Barbados is now home to a global leader in information technology (IT) governance and software assurance, another sign of the country’s attractiveness to international investors.
While some companies opted to hunker down and weather the COVID-19 storm, CompliancePath decided to “just go for it,” said Stephen Ferrell, managing director, Americas and Asia.
CompliancePath was founded in 2008 and has continued to develop its global presence in the IT governance and life science markets, opening the European head office in 2011. Ten years later, the nearshore Computer Validation & Software Quality Assurance Test Centre in Glasgow, Scotland followed.
In 2021 it is Barbados’ turn, with the group opening the second of its two testing centres here.
Ferrell explained that CompliancePath was essentially a regulatory compliance consultancy which started out with a focus on life sciences.
Compliance requirements
“We work with both regulated companies, pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, medical device, health care as well, and also software companies who are selling into that market. What we do is help them understand the compliance requirements that they have, either as a manufacturer or as a service provider into that space, and we come up with strategies for them to achieve that,” he shared.
“In the last five or six years we have taken a lot of the knowledge that we have gained there and we have branched out into IT governance. This lets us operate in really any industry where there is a desire to certify IT security standards.”
Ferrell observed that in the last 15 to 20 years a lot of enterprise global IT services moved to the Asian market, but their choice was Barbados. This will help CompliancePath to better serve its customers in the United States and Canada and to “grow our company and provide value”.
Ferrell, who is a recognised expert in regulatory compliance in the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech space, said CompliancePath’s decision to invest in Barbados during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has turned out to be the right decision.
“I think the only impact it’s had is probably just the length of time. I think if we had been able to come down to the island in normal times we probably could have made things go a bit faster on our side, but you know what, that’s okay, that’s a very small price to pay,” he reasoned.
CompliancePath’s journey here has been facilitated by Invest Barbados, with senior business development officer Leslie Gittens, who is based at the economic development agency’s New York City office, providing introductions, information, guidance and facilitation.
Ferrell said Barbados’ tax benefits were not a major drawing card for CompliancePath, but University of the West Indies Computer Science graduates certainly are.
“I’ll be honest – I still don’t completely and fully understand the tax benefits of Barbados, I understand there are some, but that’s never been a factor for us, it was always about growing a team. And one of the things that drew us to Barbados was the University of the West Indies, particularly the computer science programme that’s available,” he said.
“Leslie had connected us to the Dean and some of the other folks related to the computer science programme, we had some great conversations and they connected us with a number of job seekers. We have been blown away, frankly, by the quality of the candidates that we have interviewed.
“Because of what we do you have to be extremely detail-oriented; sometimes what we are working on could impact patients and product quality and the last thing we want to do is be telling a customer that some system is suitable when it isn’t.”
This means that CompliancePath has “have quite a rigorous hiring process”.
“After we confirm through the usual interview that we think they are a good choice, if they are still interested in pursuing a position, we put them through an analytical test and I looked at the results of three folks that we went through this with and one of them got a hundred per cent which we had never seen before and there was another who wasn’t far off that,” he stated.
Exciting time
“And I think that speaks to the quality of the educational programmes in Barbados and the skill sets are definitely there. The one individual we have already made an offer to I can already tell he is going to be very successful, even at his young age; the professionalism, the way he conducts himself, it just validates the choice that we made. So it’s an exciting time for us to see that team hopefully very shortly be stood up and working.”
Ferrell said associated company Promedim, which offers a Cloud-enabled application that supports clinical studies, field service, medical telepresence, contactless site audits, and General Data Protection Regulation support use cases, was also likely to have a presence in Barbados in the future. (SC)
