Published on 05 November 2009

CHP Consulting has recently released a new version of its flagship software ALFA. But this is only one half of a strategy that aims to provide existing customers with the newest technology available, as well as gaining new customers thanks to branch openings across Europe.

The launch of ALFA v5 last month follows two years of development and a £5 million (€5.5 million) investment. The outcome is what Andrew Denton, the company’s sales and marketing director, summarised as being a “very new and yet not very new product at the same time”.

ALFA’s previous version v4, in fact, has all the same functionality of v5, but this one is developed on a brand-new technology stack and has a web presentation on it, which Denton said further improves the software.

“We were very conscious that it was time to do a technology refresh of the product. What our team did was to come up with a way of migrating, not re-writing, the old code onto a new technology platform,” he said.

But the company is keen to highlight that v5 is not a new functional set, largely because the previous version was already a “mature” product, and also as ALFA has been around in the market for almost two decades. Current CHP customers with previous versions of ALFA will just need to do an upgrade for the new version.

“Starting from scratch with a new product would have meant having no clear upgrade path for our existing customers, confusing new customers and throwing away our heritage,” Denton said.

Denton said the key highlights of v5 are its new technology stack, the end-to-end presentation layer, the enhanced functionality with respect to its multilingual and multi-GAAP capabilities, its transportability and what he calls a “really sexy” interface.

More than anything else, however, according to Denton there is a “long-term” benefit to v5, which he summed up as the opportunity to do “stuff that could actually revolutionise the industry” with it.

One such thing, he said, are “intelligent” or “self-defining” scorecards. These, which CHP is also about to release, allow data mining using association pairs in a way that allows scorecards to “modify themselves”.

In practice, according to Denton, they would work as it already happens in other fields where data mining techniques are in use.

For instance, by extracting data relating to buyers’ habits, a US supermarket chain found that in a certain time frame, when nappies were bought, so was beer, because fathers leaving their offices would stop by and buy both.

The data mining picked this up, and the supermarket decided to put beer next to nappies, which resulted in sales of both products going up in that time frame.

CHP says now that something like that would become possible also with scorecards, and it hopes that most lessors, that already use them at the point of sale, will see the advantages of having scorecards that allow them to have constant – even daily or hourly – predictions and that could modify themselves, instead of scorecards that only are updated periodically.

He said that many existing and potential customers have reacted positively to v5. The new version is already being implemented for one customer, and three others have just committed to it.

But ALFA v5 is not the only news for CHP at present. Its new strategy includes a “global push”, with a particular focus on Europe. Indeed, while until now the company’s major deals have been mostly in the UK, American and Australian leasing markets, the company intends to focus more also elsewhere, particularly on its “doorstep” in Europe.

CHP Consulting’s strategy towards Europe had long been quite conservative, as the company had preferred to focus on the Australian and US markets because, despite their distance, they are Anglophile and have regulations and a market that is not too distant from the UK ones.

But in a move to market its products and particularly v5 also across Europe, in early 2010 CHP will open three new offices in Frankfurt, Paris and Stockholm to serve some of Europe’s major markets, as well as providing a mechanism support for a number of customers it recently won in the Nordics.

New markets like Spain and Italy on the one hand, and the CEE region on the other could follow suit.

CHP: Claims to have ‘never been busier’

Despite the financial crisis, London-headquartered software house CHP Consulting has had a busy time recently.

Apart from spending a large amount of energy in developing the new version of its software ALFA, it also signed a significant number of deals with leasing companies.

Andrew Denton, the company’s sales and marketing director, said that the company has “never been busier” and attributes its success to “a combination of luck and being good at what we do”.

The company was founded in 1990, and has delivered asset finance solutions for almost 20 years. It currently employs a team of over 150 permanent staff across offices in London, US and Australia.

According to Denton, who joined the company in 1995, the big change for CHP happened around 2000.

“We didn’t really start to realise what we were capable of until 2000. Then in 2000, things started to accelerate [ALFA was implemented at UK’s largest lessor Lombard], and we have been on this path ever since.”

The company’s staff has an average age of under 30, but according to Denton the majority of its employees “have already spent 10 years in the industry, working at different places and having different experiences”.

He added: “These guys really know their stuff.”

Following the release of ALFA v5, the company plans to make a number of promotions in its computer science team, for being able to combine the ALFA platform with all the functionality on the most up-to-date technology set available.

The above was printed in Leasing Life issue 194 November 2009 and published for the web 29 October 2009.
Reproduced by permission of the publisher.