FourNet has acquired SVL Business Solutions, a Glasgow-headquartered contact centre and customer experience specialist, giving the Manchester-based group a combined workforce of more than 230 people. The deal adds specialist skills in interaction recording, analytics and workforce management, and expands FourNet’s capacity for customer experience projects in regulated industries.

SVL employs 41 people and has worked alongside FourNet for nearly a decade. The two companies serve overlapping sectors, including financial services, utilities and public safety, and share technology partners such as NiCE.

The structural driver is AI moving out of pilots and into everyday customer service, particularly in sectors facing close scrutiny over data handling, resilience and compliance. The enlarged group will help customers identify where AI could have the greatest effect, redesign customer journeys and processes, and implement systems on secure, governed infrastructure.

“Organisations are now moving AI out of pilots and into everyday customer service,” said Richard Pennington, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of FourNet. “They need help proving its value, redesigning the customer journeys and processes around it, and implementing it safely.”

SVL customers will continue to work with the same teams while gaining access to the wider FourNet organisation. “Joining FourNet protects those strengths while giving our customers a much larger team and a broader range of capabilities behind them,” said David Kindness, Chief Executive Officer of SVL Business Solutions.

FourNet was founded in 2005 and is Manchester-based. It now serves more than 450 customers with revenues of about £65 million, up from £38 million when Palatine acquired a majority stake in 2021, and the SVL deal is its fifth acquisition in six years.

The transaction also broadens FourNet’s customer base in financial services, which it has identified as a growth area. SVL’s work has expanded over the past five years from recording, analytics and workforce management into broader customer experience transformation and AI projects.

For the sector, the deal reflects specialist customer experience providers consolidating to build the scale needed to deploy AI safely in regulated industries.

Source: IT Brief / Private Equity Wire