Travelling on a smart road to success

​But – flying high as it is – it is already working hard to bring in the next generation of smart pass-technology for travellers, office workers and the like.

Currently more than 7m public transport passengers travel about Britain with enhanced efficiency and security thanks to passes designed and supplied by the Hull-based specialist.

The market leading firm turned over more than £8m last year supplying smartcards, mainly through local authorities.

It is also now a nominee for the Ernst & Young-sponsored Business of the Year Award in the Mail's business awards.

“The next stage is for smartcards to be superseded by signals from mobile phones and similar personal electronic devices,” he said.

“But the biggest innovation here will be if we can succeed in gaining enough co-operation to enable such technology to be adopted on a widespread basis, creating a truly joined-up national system.

“Accomplishing that will be a huge task, and the main stumbling block is likely to be the too-narrow thinking and focus which has prevented many smartcard schemes with laudable objectives from becoming widely available in the past."

But to become a market leader and technology implementer, the company has already had to overcome 'narrow thinking' of a different kind.

Told three years ago that its then £2.75m turnover was too small for it to take on a £10 million-plus Government contract for pensioners' bus passes, it struck an imaginative deal with two multi-nationals, companies which incorporated its services in their bids.

Then, when the company needed to invest £1m in increasing production capacity four-fold to 750,000 cards a week, it was unable to secure funding from its then bankers.

Facing extremely tight deadlines, it came to an innovative deal with its suppliers and leased and fitted-out extra production space.

That paid off though, and new bankers Bank of Scotland, came up with financing and, despite a significant last minute technical delay, ESP – working round the clock – met its deadline by producing four million cards in just seven weeks.