Irish tech company Vizor celebrates its 20th anniversary as a business this year. We caught up with CEO Conor Crowley to hear what the biggest challenge has been for the company in that time.
The year 2000 didn’t end world history. As people across the globe counted down the last seconds of the old millennia, some still worried that the 2YK problem would send society spiralling back to the stone age. But it didn’t happen. Instead, they welcomed a new year that would bring them Eminem’s third album, Tiger Wood’s cemented his legacy as the world’s greatest golfer and in Dublin a new tech company would be born.
Vizor launched its first version of its product in 2000, a digitisation and automation service of paper-based and manual data collection processes. Since then, Vizor has become a global tech powerhouse that caters to clients around the world. It has developed deep collaborations with some of the world’s leading central banks and tax authorities.
The world-class solutions Vizor provides gives its clients access to highly flexible and extendable solutions to ensure so they can adapt to meet future needs in line with technological innovations and evolving global regulations and tax policies. And during that time, the very small Vizor team that started it all has ballooned to include almost 100 employees worldwide.
Looking back over the years, Conor Crowley, CEO of Vizor, says that building the team has been one of his proudest achievements. “They are an incredibly passionate, dedicated and talented group of people,” he says. “We have recently recognised as Deloitte Best Managed Company for the fourth year in a row, and that is a testament to Vizor’s team who have consistently delivered world-class solutions to a global client base.
“The team now has many hundreds of years of experience of working with the financial regulators and tax authorities that we serve in 40-plus countries around the world. And we love that we have this expertise that is truly unique in the world. Our customers really appreciate this too – we bring the collective weight of all that experience to bear on every new engagement.” This was recently recognised by Central Banking as well, which awarded them the Global Technology Partner of the Year.
But Crowley admits that the years have not been without challenges. The biggest obstacle that the company had to overcome was to launch the second version of its offering 2010. “Back in the mid-2000s we decided to go back to the drawing board and develop a new, world-class enterprise software platform for data collection and supervision,” Crowley remembers. “This turned out to be far more challenging than we had anticipated. But we stayed the course, continued to invest heavily, and continued to believe we were building something exceptional. That belief paid off and the result was a software platform that has been the genesis of our growth story ever since.”
So, what’s next for Vizor? “We have embarked on an ambitious strategy to deploy Vizor technology within the financial institutions that are regulated by our financial regulatory customers,” says Crowley. “Having the same technology on both sides of the fence delivers incredible value to these FIs, who can now vastly improve the quality and automation of their regulatory reporting while simultaneously reducing costs – it’s a win/win for everyone concerned!” To celebrate the anniversary, the company has released a new video telling the story of the innovative company. Check it out here below.
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