VIP Apps Consulting team discussing AI strategy for financial services in their Slough office
|

AI in Financial Services: VIP Apps Consulting Expands Its AI Centre of Excellence as UK Government Puts AI at the Cabinet Table

ByNilesh Chavda

Slough-based consultancy combines two decades of financial services expertise with alliances across Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, Anthropic, Google Cloud, AWS and OpenAI to help lenders and asset finance businesses turn AI into revenue growth.

AI in financial services is moving from a cost-saving experiment to a genuine growth strategy — and VIP Apps Consulting is doubling down on that shift. The Slough-based consultancy has announced the expansion of its AI Centre of Excellence, a dedicated practice built to help lenders, brokers and asset finance businesses use artificial intelligence to grow revenue, strengthen customer relationships and build lasting competitive advantage.

Two Foundations: Platform Expertise and Financial Services Domain Knowledge

The AI Centre of Excellence rests on two pillars.

The first is deep AI platform and technology expertise. VIP Apps Consulting’s certified specialists bring hands-on, global delivery experience across Salesforce, Oracle and Microsoft, alongside their specialist finance, data and AI agent products — backed by strategic alliances with Anthropic, Google Cloud, AWS and OpenAI.

The second is domain expertise in lending, asset finance and leasing, spanning the full workflow lifecycle from proposition through to payments, refined over two decades of global delivery experience.

AMOBI: Process First, Technology Second

Every engagement is underpinned by VIP Apps Consulting’s proprietary methodology, AMOBI. Rather than leading with a technology recommendation, AMOBI starts by unravelling what’s actually happening inside a client’s processes, fixing and optimising them, and only then selecting the right technology to deploy.

“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.” — Daypesh Patel, Managing Director, VIP Apps Consulting

It’s this sequencing — process before platform — that VIP Apps Consulting credits for implementations that show up in revenue and growth figures, rather than simply ticking off a project completion report.

From Cost Reduction to Revenue Growth

For years, financial services organisations have approached AI primarily as a way to cut costs. VIP Apps Consulting’s AI Centre of Excellence is built around a different premise: AI delivers its greatest value when it’s focused on growth.

For lenders and asset finance businesses, that translates into:

  • Faster, smarter originations that convert more opportunities
  • Deeper broker and customer relationships that drive repeat business
  • Intelligent decisioning that opens new markets and product lines
  • Agentic AI that lets teams scale their impact without scaling headcount

The Centre brings together the platforms already embedded in financial services operations — Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, Agentforce and Data Cloud 360, Oracle’s financial services and banking products, and Microsoft Dynamics and Power Platform — alongside alliances with Anthropic, Google Cloud, AWS and OpenAI to keep clients at the front edge of AI capability as the market evolves.

“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.” — Daypesh Patel, Managing Director, VIP Apps Consulting

Slough: A Hub for the UK’s AI Ambitions

The expansion lands at a pivotal moment for UK AI policy. Prime Minister Andy Burnham recently elevated the AI brief to Cabinet level, appointing Kanishka Narayan as the UK’s first Cabinet-level AI minister — a move that signals the government’s commitment to AI as a central pillar of Britain’s economic strategy, with a mandate to drive adoption across industry and public services.

Slough MP Tan Dhesi has echoed that ambition, pointing to the Slough Trading Estate’s long history of reinvention and its skilled local workforce as assets the UK’s wider AI and digital economy strategy can be built on. VIP Apps Consulting, based in Slough since 2014, sees the AI Centre of Excellence as a direct investment in that vision.

“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.” — Daypesh Patel, Managing Director, VIP Apps Consulting

Why This Matters for Lenders and Asset Finance Businesses

As UK government policy pushes AI adoption further up the national agenda, financial services organisations face growing pressure to move beyond pilot projects and into AI strategies that genuinely move the needle on revenue. VIP Apps Consulting’s AI Centre of Excellence positions the firm to support that shift — combining process optimisation, multi-platform technology expertise and sector-specific knowledge of lending and asset finance.