Vision Consulting, a small Irish firm with a big company attitude has moved to the US. It now joins the ranks of other Irish technology companies that have set up US bases, among them Iona Technologies, Trintech, Nua and Intuition Publishing.
Although Vision's midtown Manhattan office opened with a bash on March 17th, it is only now officially spreading the word. So far, 20 people have been employed in New York with the figure scheduled to rise to 40 by year-end and to 100 by the end of 1999. It when he was on during a recent visit to New York.
Most of Vision's management came from the big consulting firms of Arthur Andersen and Price Waterhouse. Yet with only 350 consultants worldwide, it is now competing head-on with IBM, EDS and the big four accounting/consulting firms. However, it is optimistic about its prospects.
"We have a different style," said John Crowley, who moved from Vision's Dublin office last summer to head up the US operations. He joined the company in 1993 from Price Waterhouse. "We believe people are central to the technology change arena," he said.
Vision's list of clients is impressive. It includes Bank of Ireland, Allied Irish Bank, Swiss Bank, Lloyds/TSB Bank, Paribas Bank, Bank of Scotland and The Dime Savings Bank in New York. On the insurance side, it has worked with AIG, Standard Life and Eagle Star in Ireland and Britain and more generally with Motorola.
Vision's focus is to provide enterprise solutions in electronic commerce, call centres and customer relationship management.
It used to partner with Benton International, a US-based consulting firm, until Benton was acquired by Perot Systems and got its own IT consultants. Now Vision is in the US on its own.
But in the past, the partnership with Benton yielded some success stories. Vision and Benton were instrumental in rolling out Bank of Ireland's direct banking service for consumers, called Banking 365. This was done in a record eight months, involving the equivalent of 20 man years of work and launched in May 1996. Another Benton/Vision partnership was to set up an integrated telephone banking operation for The Dime Savings Bank in New York. Mr Crowley said Dime's profile was not unlike Bank of Ireland's in terms of channels and customer base. The Dime had 100 branches and two call centres. "Our strategy was to integrate the channels and consolidate the customer base," said Mr Crowley. "It's a neighbourhood bank which in order to grow needs to use technology better." So from having The Dime as its first client in the US, it now counts four: The Dime; thestreet.com, a financial news service on the Internet; Westcom, a telecommunications provider; and the New York office of Paribas. Its goal is to have six clients by the end of 1998 and it aims to grow a capital markets practice in London in tandem with New York.
Vision already has offices in Dublin, Belfast, London, Edinburgh and now New York. Whether it is working with large or small companies, "the product set is still the same", said Mr Adams. "It is a scale question.".
"We're ahead of the curve," said Mr Crowley. "People are looking for partners that are strongly committed," said Mr Adams. "Vision has always been customer-centric." He sees that approach as significant in light of the changing retail banking environment in the US. More merged and acquired entities could mean larger, more impersonal behemoths.
"Our expertise in retail banking is the interface with the customer," said Mr Crowley and "customers are becoming more discriminating." In the mid-1990s, he said, companies put a lot of emphasis on cutting costs. A lot of these efficiencies have since been achieved. "The emphasis has now turned from internal efficiency to customer relationship. Now it's about driving revenue up. It's about selling to and servicing customers better."
