Vistra builds AI digital backbone to unify services

Vistra is building an AI-powered digital backbone to bring payroll, tax, fund and entity-management services onto a single customer platform. Damian Leach, chief AI and digital officer, is leading the project.

The platform is being developed in-house to combine existing digital products and staffed services so clients can access them through one interface. The firm plans to integrate recent acquisitions, including multi-country payroll provider iiPay, with local payroll solutions. Vistra employs about 10,000 people across 65 locations.

Vistra will use AI from major cloud providers together with orchestration and automation tooling. The system will run on a tenanted architecture intended to keep each client’s data separate and secure.

Development will follow agile sprints. New capabilities will be released for internal testing every two weeks and moved to clients after approval. The company expects to start rolling the platform out to major market hubs by the end of the year. Leach described the platform as “a tremendous opportunity to make sure we are operating internationally with borderless, frictionless services.”

A primary objective is to address fragmented client data. Vistra reports many clients hold portfolios with information spread across silos and multiple sources, producing inconsistent answers to the same question. The platform will consolidate and clean data under management and add AI tools that let clients query datasets and run “what if” scenarios to explore outcomes.

Early work focuses on policy design, guardrails, standards, architecture and engineering blueprints, and on regulatory and privacy requirements. Leach noted the group is prioritising technical and governance foundations before broader feature releases and described the architecture as tenanted to allow granular client access while protecting data.

Vistra’s technology organisation comprises about 450 staff reporting to Leach. His responsibilities cover infrastructure, datacentres, cloud, networks, collaboration services, Vistra Digital customer products, enterprise applications, cybersecurity, architecture and engineering. Leach’s background includes senior technology roles in global banking, a CTO role at a Fortune 500 SaaS company and a recent position as global CIO at container leasing firm Seaco.

Finding and developing AI skills is a challenge for the programme. Vistra plans to raise skills and encourage innovation within its existing workforce, recruit graduates through university partnerships, and scale delivery capacity from centres in Malaysia, China and India. Leach noted the company aims to give employees tools and psychological safety to experiment and learn and highlighted Singapore’s national AI strategy as supportive for talent development.

Vistra is also exploring relationships with cloud-native platform vendors to surface its services in third-party marketplaces and to offer integrated suites to clients. The company expects the platform to evolve through regular iterations and feature releases as it scales across markets.