Shaftesbury Systems are developers of the ‘ebillz’ system, one of the UKs leading billing and customer care solutions for resellers in the telecommunications market. Chess will now be able to offer existing ebillz customers a portfolio of wholesale telecoms services.
Shaftesbury Systems Limited becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of Chess Limited with all its employees continuing to work from its existing premises in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire.
David Pollock, Chess Chief Executive, said “We are delighted to have acquired Shaftesbury Systems. It gives Chess a strategic growth opportunity by offering our award winning telecoms services to Shaftesbury’s customers, and also offering to our existing wholesale customers the ebillz billing solutions.”
Pollock acknowledges that this acquisition is outside of his normal sphere of previous purchases and says, “This is very strategic for Chess. With more than 200 resellers using their billing system the acquisition of Shaftesbury will enable Chess to rapidly grow our wholesale lines, calls, broadband and mobile wholesale business. We will be offering preferential billing terms to their reseller partners who purchase a wider range of products from us.
Systems Integrators are entering the fixed line markets and this, together with a never ending number of new start up network services companies, means that the market will increasingly need a company such as Chess to provide a complete range of network voice and data solutions that includes billing and WLR3 which is especially a challenge for smaller resellers.”
The previous owners Howard Chaplin and Philip Broder will be retained in a consultancy role while Stephen Dracup, Chess’ Business Development Director, has been appointed Managing Director of Shaftesbury Systems.
“We are thrilled to have sold our business to Chess” said Howard. “We’d been approached by a number of other communications providers to sell but they hadn’t been able to deliver as promised. Chess delivered both on time and money. Philip and I are excited by Chess’ growth plans and we will continue to support them in the future.”
Chess Director, Richard Btesh, commented “At the heart of every telecoms reseller is the billing system. Chess have acquired over 45 customer bases in the last 6 years, a number of which bill using Shaftesbury’s ebillz system. Without exception, the Shaftesbury customer experience has been highly commended and as a consequence this acquisition had immediate appeal.”