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US-based software specialist to expand English base - 07/04/2008
Florida-based StarCompliance Software has announced plans to expand its European headquarters in the Yorkshire and Humber region of northern England, just 18 months after it opened.
Since 2006, the company has invested $4 million in a software development centre at the Science Park on the University of York’s campus. It now plans to invest a further $1.5 million per year, as the base expands beyond its initial purpose as a product development centre and focuses more on sales, marketing and support.
The York site is enabling StarCompliance, a leading provider of compliance and regulatory software solutions to the global financial services industry, to tap into the lucrative UK and European markets. It is set to play a key role in enabling the company to achieve its aim of growing its global annual turnover to $20 million within the next three years.
Since it was established to oversee the development of new products for StarCompliance’s growing client-base, the York operation has expanded rapidly and now employs 10 people. These include three IT graduates, recruited as a result of the firm’s links with the city’s university.
Martin Mannion, chief executive of StarCompliance Software, explained: “We had links with York before setting up the IT centre there. We wanted to find the most highly skilled workforce and knew that there was a real talent pool in the region, due to the universities in York and Leeds.
“We’re well ahead of our plan setting out what we wanted to achieve in York. We’ve set up the site there and developed software that will be used by some of the largest and most successful financial service companies in the world. All this has been done without outsourcing to India, as many other companies in our sector have.
“The success of the York site has enabled the company as a whole to meet its financial targets and we have been profitable for the last three years.”
As well as the availability of skilled staff in the York area, StarCompliance has benefited from the costs of operating in Yorkshire and Humber being lower than many other areas and from the region’s impressive transport links.
Mr Mannion said: “As a global firm, we could have chosen to locate anywhere, but we found Yorkshire and Humber is so much cheaper than London, for example. It also has great rail and road links to client destinations, such as London and Edinburgh, and airports that are within easy reach.”
StarCompliance Software was launched in 1999 and has its headquarters in Miami, as well as an office in Rockville, Maryland, just outside Washington DC. The company's software helps clients to streamline, automate and optimise their processes and use of data, to address changing business and regulatory requirements.
The company is one of a growing number of US firms that have chosen to invest in Yorkshire and Humber during recent years. Statistics from Yorkshire Forward, the development agency responsible for attracting investment to the region, show that at least 170 US companies have put significant sums into the area during the last decade. This involvement has helped create or secure more than 37,500 jobs and has been worth more than $28 billion.
Tom Riordan, chief executive of Yorkshire Forward, said: “The main reason for the growing involvement of American companies in Yorkshire, including StarCompliance Software, is that commercial ventures here have proved very successful for them.
“The main reasons for this is that Yorkshire and Humber has a skilled workforce and one of the largest concentrations of top universities in Europe. It also offers a superior quality of life to many other UK locations, with world-class towns and cities, many of which boast substantial urban renaissance programmes, breathtaking countryside and house prices less than 70 per cent of the British average.”
