Member Article

North East software could save financial sector millions

Two North East entrepreneurs have received a cash boost to help them develop a new software product that could save financial services companies hundreds of millions per year. South Shields-based software firm Hedgehog Lab, set up by Sarat Pediredla and Mark Forster in May last year, has received £60,000 from the NStar Proof of Concept fund.

Their idea - called Project Mohave - is to build a software platform for the financial services sector that will enable banks, mortgage lenders and other lending organisations to create web applications - such as online banking facilities - in a third of the time it usually takes.

Mark Forster, director of technology and products at Hedgehog Lab, said: “Typically, banks and other financial organisations will have 20-50 development specialists working on a project, such as an online credit card application form, for four to six months in order to complete it, at a cost of between five to ten million pounds. With our solution, the same project would take six people, with little or no expertise, one month to complete, at a cost of just one million.”

Sarat Pediredla, Managing Director at Hedgehog, says it will also aid the company’s growth: “The funding from NStar is a significant boost to our innovation strategy and will help us go forward in becoming a leading global software products supplier based right here in the North East. The investment has helped our start-up to grow to four people and will assist in our plans to grow to a ten-strong team by the end of 2008.”

Hedgehog Lab is already in discussions with a number of organisations in the financial services sector, and believe the product could eventually be rolled out to the wider enterprise market.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .