A bespoke solution from initial concept to high grow scale which meant predicted visa transaction growth by 3000%.

Nomadic is   a subsidiary of Fragomen, the largest immigration law firm globally, operating across 170 countries with 55office locations and over 4300 staff.

It is a tech company providing corporate traveller solutions to ensure compliance, while leading the way in travel document procurement.

As the sole technical partner, Intellicore developed and delivered an end-to-end business software solution for Nomadic’s global travel customers.

A flexible product to accommodate scale and delivering quick results for its user, the system removes the complexity of managing multiple considerations for both employees and employers when travelling to ensure compliance and avoid hold-ups and fines. The product has been delivered from initial concept, through MVP, two due diligence exercises and into high-growth scale where the number of visa transactions is expected to grow by 3000% in 2022-2023 as multiple blue-chip clients are onboarded.

Prior to Nomadic acquiring,Aberdeen-based firm, ‘The Visa Team’, Intellicore developed and delivered a simple website login system that would provide limited functionality to show the progress of visa applications to Nomadic’s customers.  Post-acquisition, Intellicore was retained to tackle a larger, more complex challenge which was to transition Nomadic to a technology company with a minimal viable product and later a production system.

Nomadic’s customers required a system which would:

• Allow them to detail where they were travelling from and to.
• Enable them to tag on additional legs of a journey due to leisure travel or tying in multiple work trips.
• Give them quick access to what requirements there would be on them for visa applications determined by owned passports, citizenships, addresses, working position etc.

Nomadic needed customised software which would:

• Permit its staff to manage the matrix of data simply.
• Be scalable for further data requirements and client use.
• Remain maintainable at such a large size.
• Offer the standard functionality expected from an operational system such as dashboards, reporting, emailing, SMS without having to recreate these standard capabilities.

Nomadic needed a partner that would:

• Take ownership of designing, architecting, and delivering the product to a high standard.
• Assign the IP back to Nomadic for all related works.
• Deliver a product to ISO 9001 and 27001 standards.
• Work closely with the team to develop best practices in feature releases by utilising a set of quality gates which:
• ~Guarantee the consistency in which the application is developed
• ~Deliver the technical solution with documentation with every release
• ~Ensure feature releases undergo manual, unit and regression testing
• Scale its team at pace to keep up with the needs of the business.
• Be driven by continuous improvement

The platform we developed creates profiles for each traveller who uses the portal, collating data and documents required in the visa application process. When a traveller is sent on multiple trips to various countries, the platform provides travel readiness assessments based on the data it already knows about the traveller including their citizenship, residency, employment, and travel history.

Intellicore developed a recipe-based approach, which allows a trip to be built up with each new ‘ingredient’ of the itinerary, assessing fork nock-on effects at every step. This could include requiring new or different visas and documentation, as well as the effects on tax liabilities for either the traveller or their employer.

The system is built on top of Microsoft Dynamics 365, providing enterprise level data security, reliability, and interoperability. Nomadic staff use Dynamic CRM interfaces for managing cases, while Intellicore has developed an Angular-based client facing front-end for client employers and their travelling employees.

Once the system could handle the process of managing travel across the various countries, the focus of development began to shift towards automating the traditionally high manual, low margin process of completing travel adjacent tasks. While this has at times been possible through APIs, often it has required using a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tool. The RPAhas allowed the portal to automate traditionally manual processes, such as completion of pre-travel entrance forms and downloading of documents, and store them for the traveller in a mobile application. The platform also covers other similar workflows for managing international works, such as performing right to work checks and even student visa services.

As the concept for the system has evolved, Intellicore has becomeNomadic’s partner in architecting features required immediately, whilst also planning for future growth of both usage and functionality. The system moved from prototype/MVP to an in-production solution for many of Nomadic’s clients, who are amongst the largest brands in the world, and with this progression came a shift in what Nomadic required of a technology partner.

While delivering great software remained a core deliverable, Intellicore also had to prove its agility by working as a technical partner for Nomadic through multiple acquisitions, certification audits, and blue-chip client presentations. Throughout Intellicore’s engagement, we have continually been evaluating and re-evaluating how our portfolio of services performs for Nomadic.  Where there have been faults, Intellicore has been quick to shift strategies and recruit talent to cover additional capabilities. We even developed an end-to-end quality assurance department to support the needs of a 24/7 mission critical application being used around the globe. This has involved deploying both automated system monitoring and regression testing, as well as manual new feature, exploratory, and daily smoke check testing ensuring stability, while ever growing the system scale and features.