Like many tech titans, we also began our journey as a startup in humble garage - today, we are proud to protect some of the world’s leading organisations.
We prioritie the needs of our customers with exceptional service and keeping them at the center of our focus. Gain access to our platforms and use the guides to accelerate user engagement.
How Virgin Money Centralised Their Security Operations
SHARE
Summary
Virgin Money were running incident management and compliance checks across a complex, nationwide estate – branches, offices, data centres, and vacant properties – without a central platform. The risk was real: slow responses, fragmented oversight, third-party contractors operating without the full picture.
We implemented the Zinc platform in their central control room. The result was a team with complete visibility, consolidated data, and incident reports accessible in seconds. The spreadsheets are gone. What replaced them is built to last.
The Client
Virgin Money is one of the UK’s leading financial services companies, serving millions of customers across a complex, nationwide estate. That estate spans branches, vacant properties, offices, and data centres, each carrying its own operational and security demands. Managing activity across all of it, consistently and in real time, is no small undertaking.
The Security Control Room (SCR) sits at the centre of it all, responsible for alarm activations, security patrolling, and incident response across every site. When something happens, the SCR needs immediate visibility and the tools to act. Virgin Money didn’t have that. They came to us to build it.
The Challenge
The absence of a central platform wasn’t just an inconvenience. It was a growing problem.
Virgin Money’s control room was managing incidents without the tools to do it properly. The gaps showed up everywhere:
No centralised visibility – monitoring was slow, incomplete, and reactive
Coordination with third-party contractors was manual and time-consuming
Compliance checks tracked by hand, with all the inconsistency that brings
Incident data scattered across systems that couldn’t talk to each other
Risk was accumulating quietly. The team were working harder than they should have had to, compensating for gaps that a proper system would have closed. It wasn’t sustainable.
“The opportunity to customise the Zinc platform has been a significant benefit to our organisation. It has provided us with complete control over our internal data and process flows.”
— Colin Allison — Group Command Centre Manager, Virgin Money UK Ltd
The Solution
Off-the-shelf wasn’t going to cut it. This needed to be shaped around Virgin Money’s operation – not the other way around.
We implemented the Zinc platform in their central control room. Duncan Collins led the project, and from the first conversation, the approach was the same: understand before you build. Requirements were mapped clearly. A project framework was established with a realistic timeline, built-in contingency, and enough flex to absorb the realities of a live operational environment.
What Virgin Money got wasn’t just a platform. It was a system their team could own:
One view of the estate. No more disconnected spreadsheets.
“Duncan ensured our requirements were understood and clearly defined. From this, a framework based on these requirements and a project timeline providing strong structure and direction.”
— Colin Allison — Group Command Centre Manager, Virgin Money UK Ltd
Implementation
A good implementation doesn’t just deliver the right outcome. It keeps the right people informed the whole way through.
Duncan ran an inclusive process from start to finish. Every stakeholder knew what was expected of them and when. Communication was clear, responsive, and consistent. Meetings had a point and produced actions. When Virgin Money’s operational needs shifted, the plan adapted without losing momentum.
That matters. Projects like this fail when stakeholders feel like passengers. This one worked because the people who had to use the platform were involved in shaping it, and their feedback was taken seriously throughout.
“Duncan fostered an inclusive and collaborative working environment, ensuring stakeholders felt engaged, supported, and empowered to contribute meaningfully at every stage.”
— Colin Allison — Group Command Centre Manager, Virgin Money UK Ltd
The Result
The spreadsheets are gone. The SCR now has real-time visibility of risks and threats across the full estate, and the tools to manage incidents as they unfold.
Alarm activations and security patrolling, the SCR’s primary workload, are now managed through a single centralised system. Reports that once took hours to compile manually are accessible in seconds. The visual representation of data in Zinc is intuitive enough to interrogate quickly, even under pressure. When something happens across the estate, the right people have the right information immediately.
The outcomes speak for themselves:
Real-time visibility of risks and threats across branches, offices, data centres, and vacant properties
Report access dramatically faster, with insights previously impossible to surface manually
Spreadsheet dependency removed entirely across the security team
Improved coordination with third-party contractors across all sites
A safer, more secure environment for staff and customers
That’s not a marginal gain. That’s a fundamentally different way of operating, one that’s built to scale with the business.
“Implementing Zinc within our control room has eliminated the need for additional spreadsheets, centralised our data, and significantly improved access to reports and incident information for the security team.”
— Colin Allison — Group Command Centre Manager, Virgin Money UK Ltd
“Great service from the team from start to finish. We continue to refine the system to our needs and the team has been open to our feedback. Been a smooth process all the way through.”
Incident 
+44 (0)20 3989 4859 
info@zinc.systems 