CEO Bulletin

Release Management

We started the year by deploying major releases of all four of our primary products – ProVision Core, Online Banking, Broker and Integration Hub. I appreciate this created somewhat of a testing bottleneck for our customers but was due to our withholding releases during 2020 to enable our customers to concentrate on managing the effects of the pandemic.  Following consultation at the recent Community Meet Up, we have committed to extend the time between releases and de-conflict releases of different products where possible to minimise disruption to our customers going forward.

You can also help us to deliver higher quality products and services by adhering to the Fair Use Policy and always remaining on supported versions of our products.  Supporting customers on obsolete versions exponentially increases our workload and costs and adversely impacts our ability to provide an effective service across our customer community so is ultimately unfair to customers who adhere to the Policy.  To this end, and as advised within recent meetings and communications, we are going to start charging an additional support levy to customers who reside on “out of support” versions from 1^st July.

Integration Hub

The delivery of Integration Hub in December 2020 was a particular milestone for MV as it represents our first major product to be developed within our new technology architecture – Microsoft Azure public cloud.  Integration Hub is the foundation stone of our digital ecosystem and all future integrations and API’s will be built using this open standards technology to provide optimal choice for our customer community.  Integration Hub has been extensively tested both by MV and our customers and is already live in customer sites.

Digital Opportunities

A recent CACI study, The Future of Branch 2021, asserted that digital migrations in the banking sector have been accelerated by three to four years due to Covid and we have certainly experienced this seismic shift in demand for digital in recent months.  Not only have we experienced increased demand for digitisation, automation and integration from our existing customers, but we have also seen a significant uptick in organisations looking to replace their legacy core banking systems.

Many existing customers of legacy core banking systems are frustrated by the restrictions placed on them by their current technology suppliers and crave greater choice and control over their digital futures.  Our Digital Mutual strategy offers this greater freedom by providing a digital platform with Open API’s enabling customers to choose whichever FinTech solutions meet their business requirements.

Investing In MV

In order to fully exploit the significant increase in market demand and opportunity, the MV Board, shareholders and senior leadership team have endorsed an accelerated execution of our Digital Mutual strategy including accelerating the transformation of our products into Microsoft Azure public cloud.  We have therefore recommenced our shareholder expansion and investment activities following the Covid imposed hiatus.  The leadership team has put together a compelling business plan which demonstrates the enhanced shareholder and customer value that can be generated through additional investment and the significant business growth that can be achieved.  We have therefore begun engaging with customers that may be interested in taking an equity stake in MV to further support the Digital Mutual model.  Please feel free to contact me if you would like to know more about this opportunity to take a more proactive and collaborative role in driving forward your digital strategy.

Operational Excellence

During recent months, we have placed a continued focus on improving our operational excellence and release quality.  Whilst there is undoubtedly more to be done in this area, we have made great progress by reducing the number of escaped defects in software releases by 51% on a rolling year basis.  We have also been busy recruiting additional team members into MV in key areas including product support, technical support, quality assurance, consultancy, delivery and user experience design, with further recruitments planned throughout 2021.  Additionally, we have smoothed out our release plans to minimise the acceptance testing burden on our customer community.

We are committed to continuously improving our operational delivery and quality of our software and are confident that the benefits of the investments we are making in this area will be felt in the coming months.

Project Success

The whole team at MV are really proud of what we have achieved in terms of project delivery through working in close collaboration with our customers.  We kicked off the year by undertaking a data migration and core banking system implementation within just 8 weeks for our new customer – Tandem Bank.  We wonder if that is a record for a new core banking system implementation!

Our project to replace Manchester Building Society’s legacy Sopra Steria core banking system with ProVision is also going extremely well – running on time and under budget.  We know from the experience of speaking to customers who have implemented other core banking systems that this is quite a rare achievement in the industry.  We also continue to support Hanley Economic Building Society in their implementation of DPR’s system demonstrating our commitment to working with our clients as their technology partner to implement whatever solutions they choose.

Summary

Since joining MV in September 2018, I have never known such a high level of digital activity and opportunity within the banking sector.  The investments we have made in the business in the last 2 years to enhance our operational delivery capability and define our technology architecture and product roadmaps mean that MV is uniquely well placed to rapidly grow and thrive in the coming months and years.  MV increased revenues by 15% from 2019 to 2020 and this trend is continuing with MV performing well ahead of budgets in 2021 to date.  As the Digital Mutual, we reinvest all profits for the benefit of our customer community so our ongoing financial success directly benefits each and every one of our customers.  We are passionate about the mutual business model and believe it offers the ideal platform from which to provide a digital platform and ecosystem to enable specialist banks and building societies to digitise and compete with high street and challenger banks.

MV – The Digital Mutual