connect with website visitors
to answer questions, send photos
of products and even start up a
live video chat from the shop
fl oor.
"Hero combines the need
of the customer with the idle
time that associates in many
retail stores have," explains
Levene. "If these stores aren't
being connected to the fast-growing
world of eCommerce and are instead
waiting for shoppers to come
in the store, they are being
wildly under-utilised.
"When you can
assist a customer with
the knowledge and
the expertise of an
associate, they are far
more likely to spend more
and far less likely to return
an item."
This 'omnichannel' approach
connecting a customer's experience
between app, website and store is fast
becoming the norm.
"Omnichannel is a problem and an
opportunity for retailers today, because
the customers are switching between the
channels. The customers are omnichannel,"
says Levene.
Harvey Nichol's uses the platform to
connect its online customers to shop
assistants at its nearest shop location to
encourage an in-store visit. "One in fi ve
interactions on Hero ends with a sale online,
but many conversations on Hero also result
in a customer going to visit the store, to be
greeted by the same associate who served
them online."
Levene points out that retail jobs are the
number one career for people living in the
US and UK, but dwindling footfall leaves
skilled employees and smaller businesses
at risk. The company has recently opened
an offi ce in New York as it looks to
expand its international reach.
"In the US, one in ten
jobs is in retail. The US
retail market is huge
so it presents a great
opportunity for us," he
says.
Another key to the
company's success is
fi nding the right partners,
like cloud communications
platform Twilio, which Levene
says can help the company scale up its
technology.
"Going forward, the Asia-Pacifi c region
is incredibly exciting, especially with their
familiarity with shopping via messaging,
with tools like WeChat."
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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CLOUD
UKFast 'can become one of the
world's biggest cloud companies'
Lawrence Jones MBE outlines vision for growth following
news that firm is considering stock market flotation
The CEO of UKFast has set his
sights on worldwide expansion as
the UK hosting firm considers a
stock market flotation.
Lawrence Jones MBE founded the
Manchester tech firm alongside his wife,
managing director Gail Jones, in 1999 and
has grown it into a 47 million turnover
business.
Despite doubling in size in recent years
and expanding its workforce to 325,
Jones sees an IPO as a potential catalyst
to expand its presence in London and
from there, the world.
"If you really believe in your brand and
want to take it to the next level, there
comes a time where you need to go out
and raise money," he told BusinessCloud.
"There is a huge opportunity for us
right now: Amazon's AWS [cloud offering]
has been challenged by Microsoft Azure
and, while those two are scrapping, we
can come in below the radar.
"While it's not 100 per cent that we're
going to do it, floating on the London
Stock Exchange would allow us to build
things faster.
"If we're up against these huge
corporations we need to be going faster
than them. But you can't do that unless
you expand and add major capability."
UKFast, which fully owns and operates
five data centres in Manchester, has
appointed global investment bank GCA
Altium to review its strategic options,
with a potential float seen as a 'prime
option'.
Plans to build a world-class campus at
its already impressive Manchester base
could even be replicated in the capital,
according to Jones, who has developed a
separate arm of the business to carry out
its construction work, UKFast Space.
"If we were to replicate what we have
here in London, it would really raise our
profile," he said of the modern design of
its workspace. "It works incredibly well for
us and sets us apart as something a little
bit different.
"From there we can expand into
Europe, and then who knows if we do
a flotation, there's no reason why can't
set our sights on becoming one of the
biggest cloud companies in the world."
He added: "I believe we have the best
customer service on the planet. AWS and
Azure don't have the ability to support
customers like we do.
"But this could give us the chance to
expand in other areas with a big war
chest, we could go out and get more
programmers and devops and expand
the API functionality we have allowing
us to build more software to help our
customers grow."
UKFast achieved 18 per cent organic
growth in 2017, a year in which it
acquired public sector cloud and
security specialists Secure-IA, which
has deep public sector and government
credentials.
In recent times it has also taken
over cyber security firm Secarma and
invested in many other businesses such
as eCommerce platform Mercarto.
Jones is also a major shareholder in
BusinessCloud.
"S-IA gave us more customers and
high-profile customers such as the
Cabinet Office and Ministry of Defence
and revenue, but more importantly, it
allowed us to improve how we served
those types of customers," said Jones.
"There are many technology
businesses out there that have
extraordinary capabilities, which we could
plug straight in and supply to our clients
if we IPO, we could also [for example]
buy a software company to bolster our
devops team."
In a marketplace where many
technology companies are struggling to
attract talent, Jones is open about the
challenge of keeping his top-performing
staff and being seen as a valuable partner
to start-up founders such as Mercarto
founder Sean Brown.
"If I don't create opportunities for
world-class people that want to grow
to the next level I'll lose them and I'm
not prepared to do that," he said. "I'm
prepared to push my own boundaries to
build this business."
Happiness chatbot
fighting poor mental health
Artificial intelligence app Wysa is bucking the trend as a piece of technology
that actually improves your mental health rather than merely diagnosing it.
Alistair Hardaker speaks with CEO Jo Aggarwal.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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@BCLOUDUK
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
If you had a successful
product but knew
it didn't solve the
problem you wanted it
to, would you be brave
enough to ditch it?
That was the dilemma which faced Jo
Aggarwal and she followed her heart
rather than the bottom line.
Her software company Touchkin, based
in London, had devised a way to detect
depression using basic smartphone
sensor technology. It had a 90 per cent
success rate and Aggarwal,
who had suffered from
depression herself,
decided that the best
way to get people to
use the technology
was through a simple
accompanying
chatbot.
However she
suddenly saw a problem
with the business. "Out
of the 30 people who we
detected had clinical depression,
only three were open to taking therapy
and only one of them took the therapy,"
she explains to BusinessCloud.
"People just wanted to be
recommended another medication.
We realised that our technology was
just going to create a wave of anti-
depressants. Initially we were trying to
detect whether somebody might be at risk
of depression and slowly we began to
realise that it didn't matter."
Aggarwal made the brave decision to
throw their developing technology out,
despite its potentially lucrative appeal
to the likes of medical companies and
Example conversation on Wysa app.
even advertisers, and concentrate on
promoting good mental health practice
rather than merely identifying symptoms
of poor mental health.
"It doesn't matter if someone is
suffering from depression and moving
in a certain way," she says. "All of that
movement detection went out of the
window."
She is now the CEO and co-founder of
Wysa, the start-up behind the happiness
chatbot app which shares its name. Wysa
is a global success story after
coming through the
Facebook Start-up
accelerator and
clocking up more
than 300,000
users across the
world despite
not engaging in
any marketing.
Wysa
converses with
users by analysing
their text through
artificial intelligence. It has
50 separate 'models' to approach
people suffering from a variety of
problems in the most appropriate way
from depression to less serious situations
such as low self-esteem.
"The writing process is a large decision
tree. It's a combination of a therapist, a
person who can structure the content, and
a dialogue writer who then humanises it,"
explains Aggarwal. Last year the company
raised $1.3 million in seed funding and has
brought in movie scriptwriters to ensure
that the replies sound as natural and
human as possible.
Aggarwal estimates that they add 500
new 'conversations paths' to the app every
month, which help the AI to diagnose
the user's problem and lead them to the
correct advice, which includes meditation,
relaxation and reflection. It has had more
than 20 million conversations with its users
to date.
"There's a stigma against therapy the
availability of it, the cost," says Aggarwal.
"But we found that people were really
comfortable talking to the chatbot about
what they were feeling. Wysa doesn't exist
in the realm of communication. It exists
in a space between yourself and another
human being.
"That's why we call Wysa 'your 4am
friend', when everything is still inside your
head and you need to reflect."
Though she is adamant that the app is
not therapy, Aggarwal regularly receives
feedback from users which suggests that
it has been quite literally life-changing.
"We help people learn the skills that allow
them to manage their emotions," she
says. "There is even an NHS trust which
recommends it to all of their adolescent
and child patients who come to the trust
for mental health."
Jennifer Mossop Scott.
Giles Beswick.
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REGIONAL REVIEW
Why NOW
is the time
to invest in
Manchester
If you were to ask
people in the south
of England for their
opinion of Manchester,
you may hear about
the city's football
teams, its industrial heritage and an
excess of rain.
However that perception is changing.
The city has experienced a huge shift over
the last couple of decades, shrugging off
its gritty image as it builds a reputation as a
global player in tech.
Access to university talent, cheaper living
costs and a thriving start-up scene means
that many would-be entrepreneurs are
increasingly looking at the UK's second city
as an alternative to London and, crucially,
the same is true of investors.
Jennifer Mossop Scott of online fashion
retailer N Brown is an adopted Mancunian,
having moved over from Canada. She's
found sourcing tech talent in the city
'competitive but successful'.
"We fi ght hard like everyone else for
great talent and fi nd terrifi c graduates,
particularly in computer science and tech,
coming out of the universities," she told
a 70-strong audience at our 'Why Now is
the Time to Invest in Manchester' event.
"Having the likes of Boohoo and Missguided
here also means there's a good pool of
fashion talent in the area and we see a lot of
fl uidity between that.
UNDER THE SKIN
"My colleagues who don't originate from
here and that includes myself
really, really love Manchester. In
terms of perception versus
reality, when I moved here
nearly 20 years ago it was a bit
grimmer than it is now, that's
true.
"However, as soon as you get
under the skin of the city and
realise the diversity, the food,
the culture and the fantastic schools,
it's very compelling.
"My husband's an AI
specialist drawn here by the
university and there isn't a
better place in the world to
do the type of deep machine
learning that he's in."
Giles Beswick is director of
Select Property Group, sponsor of our
event. He believes London has enjoyed a
phenomenal period of growth but the key
factors that drove it are now propelling
Manchester forward. "London is coming
towards the end of its cycle, whereas
Manchester is really driving forward at an
earlier stage in that cycle," he said. "It's a
city positively teeming with not only the
talent but the wherewithal
to build the workforce
of the future in the
knowledge economy.
"Whether you're looking
to invest in land and
buildings, infrastructure,
employment or new
business ideas then
chances are you'll
get a good return on
investment by investing
right here compared to
other cities. That's the
reason we're seeing so
much inward investment
from all over the world."
Swiscot CEO Vikas Shah
brought an alternative
London has long reigned supreme in the eyes of investors but experts told our breakfast event
that they should now be looking northwards. Katherine Lofthouse reports.
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
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@BCLOUDUK
REGIONAL REVIEW
Christian Spence.
Patricia Keating.
Vikas Shah.
Sheona Southern.
" It's a city positively
teeming with not
only the talent but
the wherewithal to
build the workforce
of the future in the
knowledge economy."
GILES BESWICK
perspective as a born-and-bred Mancunian.
However, he found that this presented
different challenges growing up in the
changing city. "I was always a bit of an
outlier as I wasn't particularly into football
and I was just bored," he said. "The thing
that changed everything was a resurgence
in investment in things like arts and music
and restaurants: within a couple of years
I found myself falling back in love with the
city. Now it's become a place where I'm
proud to bring international investors
because there's something here for
everybody."
TAKEOFF
For the city to really take off though its
airport needs to step up its game, says
Shah something which is well on its way.
"The first impression you get of a country
is the airport and that's why I'm so pleased
we've announced investment because
Manchester Airport is showing its age," he
said. "You can't say we're in a progressive
city then land in an airport that's a bit like
landing in A&E on a Saturday night. It just
doesn't project the right impression."
With that taken care of, Shah believes
that now is absolutely the time to invest in
Manchester. "The thing that differentiates
it now is that the practical is overtaking
the hype," he said. "So it's not just people
saying 'Manchester's amazing' there's real
activity, businesses and labs. You can go and
touch it and see what's really happening."
If anyone knows about the positive
changes happening right now, it's Tech
Manchester programme lead Patricia
Keating. Hailing from Ireland and
originally intending to move to Dubai, she
'made a stop' at Manchester on the way
and never left.
"The thing that's unique about
Manchester is that there's real
value in community here and
that's the magic sauce," she
said. "The biggest part of what
a successful ecosystem needs
is a thriving start-up scene and
start-ups gravitate to places
that have the things they
need. One of those things is
money. They also follow customers
and there are some great client
accelerators here, but they
also need support and that's
where Tech Manchester
comes in. We're providing
really vital education and
resources, through initiatives
such as mentoring, to the
entrepreneurs that need it
most."
Sheona Southern, managing
director at Marketing
Manchester, says this
connectivity also extends to
the city's tech infrastructure,
and is key for catapulting it
into investor eye-lines. "We're
right in the top ten connected
cities in Europe," she said.
"We're connected on the ground,
connected to international
groups, we're bang in the
middle of the country so well-
placed to start a business and
we're really connected around
Greater Manchester and
transport links."
Christian Spence, head of
future economies analytics at Manchester
Metropolitan University Business School,
says another key to success is the city's
entrepreneurial spirit.
"Manchester has given birth to its
own companies we're a thriving
entrepreneurial lot here," he said. "The
attraction is there for global companies that
want Manchester as their UK office. They're
not coming for the weather we know that
but the access to skills."
Spence agrees with Shah that the airport
is the game-changer for the city. "It's
phenomenal. Almost two thirds of inward
investment happens within an hour and a
half from a city's port of entry," he explained.
"Taking people to the
heart of where you want
them to be and not having
to shift them around is
hugely advantageous.
The opportunity to get
Manchester into a global
network is all about
knowledge exchange.
Manchester has been
the door through which
international investors
increasingly see access to
the Northern Powerhouse."
Ash Pandey of Tech
Mahindra recently opened
an office in Salford after
growing the company's
foothold in the north over
the last few years. He
agrees that Manchester's
forward-looking attitude,
cultural inclusivity and
growth opportunities were
a big draw for his company.
"Innovation is key to the
country's economic and
social plan, leading as a
centre for innovation
and creating a global
talent pool along with job
opportunities," he said.
"Tech Mahindra through
Innovation lab, its new
office in Salford and its
apprentice programme,
will engage with more than
100 local talents as 2018
unfolds."
Tim Newns, CEO of Manchester's Inward
Investment Agency (Midas), believes the
city is in a great position going forward.
"In terms of interest in Manchester as an
investment location I'd say it's never been
stronger," he said. "We're winning projects
off major competitor cities like Berlin, Dublin
and Amsterdam, so it's about getting an
air of confidence in the investors' minds
to say that this is the right place to invest.
We'll get that through reputation and a
track record, so telling the story of investors
coming in actually delivers confidence in
new investors."
Why NOW is the time to invest in Manchester
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DUBAI LONDON MANCHESTER SINGAPORE SHANGHAI BEIJING
info@selectproperty.com | 0207 123 4000

BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
73
@BCLOUDUK
CYBER SECURITY
People can be both your greatest asset and weakness
when it comes to security. Alistair Hardaker speaks
to Nick Wilding of AXELOS about the need to make
training an engaging experience.
Getting inside the head
of a cyber attacker
is the most eff ective
way of protecting your
company against online
criminals so why is
security training often treated as a
'tick-box' exercise?
AXELOS is taking another approach in its
role of helping clients change the behaviour
of employees to reduce attack risk: putting
staff into the shoes of an attacker. Created
in 2013 as a joint venture between the
Cabinet Offi ce and Capita which owns
global best practice frameworks like ITIL,
Prince2 and RESILIA AXELOS' RESILIA
Frontline programme includes a phishing
game which helps employees better
understand the techniques adopted by
criminals.
"You're given access to multiple emails
and you can try and steal money
and sensitive information,"
says programme leader and
general manager of cyber
resilience at AXELOS Nick
Wilding (pictured). "You're
told throughout the game
why a particular attack has
failed or succeeded, meaning
you get better at identifying the
tell-tale signs of an attack."
The cyber security expert says too much
of the training he's seen is "boring, too long
and too technical". In particular he says
that the language used to educate all
staff is often critical. "We need
to give our staff the simple,
practical guidance we all
need to make more vigilant
and resilient decisionsat
home and at work!
"Businesses need to
realise that if they aren't
serious about their cyber
security they will be attacked,
and it will be very likely that the reason
they are compromised is due to human
error. Organisations are thinking about this
now because they know that their people
are their greatest defence but also their
greatest vulnerability."
Wilding believes that organisations
need to balance the "stick with the carrot"
as all too often bad behaviours are
punished but good behaviours go
unrecognised. "At the moment,
we are missing a massive
opportunity by talking about
cyber threats with technical
and jargon-fi lled language,"
he says. "It simply doesn't work
with the majority of people."
A feature of the RESILIA Frontline
training is providing engaging training
through short nugget-sized learning
via e-learning and tests, animations,
simulations, audio stories and games. "If
you tried to keep people up to date with
each and every scam, you'd be
telling them something new
every day," he explains.
"Instead, we go into the
nature of phishing and
scams, the tell-tale signs
and how to develop a gut
feeling, which counts for a
lot."
Whilst Wilding says that
phishing can be understood in just 15
minutes by anyone willing to learn, he
highlights the need for extra care to tackle
'whaling' and 'spear-phishing' attacks
which are more sophisticated attacks often
targeting senior executives.
"It's more diffi cult to train the whales," he
explains. "You've got less time with these
people because they are extremely busy,
and they think they are more immune than
anybody else. That actually makes them
more vulnerable."
AXELOS has released a cyber thriller
series called 'Whaling for Beginners'. "We
need a societal response to cyber security,
and I'm not just talking about government,"
says Wilding. "We need to talk about this
much more openly, and one way in which
we can do that more eff ectively is through
the language that we use."
Putting the
into cyber security
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
74
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
INTERNET OF THINGS
The term 'Internet of
Things' has become
synonymous with
connected devices
for many people. But
it is the Industrial
IoT rather than consumer-led tech
where the greatest impact could be
felt.
A recent study from Inmarsat claimed
that organisations across the global
supply chain expect the IIoT to boost
annual revenues by ten per cent within
fi ve years as the increased use of real-
time data and machine-to-machine
communications allow businesses to
automate processes, reduce operational
waste and speed up rate of production.
" There's been a lot of
conservatism with
regards to the IoT
sit back, wait and see
what other people do
and then think about
doing it." CRAIG SMITH
Does IoT work for
all businesses?
Industry is fi nally waking up to Internet of Things technology. Jonathan Symcox reports on how
the IIoT - Industrial Internet of Things - can benefi t SMEs and enterprise companies alike.
There is an obvious benefi t to
industries which rely on manufacturing
and transport and logistics, with Industry
4.0 now a fi rm part of the tech lexicon.
However any business down to the
humble sandwich shop should also be
looking to get on board with sensor
technology and the data it delivers.
"IoT is for every business," Craig Smith
(pictured opposite page), director of IoT
and analytics solutions at Tech Data, says
at its 'IoT on Wheels' roadshow at Salford
Quays. "If you need to do a stock check
in your shop you can walk around with a
scanner and fi nd out where the item is on
the shop fl oor. With smart refrigeration,
you can show the health and safety
bodies that your sandwiches stay at a
particular temperature during the whole
day.
CLOUD POWER
"There's a cost of entry, but the IoT
is priced based on consumption of
computing power and services, which
makes it much more consumable and
relevant to smaller businesses.
"You can connect one fridge and not
have a massive outlay."
Tech Data is a Florida-based fi rm that
works with 115,000 partners globally
including the likes of Microsoft, Vodafone,
Schneider Electric and Cisco to deliver
IT solutions to millions of customers.
When it comes to the IoT, those
solutions will take parts from various
partners for example data-crunching
platforms and sensors and be delivered
as a whole package.
Ian Banham is Microsoft's technical
sales lead for the IoT in the UK and says
industry in the UK is "fi nally waking up" to
the technology.
"We're reaching that point now
where there's a lot more interest from
companies in the industrial sector to talk
to us and look at projects we can help
them with," he says. "There's been a lot of
conservatism with regards to the IoT sit
back, wait and see what other people do
and then think about doing it.
"The IoT is not new but the change in
technology over those 25 years is what
has made it far more usable now. It's
much easier to get data from a device in
bulk and cheaper to store and analyse
it thanks to the cloud in the past you
had to have your own set of servers and
people to run and maintain them to do
your analytics."
75
@BCLOUDUK
Tech Data is focused on four
primary sectors which it estimates
covers about 70 per cent of industry's
IoT use: retail, manufacturing,
transport and logistics, and smart
spaces. These interviews with
BusinessCloud are taking
place in a smart meeting
room, where sensors
beam intelligence about
how the room is being
used back to a cloud-
based platform.
"At Microsoft we've
got five buildings on a
campus in Reading; last
week I tried to get a meeting
room for three weeks' time and finally
found one that was free in the fourth
building that I looked in. However, I can
guarantee that if I ran around those
buildings on that day, I'd find empty
meeting rooms," Banham reveals
candidly.
"There's a lot we can do with
sensoring up the rooms so we can find
one free at the time that we need it."
Microsoft and Tech Data are
together looking to introduce the IoT
into the water industry, which has
faced big supply challenges during this
year's hot summer and also during
the particularly wet spring which
preceded it. Currently an estimated
three billion litres of water is lost per
day due to leaking pipes.
WATER REVOLUTION
"I'm dealing with water companies at
the moment who've been collecting
data via dial-up modems for the last
25 years," says Banham. "They've
really jumped on to the IoT in the last
year and are looking to connect up
the pumping stations and analyse the
flow of water within the pipes to try
and detect leaks. They're looking to
save large sums of money by being
able to react better to large rainfall and
manage where the water is."
The projects involve smart sensors
on manhole covers and in storm drains
which feed data back about water
levels at far more frequent intervals
than has been possible in the past.
"They've collected data for 25 years
but haven't had the means to store it
or analyse it to find out what's going
wrong and do something about it,"
explains Banham. "They only got the
data when it was too late because
it only sent it back every
hour so, which is too slow
during a particularly
heavy rainfall. With
this technology
they can react more
quickly. A lot of the
water companies have
storage facilities for
water so, if they have that
data, they can move water
about to avoid floods and sewage
overflows. That is massively important
because they're only allowed so many
sewage flood incidents per year and, as
soon as they go over that, the fines can
run into millions of pounds."
Banham says that many of
the responses to the data can
be automated through analytics
programmes which take in data in 'near
real-time'. "It can pick up on events
of interest and communicate them
forward to other systems or people to
get them to do something," he says.
"In many cases, there's no need for
humans to even be involved."
Schneider Electric's Eric
Cocquereaux says that the IoT is the
coming together of OT operational
technology such as data centres and
energy provision and IT. "There
is a change in the market," he says.
"The main topic now is to address the
amount of information coming out
of devices and to be the first line of
help when things go wrong such as
the power going off in hospitals or an
industrial setting.
"Not all the traditional IT companies
are doing this and that is a big mistake.
We are in a world where people
pay a recurrent fee every month
to keep things maintained, but you
need connected devices, business
intelligence, a platform to store this
information and applications to crunch
the numbers in real-time so you can
react quickly."
Am
I addicted
to tech?
Student Amber Murray didn't
think she was so we set her
the challenge of chronicling her
usage for a week
I was sure I only used my phone for
Messenger and Spotify... and Snapchat,
of course. No way was I addicted! But
when the editor of BusinessCloud set
me the task of monitoring my usage for
a week, this image began to crumble.
The first thing I did when I woke up was
check my phone for messages and the
weather. I then stayed on it for half an hour
rather than doing anything productive,
such as showering or eating breakfast.
I then spent the entire day at work on
my computer. My evening was better, with
a tech-free play and dinner before a few
episodes on Netflix.
The next day I set myself the challenge
of seeing how long I could go without
checking my phone after I woke up. I then
completely forgot about this until I was five
Snap stories deep and by then I was too
invested in my friend's night out to close
the app. The rest of the week carried on in
pretty much the same way.
I often conflate being addicted to tech
with being addicted to my phone but you
forget that working on your computer,
watching a movie, talking to friends and
even shopping is actually screen time.
When I don't have any form of access to
the internet within reach, I feel disconnect-
ed. We throw the word 'addicted' around
pretty loosely at the moment, but when
a lack of access to a non-essential good
throws you off course, it's probably safe to
say you have a problem.
So I am addicted to tech and especially
the internet. But is that necessarily a bad
thing? It's become fashionable to say yes,
we should all give up our phones but I'm
pretty sure most us would have a hard
time working or communicating without
technology.
I certainly won't be giving up my internet
any time soon.
Podcast: How IoT is boosting Sagrada Familia tourism
businesscloud.co.uk/podcasts & soundcloud.com/businesscloud
BUSINESSCLOUD EDITION 11, Q3 2018
76
BUSINESSCLOUD.CO.UK
REAL LIFE
Former y
outh wor
ker
reaches m
illions wi
th
interacti
ve films
Paul Irwin
created T
ryLife to
educate y
oung peo
ple about

the conse
quences
of poor li
fe choice
s but nev
er dream
ed
that his in
teractive
drama se
ries woul
d reach 1
40 million

America
ns in a si
ngle mon
th. He ta
lks to Mo
Aldalou

about hi
s journey
and plan
s to take
the US b
y storm.
With a baseball cap,
Darth Vader T-shirt
and a distinct but
approachable Geordie
accent, I think it would
be fair to say that
Paul Irwin isn't what you might call a
typical entrepreneur but he doesn't
claim to be.
The former youth and community worker
set up TryLife to create an interactive
educational drama series to educate
young people across the UK about
the consequences of their life
choices.
"I was working as part of a teenage
pregnancy team with young dads and
our team of 26 was stripped down to
three," Irwin tells BusinessCloud.
"The funding just wasn't there
anymore. After that I just knew there
had to be a way to engage with young
people around health issues by using
technology."
TryLife has produced a number of
episodes covering subjects including
drugs and mental health. Viewers choose
a character and make decisions which
then have consequences in the storyline.
It has attracted millions of followers on
social media.
"I think it's our approach to how we
develop the content," Irwin says. "We
launched our first episode with 100,000
fans, the second with 200,000 and the third
with 5.4 million it's grown exponentially."
But Irwin and fellow co-founder Nicky
Kaur have no plans to stop there they now
want to educate young people about the
history of gang violence in America.
The pair had initially travelled to the
US in 2016 as part of a trade mission and
have since been working on developing
a new interactive film with the Bloods,
Crips and Mexican Mafia in South Central
Los Angeles.
"I managed to speak to two opposing
gangs and they agreed to call a ceasefire
they were killing each other at a rate of five
to six people a month," he says.
During Irwin's latest six-week trip to
Hollywood earlier this year, he was able
to bring the founding members of the
notorious American gangs together on
stage to start a conversation about peace.
"This time we managed to get about 12
heads of gangs some of these guys have
done 30 years in prison for mass murder
and we brought them together on stage,"
he says.
"We held an event where we had
founding members of the Bloods, Crips and
Mexican mafia on stage for the first time,
all standing there saying 'If I had something
like TryLife as a kid maybe I wouldn't be in
the position I am' so we got buy-in from
the entire community."
Irwin says TryLife is currently in talks
with major companies including
Facebook, Netflix and Freemantle.
"We've got a few meetings and
quite a lot of interest in it I'm
just going to see where it ends
up sitting," he says. "Producing it
is the most important thing, just
getting it off the ground, but it's just
phenomenal to see how it's been
taken up."
Despite not having released a
US-centric episode yet, Irwin says
TryLife's biggest audience is now in
America.
"We've got 6.5 million people on
Facebook, I've reached 188 million in a week
and 140 million Americans in a month with
no marketing or an advertising budget,"
he says. "That means that 65 per cent of all
Facebook users in the US have seen some
TryLife content within that month.
"I've got the trust of a huge community
there and we just need to keep the
momentum going."