MVI Technologies wins first E50 Award by staying reliable and adaptable

Don't panic - when a problem appears complex, break it down into simpler components and deal with each. Stitch them all together again and you are likely to find the solution.

It is an important lesson Mr Foo Say Juan, CEO of MVI Technologies (S) Pte Ltd, picked up from his company's endeavours to tap into innovative practices that will keep it on top of clients' needs in our increasingly digitised economy.

MVI Technologies develops and implements financial and payment software solutions for clients in the banking and payment service sectors, such as NETS and AXS in Singapore and Global Blue in other parts of the world.

"Our software is expected to be of highest quality without error, remain resilient to adverse external conditions such as hardware failure, and continue to perform well even under extreme pressure," says Mr Foo.

"By ensuring our software is reliable, our clients can provide uninterrupted services non-stop. So we pride ourselves in meeting all these objectives and sometimes even surpassing their expectations."

A new milestone

MVI Technologies, which lands its first E50 award this year, was set up in 1991 by Mr Foo.

"We provide mission critical software solutions to large companies in the Financial Services Industry (FSI). Hence it is crucial that we demonstrate to clients we are well-run and profitable with a proven track record. And winning an E50 award affirms our ability to deliver and that we are here for the long haul," he says.

It is a testament to how MVI Technologies have held its own in an increasingly digitised global economy.

"Over the years demands have mounted on systems to adapt quickly to changing requirements to enable companies to become more competitive. MVI has transformed itself from supporting legacy channels to additionally support new channels, service types and platforms, among others," he explains.

"Our advantage lies in having productivity tools and processing engines which are developed in-house and enable us to develop new software or customise existing onesmuch more quickly than our competitors."

At the forefront of technology

In 2003, MVI Technologies became the first company in the world to use Process Flow Orchestrating and Data/Message Mapping GUI Tools to develop a mission critical Multi-Channel Financial and Payment Switching Software product which achieves sub-second response time even under extreme load.

It also helps that Mr Foo and his team understand it is important to keep up and evolve with new technologies. This ensures their products stay relevant to the times. They have continued to refine their GUI Tools so they are now more user-friendly and versatile, as well as to enhance their processing engines to improve performance.

"Over the last three months,we did demos for two chief technical officers from overseas and explained how our software was developed. They were so amazed and asked if we have patented the product!They weren't aware at all theidea was conceived 15 years ago."

Taking on newer approaches

Accolades such as the E50 award often involve having to overcome challenges.

In most mission critical systems, the primary focus is to address technical challenges of scalability, performance, availability, manageability and integrity, says Mr Foo.

"With today's state-of-the-art technologies, it will be easy to fulfil these expectations if request and response processing are synchronous in nature where it is completed within the same flow" he adds.

"But the process becomes more complex for asynchronous scenarios, whererequests and responses are completed in different flows.And that is often the case for financial and payment switching. Thesedifficulties can lead developers to focus on addressing technical challenges, and sacrifice agility."

Instead of settling for one or the other, MVI Technologies found ways to mitigate these two polarities by using GUI tools andprocessing engines, and designing the system toboth satisfy the technical requirements of mission critical systems and adapt quickly to changing needs.

MVI plans to continue investing in research and development to enable its products to utilise artificial intelligence, blockchain, big data, tokenisation and others. While they have received positive feedback, he knows that propelling the company further requires stronger support.

Besides seeking out experts to collaborate to offer its software as cloud services on top of its existing product licensing, the company is also looking to grow its headcount over the next two years to capture other business opportunities.

As he puts it: "We have about 45 staff, which is considered a very small team compared to the Big Boys.We are in talks with a large payment company overseas, which has expressed interest to become our re-seller in the region and an investor. We want to be able to scaleup our operations substantially by then with more staff."

That's why he advises other start-ups to "take care of your people and they will take care of your business...It makes all the difference to have them going through the fire with you".

A business must also stay adaptable, he points out. "If a business model doesn't work now, put it aside and focus on what will. You need to stay alive in order to continue to fight."