Bob Compton, CIO, North, Mobilize Financial Services
As society emerges from years of pandemic, IT is ever more central to our personal and working lives, and IT professionals have never been more crucial to the functioning of businesses and society.
The UK IT Industry Awards are designed to celebrate and promote the organisations, teams, projects, technologies and individuals who have given so much, and those who continue to help shape the future of IT, our industry and digital society.
This year's winners were announced at a live awards ceremony on Wednesday 9th November in London.
One of the finalists was Mobilize Financial Services, in the running for the Business Analyst of the Year.
Before the awards, we caught up with Bob Compton, CIO, North at Mobilize, to find out what makes his company different from other technology firms.
Bob has been leading the IS department for the last five years. His background and career has been always within financial services, banking, fintech and all areas of IT, but with a specific focus on software development and projects.
His role enables him to collaborate and work with colleagues on a global level working within global tribes and squads, finding ways to fast scale new approaches to multiple countries!
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers.
Bob Compton: Our company has had a major rebranding in 2022 from RCI Financial Services. Mobilize Financial Services demonstrates our close relationship to new mobility brand Mobilize - supporting Renault Group's strategy to go beyond the automotive industry.
Mobilize Financial Services continues to be the finance arm for customers of the Renault Group brands, including Renault, Dacia and Alpine. Nissan customers receive the same quality of services & products, through the Nissan Financial Services brand.
Since the creation of Mobilize in January 2021, Mobilize and RCI partnered to enhance development of new mobility solutions and offers tailored to customers' needs. Mobilize Financial Services is striving for affordable, green mobility that fully embraces the evolving industry and environment.
Mobilize Financial Services operates in 36 countries and nearly 4,000 employees, the group financed over 1.4 million contracts (new and used vehicles) in 2021 and sold 4.7 million services.
How is your company different from its peers?
As part of our customer centric strategy, we aim to become the most innovative captive finance company. This has seen a shift in attitude so despite our position in financial services and banking, we are ultimately a tech driven company.
In the UK, the IS department is operating as a software development house within a bank. We are working with modern tech stacks, full SCRUM methodology and implemented many transformations in recent years beginning with the agile changes, the way we test, our resourcing, cloud hosting, and also automation, where we made a rapid 12-week rollout of RPA in 2020.
This is creating an exciting fast paced environment where we really are on our way to achieve the company mission.
What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
Of the 40+ projects and initiatives, we pushed our new branding across all systems within 4 months of the project starting. As part of this we have launched a newer Self-service Customer Portal with modern tech stack, great functionality, which will allow more innovative features for our customers over the next year.
One thing I can say is that I am very proud of the IS team that we have built and how they collaborate seamlessly with our wider business team colleagues. They are a talented bunch with a track record of success having delivered 90+% of projects and initiatives to schedule for the last three years.
What are you working on this year?
We continue to drive our time to market aspirations and will move more towards a DevOps model, complimenting the gains made with agile.
We're also working to constantly expand our automation, whether that be across the testing suite or RPA to bring business efficiency gains; and we still plan to launch 10 more projects across multiple work streams this year.
Another area of interest is the global AI Tribe, where we have four use cases of shared interest to multiple countries. We plan to scale these as proof of concepts, which will then allow us to plan wider adoption in 2023.
Why are events like the UK IT Industry Awards important to the IT industry?
It is just such an exciting time to be working in IT with all of the emerging technologies and methods. IT is also clearly one of the most diverse industries. It is always important to reflect on all of our victories and successes. These awards provide an opportunity to celebrate not just the winners and the finalists, but also all of the achievements that the companies entered into the awards have had over the last year.
