Callcredit aims for closer university relations

Mike Gordon, the CEO of Leeds-based Callcredit, also made an impassioned plea for extra investment in the region’s road, rail and airport network to make it easier to attract talented people to Yorkshire.

Mr Gordon, who has spent most of his career in the US, said he wanted to see more investment in infrastructure in the North: “It’s very simple, coming from the US, I like bigger roadways. More lanes going back and forth on the M62...

“If you connect the North, we have offices over the Pennines in Warrington and Stockport. That’s 35 miles – it should take 35 minutes to get there. Just working that through, actually builds a stronger infrastructure. I would like to see the airport improve.

“I know this is not in Yorkshire, but I’ve always wanted that third runway at Heathrow... That will help us internationally. I know that you can fly through Amsterdam, I’d rather fly through London. There’s a draw from having international people coming through London.”

Founded in 2000, Callcredit employs around 1,000 people across Leeds, Kent, Bath, London, and Warrington, and it also has offices in Japan, China, Dubai and Lithuania and agents working across international markets. In 2014 it was acquired by the private equity business, GTCR.

Callcredit specialises in database marketing services, credit referencing and software analytics and fraud prevention. Callcredit is the UK’s second largest credit reference agency and it helps businesses manage credit risk. Callcredit also helps individuals to check their credit report and credit score and protect against identity theft.

Mr Gordon, who was previously executive vice president for sales, services and marketing at Fair Isaac Corp (FIC0), said he expected to see particularly strong growth in services that helped to protect clients against fraud.

He told The Yorkshire Post: “We believe identity fraud... will become a huge issue for people, especially as you get more into the digital spaces. Fraud keeps changing.”

He added: “I would like to make a couple more (acquisitions) this year. We have a couple in the pipeline.”

The group saw its revenues increase to £150m for the year ended December 31, 2014, up from £126m the year before.

Earlier this year, Callcredit launched a graduate scheme for careers in software engineering. Mr Gordon said he was keen to work with universities to ensure more graduates remained in Yorkshire.

He said: “We’ve started working with the local universities to build programmes... that say, ‘We need developers, we need people who can do analytics.’ There’s a lot of things we need around data. We are the original big data company.

“So we’re working with them to say, ‘These are the skills that we’re looking for’. But at the same point we will train them. We will work on programmes within the universities.

“Our hope would be that we can take somewhere between 25 and 30 people every year, going forward, because we’ve always been a big hirer of talent; right from university.”

INTERNATIONAL markets offer prospects for growth at Callcredit, according to Mr Gordon.

He added: “Where we’ve really got to get to, is to take the innovation from our Callcredit offering and offer those worldwide. So (that includes) Commonwealth countries, banking systems, insurance systems very close to Britain and western Europe. Positive data is coming to those markets...In Britain you have positive and negative data that determines what your credit score is.

“In other countries it is just negative data. Negative data only gives you five per cent of what that person is doing. It’s really the positive data and what they do in their transaction files which is really excellent data.”