VIP Apps Consulting expands its AI Centre of Excellence

VIP Apps Consulting has expanded its AI Centre of Excellence. The Slough-based consultancy said the enhanced practice combines more than two decades of experience in financial services with expertise across leading technology platforms, including Salesforce, Oracle and Microsoft, alongside partnerships with Anthropic, Google Cloud, AWS and OpenAI.

The expansion is designed to support organisations across lending, asset finance and leasing in deploying AI to increase revenue, improve customer engagement and optimise business processes, rather than focusing solely on cost reduction.

At the heart of the Centre of Excellence is VIP Apps Consulting’s proprietary AMOBI process optimisation framework, which analyses and improves business processes before selecting the most appropriate technology solution.

Daypesh Patel, Managing Director of VIP Apps Consulting, said:

“AMOBI comes before everything else. Before we look at platforms, before we make any technology recommendation, we go into the business and unravel what is actually happening in the process. We fix it, we optimise it, and then we make the technology decision. That sequence is what delivers implementations that genuinely change how a business operates.”

The AI Centre of Excellence supports financial institutions across the full lending lifecycle, from proposition design and origination through to payments, combining industry expertise with AI-enabled technologies such as Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Agentforce and Data Cloud, Oracle’s financial services platforms and Microsoft Dynamics and Power Platform.

According to VIP Apps Consulting, AI delivers its greatest value when it is used to drive growth through faster and more intelligent lending decisions, stronger broker and customer relationships, expanded market opportunities and agentic AI capabilities that enable teams to operate more effectively at scale.

Patel added: “Financial services organisations have spent years asking what AI can save them. The leaders we work with are now asking what AI can build for them. That is a different question entirely and it calls for a different approach. Our AI Centre of Excellence exists to answer it.”

The expansion comes as artificial intelligence moves further up the UK policy agenda following the appointment of Kanishka Narayan as AI Minister under Prime Minister Andy Burnham, reflecting the Government’s ambition to position AI as a key driver of economic growth and innovation.

VIP Apps Consulting said the move also reinforces Slough’s growing status as a centre for AI infrastructure, talent and digital investment. The consultancy has been based in the town since 2014 and has grown alongside its thriving technology community.

Burnham has highlighted Slough as a location where talent, infrastructure and investment are converging to support the UK’s digital ambitions, while Tan Dhesi, MP for Slough, has pointed to the Slough Trading Estate’s long history of reinvention and its skilled local workforce as key strengths underpinning the UK’s wider AI and digital economy strategy.

Patel said: “What Kanishka Narayan and Tan Dhesi have described is exactly the environment we have been operating in and building from for over a decade. Slough has the infrastructure, the talent and the connectivity that serious AI work requires.

“This expansion of the AI Centre of Excellence is our contribution to making that potential real for financial services organisations across the UK and globally.”