As the VM Group looks to further charge up operations and feverishly plots new growth post-restructure, the company through its non-financial arm, VM Innovations Limited, is also working to deliver on a number of new fintech solutions for customers.

At a recent Jamaica Observer Business Forum, CEO of VM Innovations Maurice Barnes said that a pipeline of new products is being developed and made ready for roll-out to market in short order.

“We’ve been actively looking at joining other deposit-taking institutions (DTIs) in bringing more payment solutions, including a digital wallet to market — some work is still being done on this, but we continue to create new products as we seek to offer our members more options and not have them left behind. This, while we continue to look at the unbanked and under-banked population and develop new solutions to touch that market and increase our membership, especially now when we push forward with our million member march,” Barnes said.

He said that in keeping with the group’s strategic objective to significantly advance its portfolio of digital offerings, the build-out of a new mortgage system, which seeks to bring together a type of one-stop, end-to-end automation of the home purchasing and mortgage processing activities, is currently being prepared for launch within the next few months.

“Extensive work has been done and customers can look forward to us delivering this around the second quarter of the year, as we work to improve that experience to bring together all mortgage players under one single platform,” he told journalists.

The CEO further said that with artificial intelligence (AI) and the introduction of software technology such as Chat GTP dominating discussions globally, VM was not to be left out, as work in this area picks up focus and gains momentum.

“We have been working and experimenting with AI and we will also be bringing an AI-driven product to the market soon, maybe within another month or so, but we are definitely in that space as we continue to look at how AI will support the automated efforts and digital transformation of the group,” he stated.

“VM Innovations is now working closely with all business lines within the group to bring the sort of capabilities to some of our business processes that will enhance and increase efficiencies,” he added.

The group’s digital transformation strategy, which CEO Courtney Campbell said was activated from as far back as 2018, has since then seen the 145-year-old establishment being able to improve and deliver on a number of products and services bolstered by the expansion of new and updated online channels, operating systems, mobile banking, an upgraded fleet of ABMs and the introduction of credit cards.

The significant investments in software alone, which Campbell said were valued at over $3 billion, assisted the group to ramp up its digital strategy and was also instrumental in helping it to accelerate revenue growth across a five-year period in which it near doubling out-turns — moving from $6.5 billion in 2017 to total approximately $12.8 billion in 2022.

“In 2018 when we started our digital journey just over 20 per cent of our services were available online and currently that is almost at 80 per cent as these transactions increase right across the group. Our digital transformation strategy, though not finished, has been a tremendous success and we look forward to more opportunities,” Campbell said during the forum.

VM Innovations, as a full service IT consulting innovative company post-restructure, said it is now able to offer services to the general public in the areas of innovation management, ideation workshops and software development which prior to the December 2022 approval for restructure, it wasn’t able to do.

“The restructure has offered us much room for growth with the world becoming our oyster. We are now in a position where we can do much more as the non-financial holding company and being separated from the financial holding company,” Barnes said.

Having gone through a number of improvements following a successful roll-out in June 2022, the Propman, property and community management tool, which pioneered as the first product for VM Innovations and adopted by a large St Catherine-based housing development, is now being made ready to onboard a number of other communities islandwide.

The fintech’s CEO in an update said the platform is also currently being retrofitted with enhanced security features to offer additional alerts, visitor management and logging services to its subscribed communities.

“We have a robust pipeline and is now working to make additional improvements so that we can meet the market where it is,” Barnes said, citing plans for the future from which the company wants to realise increased integration with Internet of things devices, security cameras and gate openers, in order to have a more seamless delivery of the technology.