Isle of Man: Looking to digitalisation for growth
The following is an edited transcript of the latest SMI round table debate, titled ‘Isle of Man: Looking to digitalisation for growth’, which took place at the end of January.
Participants were: Capt. Lee Clarke - Managing Director, Isle of Man Maritime;
Brendon Kenny - Business Development Director at Ellanstone; Shelley Langan-Newton - CEO of digital identity verifier SQR and Joe Robertshaw – UX/UI Developer at SQR;
Mark Robertshaw - Sales Director, Complexio; Cath Robertshaw - COO at Eyesea,
Capt. Kuba Szymanski -Secretary General, InterManager; Lars Ugland - MD of Ugland Marine Holdings; and Catriona Watt - CEO of PDMS. Moderator was Sean Moloney,
CEO of Elaborate Communications and Publisher of SMI.
Sean Moloney
Welcome everybody. Can I start by going round the table and asking you to introduce yourself and say a few words about what your organisation does. Lee, let me start with you.
Lee Clarke
Okay, so I’m Lee Clarke and I’m the Managing Director of Isle of Man Maritime. We are a non-for-profit organisation which is basically designed to be a conduit between the maritime sector and government, industry, and new emerging technologies, and a member cluster.
Joe Robertshaw
Hi, I’m Joe and I work for [digital identity verifier] SQR as the UI/UX designer. We’re involved in reusable digital identity and we’re looking to get into the maritime space, in particular for crew management and ship management.
Mark Robertshaw
Hello, I’m Mark Robertshaw, a Sales Director for Complexio. We’re an Artificial Intelligence business, basically making sense of whole company data, very much focused on the shipping sector specifically.
Catriona Watt
Hi, I’m Catriona Watt, CEO of PDMS. We are a local digital services company and been around on the island for 30 years. We cover a lot of domains and spaces, but we’ve a particular focus on maritime. We provide ship registry software and work with a number of maritime organisations.
Brendon Kenny
So I’m Brendon Kenny from Ellanstone. I bring businesses to the island and help them get them established on the Island of Man. I sort of do what the DfE (Isle of Man’s Department for Enterprise) does, but commercially.
I’m also working on a maritime research project called ‘AI PASSPORT’ (AI-based digital PlAtform and Service to enhance efficiency and safety for Ships and PORTs), an Innovate UK research project with Liverpool University, John Moore University, Strathclyde University and South Korea. It’s about how we connect ships better to ports and so that we can actually make them more efficient and also technologies which make it safer around the ship, man-overboard technology, etc.
Shelley Langan-Newton
Hi, I’m Shelley Langan-Newton, CEO, co-founder of SQR, so I work with Joe. We help people prove who they say they are, which is obviously huge in terms of seafarers and also passengers and safety at sea. But one of the things that we’re also looking at is ‘should you be where you are, doing what you’re doing?’. So that’s what we’re bringing in in the next couple of months to innovate in the area.
Kuba Szmanski
I’m Kuba, wearing three or maybe four hats here today. So I’ll start with the big one, InterManager, the International Ship Management Association, based in Cyprus. However, I’ve chosen to be here on the Isle of Man and have been here for 35 years, so I‘m managing the Association from the island. I moved the office from Monaco, where my predecessor was, in 2010. It’s an association for ship managers but also crew managers, who take care 90% of all officers and ratings on board ships.
Then my wife and I are also Directors and major shareholders of Ramsey Shipyard here on the Isle of Man, which is practising ‘kind leadership’ with youngsters, something I am very keen on.
And what we need here is to retain skills, and train skills. So, we have started also our Ramsey Shipyard Academy now, where we are training people. We started with welding courses, forging courses, blacksmithing, GRP (Glass Reinforced Plastic).
The response from the Isle of Man has been overwhelming and on the first course, 45 students signed up for welding courses.
Then I’m also a RYA (Royal Yachting Association) instructor at Douglas Bay Yacht Club, where we do VHF courses and, with the help of Isle of Man Maritime, are able to co-sponsor some of the youth on the island to have a radio license so for local fishermen it will be almost free of charge.
So, that’s the sort of collaboration I’m looking into, and I call it ‘kind leadership’ because we are definitely human-centric in our approach.
Lee Clarke
Just to add on to that, we have a cadet programme, and in my view, it’s one of the most successful cadet programmes in the UK in terms of how we retain people with a 99 percent retention rate. 58 Manx cadets have trained in the last eight years. We’ve actually had only one drop-up and it doesn’t really count because he was retained within the shipping industry and he’s now a crew manager up in Glasgow. We have four apprentices with Isle of Man Steam Packet. And one of the reasons why we do this is that we are creating that maritime skill set here on the island.
And I think it’s a huge success story in terms of what we’re trying to achieve because the natural progression for cadets 20 years ago was that you stayed at sea. Now, it’s that they feed back into the maritime sector in areas like crew management: one of our cadets, he’s just done his master’s, now works at Manx Ocean Crewing down in Port Aaron. And also, a lot of them may not go back to sea, but they’re also looking at future technologies and how that’s going to be driving them. And with that real grounding in the understanding of maritime, we’re able to bring them back to the island.
Kuba Szymanski
I would like just to follow through and say I think the strong point for the Isle of Man is that we are a small community, we know each other. There’s a saying in England ‘It takes a village to raise a child’, and maritime on the Isle of Man is a village and we are able to capture these people.
Catriona Watt
Yes, we work in Isle of Man, we work equally in Scotland and in the UK and overseas but it’s the ease of doing business in the Isle of Man, where you can have access to the politicians, to other people within the business who in turn know people. And we all understand each other’s businesses. That ease of doing business it’s just a huge advantage. And we’ve tried to kind of replicate what we have done in the Isle of Man in Scotland and that’s a lot harder but it’s still easier than doing it in the UK because you still have that ease of access in different networks and people know each other and will help you 100%.
Mark Robertshaw
Yes, people want to move here, they really do. We’re in a great position and the talent pool over here is amazing with regards to the finance sector, the e-gaming sector, the insurance sector. The tech skills on the Isle of Man are significant and at Complexio we employ people globally wherever the talent is. The Isle of Man is a unique position because if you wanted to set up a business here it’s very tax efficient with zero corporation tax as so you could attract people in the tech and machine learning sector, the digital nomads.
[The discussion continues, with much talk on the advances in digitalisation and AI taking place on the island, as well as the hosting of a Techstars event to help startups this summer and the idea of holding ‘living lab’ workshops for innovation… before Lars Ugland and Cath Robertshaw join ]
Mark Robertshaw
The problem with machine-learning and Artificial Intelligence is that it can be very focused on particular areas and it’s not holistic. You might have one system where artificial intelligence is adopted but it is still isolated from the rest of the company and that’s where the major problem is, that’s what Complexio is solving . It’s about understanding the whole ecosystem of the company and building a living map of how work actually happens in order to create true automations and efficiencies.
Sean Moloney
Lars, what are your thoughts on all this?
Lars Ugland
For me, quality comes very high on the agenda and I think that if the Isle of Man can demonstrate that everything we do on the island is high in quality that will sell, and you might attract more people to come to the island. I very strongly believe that quality sells.
Sean Moloney
I’m very heartened by what I’m hearing today because I’ve been coming every year to the island, whether it’s in person or online, and have been hearing about ship managers moving out or people leaving the island, and now it seems you have an exciting future.
Lee Clarke
It’s so fast moving in the industry at the moment and digitalisation and AI is so big that I think we have to be on this journey. Isle of Man Maritime has to be on this journey, and we progressed from the Isle of Man Shipping Association to this sort of cluster and then we went through the pain point of the loss of the big ship management company.
We still do have ship management, we still have Shell, Doehle (IOM), Manx Ocean Crewing, and boutique crew managers, but we have had to look into what actually is the sell point. And again I think we’ve hit that mark now with the four hubs we have introduced – Digitalisation & AI Hub, Skills & Seafarers Hub, Superyacht Hub, and Business Hub – and encouraging the member feedback from those four hubs.
Brendon Kenny
I just wanted to get across as well is that the island is continuing to innovate around data, which is the fossil fuel for AI machine learning, and has developed what is called the Data Asset Foundation. We’ve got a couple of pilots happening it’s going to help the island become a real data capital for the world and maritime. The ‘blue economy’ has got an immense amount of data, as you know
Shelley Langan-Newton
I’m going to add on that it’s not just about holding and storing data but our whole business is about safe transfer of data and data sharing. And one of the ways that has to happen is using standards so that we can be as interoperable as possible globally. And obviously being interoperable in maritime is a non-negotiable because of the digitisation journey that the maritime industry is going on in terms of the STCW and how we can now digitise those certificates.
Lars Ugland
Well, I would like to see more support from the government for the maritime industry. We try to feed Government with information but the support from them is less.
There is a general election coming in September so hopefully we get some more commercial people on board and somebody that understands the maritime industry better.
Lee Clarke
I know we don’t have a designated maritime champion within government but to be honest I think the ship registry do a good job of that. But we need to complement that by showing it’s not just about the ship it’s about the ecosystem that’s also behind it.
For example, another thing I want to mention is that with Eyesea we’ve got pretty much one of the only plastic pollution data hubs in the world here on the island through the Eyesea app.
Cath Robertshaw
Yes, with the EyeSea project we’re asking people to photograph any litter that they find on the beach, and then we can read it and see where it’s coming from and try to prevent people dumping rubbish. From an IT point of view, and from a maritime one because obviously we are maritime-driven, it’s really important that this is a global initiative, not just an Isle of Man one. But what I’d love to be able to tell you is that the Isle of Man really gets behind this
Using satellite imagery provides a really important, different way of looking at things, such as the project where IBM used our data and our images to do their plastic net pollution program. And then Microsoft saw what we were doing as well, and they wanted to help.
So now when people take photos across the world we’ve got computer vision and computer learning and we can all see exactly what’s on these beaches. And we pair that with stuff like imagery and spectrometry that can actually map an area on beach from space, and then we can match it on the ground. The capabilities and the technology exist to do good, and from an IT perspective, that’s what I would like to see boosted.
Catriona Watt
Well, I’d like to follow on here. We’d like to say that we’re one of the first ‘living lab’ participants. We’d like to say that we’re part of that journey, contributing to the community.
Mark Robertshaw
Just to echo what’s been said. I hope that the ingredients created here are taken on board by the people that are really interested. Because the Isle of Man isn’t going to be for everybody. It’s a global village but has access to a government on its doorstep. It’s not going to attract people who want to live in a big city. And I just hope that all this starts to bear fruit because the ingredients that Lee and a lot of the team around this table are putting together is very appealing and I think we are going to see traction. We’d just like to see a bit more of that traction through good ideas and good efforts coming into fruition.
Joe Robertshaw
I suppose from an SQR perspective, it would be really good to say in time that we’ve used the Isle of Man, the ship registry, to do a first pilot of reusable digital identity and have that as part of crew management and just make it more secure for port security… just to make the most of the Isle of Man and all of these connections that we have to create this test bed, basically.
Sean Moloney
Can I ask one last question, because I know we’re ten minutes over our time, and I’ll start with you Brendon. If I was back here in a year’s time, what would you like to be saying to me?
Brendon Kenny
I’ll be saying to you that we’ve got our Data Asset Foundation up and running, that we’ve got lots of innovative businesses coming. And not just innovative businesses because what the Data Asset Foundation allows is that any organisation in the world that’s data rich will be able to place their data in the Isle of Man in a safe environment that’s secure and ethical. And to be ethical it’s not for everyone - we’re going to be very selective. So I’d like to say in 12 months’ time that we’ve got a vibrant maritime community focused on ethical AI, the living lab, we’ve got people coming over to universities, innovators all here every week trying to work together that’s all I’d like to see in 12 months’ time.
Kuba Szymanski
I’ll be very ambitious about this and predict you’ll be coming and saying: ‘guys, there is a trademark now called IOM that everyone’s talking about, and not many people will understand what IOM stands for but they will be all driving and striving to have a stamp on whatever they do which would be ‘IOM approved’, ‘IOM driven’ or ‘IOM best practice’, meaning well above the industry regulations and rules.
People would be saying ‘we are using IOM’ and it would be standing for whatever we come up with, whatever we have driven. And that actually there will be ‘rules of engagement’, if you like, when it comes to AI because I think that’s what we are talking about here today. And I would love to know that AI is trying to help humans, not making humans merely feeders into AI. And that we are able to verify all the AIs around the world connecting to the Isle of Man hub, and that people will say: ‘Where did you get this data from? Oh, it’s Manx data so it must be good’.
Lee Clarke
My ambition is to ensure that the Hubs are a solution-based sort of ecosystem. You know, I certainly am very excited around the Isle of Man Maritime playbook and the data that I’ve been receiving recently is so encouraging. I’m very fortunate to have exceptional board members and I think we are on the cusp of this maritime ecosystem on the Isle of Man and developing it further in terms of what we are doing with the Hubs.
So I’m sure the next 12 months is going to be one of the most exciting periods with the Isle of Man Maritime Conference 2026 taking place on 16 July. with me going on the international stage and saying: ‘The Isle of Man is here!’
Sean Moloney
Thank you very much, everyone.