About Us

The original North London location in 1965

An Insurance brokerage and estate agency on ground floor
owners accommodation up above

Our Story

Our story starts in 1965 in a sleepy little village in North London UK.
Its a two-story terraced building in a small parade with a shop on the
ground floor and a spacious two bed apartment on the first floor.

The first founder of the company bought this building for £500, in 1965,

moved into the apartment up above and opened an Insurance

brokerage and property management company from the shop

below. The Former name of Data management Group Ltd was

Van Houten & co (insurance) Ltd.

Young VanHouten ran a very successful business from 1965 to 1977 when

he decided to emigrate to the United States..

Ananda Jayasinghe

(also known as Andy Jay by those who could not pronounce his

real Christian and Surname)

bought the business of Van Houten

and the whole building for a sum in the region of £25,000.

Andy Graduated in Sri Lanka in

1963, emigrated to UK in 1965

and completed his Accountancy

qualifications whilst working in

the profession and in service and

manufacturing industries.

by 1977 he had achieved the

highest possible position in industry related

to his profession as the finance director

of a construction company.

Andy recalls ..

"In the 1960's and 70s Managing Data was a very manual process. The only machinery available in those days was a Typewriter

and a Comptometer. The latter being the calculator used by a trained operator to key in numbers handwritten in a

spread sheet type of format. Communication was mainly by post. The telephone became the technology evolution with a telex machine being used for long distance.

the photo copier and the fax machine arrived in the late 80."

"Yet even with all of this, everything... more or less... required manual effort.

Factory production lines and clerical work in the offices required loads and loads of staff.

There was a hunger for labour saving mechanisation and automation of every conceivable process in the late 70s and 80s.

However, new Equipment was expensive, and only the larger companies could afford the huge costs of mechanisation."

Says Andy :

"In 1977 I saw a gap in the market for the automation of management processes for the smallto medium sized businesses

and that was the birth of

The Data Management Group Ltd ".

Apart from the Freehold property the other main asset was Van Houten's Client list of some 1500 names and contact details of a mixture of businesses and private individuals.

Andy didnt waste any time contacting each and every one of them and

offering them a rounded financial and management consultancy service which included

the offer to manage their insurances, real estate, and financial DATA, in addition to the services that

Van Houten offered.

Accountancy, Taxation, and System Analysis was taken up by many.

Some of the success stories arising out of this effort soon prompted a name change of Van Houten to

Data Management Group Ltd.

Here are a few success stories.

A small Bakery in Knights Bridge London, making cakes,

became a large manufacturer of Frozen Gateau supplying

all the supermarkets of the day.

The company was sold for £20 million

in the late 1980's.

A Ugandan Asian family who was importing fresh vegetables from India

ended up Owning most of the stalls and stores in Ealing Road to distribute

tropical vegetables grown by the family business

in newly acquired land in Portugal.

a small Packaged tour operator struggling to compute the prices in good time

to publish the seasonal brochures, ended up competing

and beating the largest tour operator on price when their brochures

wewere published soon after the giants’ brochures were delivered to travel

agents.

In a nutshell Data Management Group has helped many small to medium sized businesses to scale their business

through the use of technology.

Whats pertinent is DMGs ability to use the best technology available at the time the requirements are known.

In 2021 we are focussing on a completely new requirement.

MAKE EVERY BUSINESS PANDEMIC PROOF.

End of Feb 2020 saw the UK and most of the world just shutting down to protect human beings from the devastating effects of a new virus.

We lost the revenues from many of our customers.

But we have continued with a 100% service to all customers at no cost until the situation gets back to normal.

we also built a brand new FRAME WORK to make businesses pandemic proof in the future

we called it