Later this morning we’ll be attending the inaugural Ireland Day at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Ireland Day will look to communicate the Ireland Inc brand and showcase our best and brightest to some of the most influential business leaders and corporations in the US. We also wanted to take this fantastic opportunity to announce the latest addition to the Lough Shore Investments portfolio. This latest investment sees us partner with one of Northern Ireland’s leading software firms, Geopii. If Ireland Day is an opportunity to showcase some of Northern Ireland’s leading export orientated businesses, then there can be no doubt, Geopii is just that.
Geopii is a Coleraine-based software firm offering a solution designed to assist with the management, assessment, evaluation and viability of land portfolios. In particular, Geopii focuses on land and property in distressed market conditions. Most interestingly, Geopii has developed patented technology that is set to transform one of the murkiest areas of global finance, namely the valuation of large property portfolios.
Identifying early stage companies with the potential to become PLCs is at the very core of the Lough Shore Investments model. That said we haven’t forgotten our roots in the development of leading edge financial technology. In recent years, as the ‘credit crunch’ took hold we’ve focused on identifying technologies that could fill the vacuum in the areas of large-scale property valuation and risk management, left so exposed by the global crash. The inference of course is that institutions at all levels in the global financial system would be clambering to build out infrastructure capable of ensuring that the levels of exposure and mispricing seen over the past decade would never happen again.
With such a focus in mind, we couldn’t believe our luck when we first came across the folks at Geopii (then CDC-NI). I was first introduced to Geopii Managing Director Ashley Moore by a contact in a leading, but now defunct, investment bank in late 2007. The bank was in the final stages of a deal to acquire Geopii, and their patented property valuation technology, when forced to file for bankruptcy, thus scuppering any chance of a deal. Such obvious global interest in the potential of Geopii’s technology immediately caught our eye.
Geopii began life ten years ago as a spin out from the Geography department in the University of Ulster in Coleraine (UU), Northern Ireland. The company’s initial focus was on GIS consulting, but it quickly got into the large scale property valuation business for rate setting and taxation. They had the foresight not only to build a software platform for valuing property portfolios (Spatialest), but also to patent key aspects of the process. Spatialest has been used by government bodies at the city, state and national level all over the world valuing land parcels totalling tens of millions of properties, worth tens of billions of dollars.
For the last few years, the Spatialest automated valuation technology has underpinned the platform used by Tyler Technologies Plc, one of the largest public companies in the local government space in the North America.
The decision to refocus the company on the financial sector was made at the start of 2010. The first product in the Geopii Property Analytics suite was released to beta partners in August 2010 and is now in production. The first release is a land bank management platform targeting retail banking in the UK and Ireland. Additionally, Geopii will be looking to the US market later this year.
Now back to Ireland Day. Later this morning, we will join the first panel of the day to discuss the topic ‘Reinventing Ireland Inc.’. The panel, including the likes of Denis O’Brien, Buddy Darby and Gary McGann of the Smurfit Kappa group, will no doubt discuss the very recent economic difficulties faced right across the island of Ireland. I have no doubt however, that we will quickly put those difficulties to one side and focus on the many reasons to be hopeful.
Companies like Geopii provide a great reminder of the strength in-depth of leading edge engineering talent that has always been a core characteristic of the whole Island of Ireland, and Northern Ireland in particular. It is worth remembering that over a hundred years ago Marconi carried out the first live testing of radio between Ballycastle and Rathlin Island just a few miles from the UU campus (now home to Geopii) and that was just the start of this region’s contribution to the world. Innovation has always been deeply embedded in our culture and we expect companies like Geopii to continue this tradition.
Could the Geopii property portfolio technology have as profound an impact on how property loans are managed in the global financial system as Marconi’s radio had on communications? We certainly think so.