A funding of €161,000 provided through the National Programme for Research and Innovation run by the Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) made it possible for Scope Solutions, a Maltese company, to develop a new, innovative product called DataDear, in collaboration with the University of Malta.

During a visit at the offices of Scope Solutions, Minister for Research, Innovation and the Co-ordination of Post Covid-19 Strategy Owen Bonnici explained that this is another concrete example of a success story which has as its base funding by means of research programmes and a synergy between local companies and the University of Malta, leading towards the creation of a new product or service which is, in turn, commercialised locally and abroad. DataDear provides its services to around 10,000 clients from 30 different countries and this puts Malta in a strategic position with regards to this particular industry.

In the last decade, the industrial world experienced an important transformation, the change from the use of traditional software systems to that which is based on the Cloud, often referred to software as a service or SaaS. While the situation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the process for many business organizations, Scope had been working on this change since 2013.

Intensive research carried out by the company put it in a position that enabled it to provide guidance and aid to other Maltese companies, with regards to the choice and implementation of Cloud solutions according to the requirements of their specific industrial area.

After conducting intensive research, Scope was able to identify an important opportunity in the financial sector, so they decided to invest €1,000,000 in further research to work on the possibility of applying this new technology to facilitate the work of professionals in the financial and technological sectors, ultimately helping them strengthen their enterprise even further.

This innovative system manages to synchronize between data on the Cloud and data that is being used in a more traditional manner to facilitate the transfer of such data in a controlled environment. Thanks to this software, Maltese accountants, for instance, will be able to process VAT tax in a matter of minutes, whereas before, this process would take them hours of work.

Brian Ferris, one of the partners of Scope, said that thanks to Scope’s collaboration with professionals, particularly ones from the financial sector, an opportunity was identified and developed through DataDear in the form of an SaaS product that provides integration and synergy of data.