Following on from the expansion of its senior leadership team around a year ago, which included the appointment of Matthew Williams, its first chief executive, the latest phase saw the Rayleigh-based business focus on strengthening its team to further improve customer service, project delivery, and quality assurance at group level and in its key payment and retail sectors.

Four new senior managers have joined the business in recent months. Roben Leonard comes from UL as head of technical development to lead innovation and technical development for new EMV card projects, while Ian Greenslade has been appointed as head of business improvement to lead the development of processes and data projects to improve customer information, reduce lead times and increase service levels.

Sue Worth has joined as head of customer services and Darren Garfield has been appointed head of production to focus on the roll out of ‘lean’ across the business, which will improve the agility and efficiency of manufacturing processes to deliver “world class” service and quality to customers.

Additionally, several appointments have been made to strengthen the company’s commercial division.

Sales manager Andy Morrison has joined to help grow sales to financial customers, product manager Steven Tait has been taken on to ensure quality and agility for the launch of new card programmes and Faraz Amjad will lead the development of the group’s growing customer base in the Middle East and Africa.

Jamie Challis has joined as director of retail sales, to support customers in the development and launch of new gift and loyalty programmes, and he will be supported by new customer account manager Sarah Robinson.

“My main focus since I’ve been here has been to get everyone in the company fully engaged and contributing to the pursuit of the vision and strategy that we’ve set up for the business. We’ve got some strong competition in the marketplace, so we need to set the bar high,” said Williams.

“Our goal is to be world class in everything we do – across our products, services and in our partnerships with customers. To achieve this, it was important to further expand and strengthen the team.

“These appointments are the next phase of the organisation’s development to take the business to the next level and ensure we deliver on our core values of integrity, quality and responsiveness.”

Paul Underwood, who served as managing director of the company for 20 years, has decided to step down from his operational duties and into a non-executive role. There will be no replacement managing director.

“Paul is as committed and engaged with the business as ever and keeps very involved in terms of strategy,” said Williams, who added the company rebranded as its previous branding was “a bit unclear and had got a bit tired”.

“We wanted to modernise the brand, and while card production is our core business, we provide a lot of other services for customers linked to the cards, such as data and technology, and we have a lot of new products in the pipeline at the moment.

“We removed ‘card’ from the name because it didn’t really communicate the extent of what we deliver for our customers.”

Thames Technology, which was founded in 1994, has 200 staff and a turnover of around £16m.

In October the firm installed two MBO T460 compact buckle-folding machines, as part of a push to increase its automation.

Earlier in 2017 it increased its personalisation capacity by 60% after investing in a raft of new kit including two Atlantic Zeiser Persomaster machines, three Entrust Datacard MX6100 card issuance systems and an AutoFeeds Cartan card system encapsulation machine.

The business has also recently signed an exclusive agreement that enables it to offer a ‘greener’ alternative to PVC cards for its customers.