Meet Vistra
Vistra is a leading provider of essential business services that help organizations to invest and grow efficiently and compliantly across the world, including company incorporation, corporate secretarial work, accounting, and payroll. With offices in over 50 countries and more than 9,000 colleagues worldwide, Vistra is a trusted partner for businesses and funds navigating international growth and compliance requirements.
The challenge
As a legacy company serving global clients, Vistra faced significant challenges in modernising its service delivery and internal processes. After acquiring around 50 different customer-facing applications over the years, Vistra’s tech landscape had become a frustrating maze." For customers, it was quite a confusing landscape, having to log in to 50 different applications if they wanted to access everything with us," said Alan Schmoll, Executive Vice President, Vistra Platform. "We spent so much time maintaining legacy systems that were built to service us instead of prioritizing our customers’ needs and experience."
Without a formal system for tracking projects or executing business processes, the company ran almost entirely on email chains and impromptu meetings. Important decisions were made through emails and calls without clear documentation or structure. This ad-hoc system led to information silos, communication inefficiencies, and tasks and requests falling through the cracks. These challenges culminated in a slower pace of work and often led to frustrating customer experiences. As Vistra embarked on an ambitious digital transformation, it became clear that the status quo was no longer a viable way of working.
The solution
Why monday.com?
Vistra’s digital transformation plan included creating a proprietary platform for customers that provides a single sign-on to manage all of Vistra’s services. Building such a robust platform from the ground up demanded a comprehensive approach to project management, collaboration between development and non-technical teams, a centralized system to track customer feedback, and even cultural changes to support a new way of working. Vistra required a platform that could support its digital transformation efforts and enhance collaboration across the organization.
Leading the digital transformation efforts, Alan chose monday CRM for its ability to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical teams, while providing the flexibility of robust API and marketplace integrations. Unlike engineering-centric tools like JIRA, monday.com's intuitive interface made it accessible to all stakeholders, from software engineers to marketing teams and commercial teams.
After its initial success using monday.com to redesign its workflows and project management, Vistra expanded its use of the platform. The development team adopted monday dev to handle the entire software development lifecycle — from capturing customer feedback to implementing new features. The platform became the central nervous system for Vistra's digital transformation, enabling seamless collaboration between teams and providing full visibility into project progress.
Enabling cross-functional collaboration
monday.com has created the foundation for seamless collaboration between technical and non-technical teams. By unifying project data and centralizing communication on one platform, Vistra has dramatically improved alignment between stakeholders. monday.com has become the company’s virtual meeting ground, where software engineers, product designers, marketing teams, and commercial staff all come together to plan, execute, track, and measure projects.
beOne of the key ways monday.com has transformed the way teams collaborate is by eliminating the need for long email chains. Now, teams use their monday.com boards to break projects into tasks, determine priorities, track progress, and make decisions. The platform has also helped bridge the gap between technical and business teams. Technical updates originate from feedback forms, which are written in natural language and business-friendly terms. This makes a huge difference for teams in terms of alignment about what needs to get done. No more confusion about what's being built or why — everything is clear, accessible, and actionable.
Streamlining the software development lifecycle
Gone are the days of feature requests and bug fixes getting lost in email threads or chats. Vistra has transformed its development process by creating a smooth, transparent journey from customer feedback to feature deployment. It starts with simple monday.com forms where commercial teams can submit feedback and feature requests. Each submission gets rated and prioritized on the QA Queue board according to business impact and reviewed by product teams to ensure resources are focused on the most valuable improvements. Approved items become development cards for the engineering team, complete with story points and clear specifications. Other requests might be saved for later or marked as "won't do," but nothing falls through the cracks anymore. Teams can easily see what's in development, what's coming next, and why certain decisions were made.
This standardized system enables two key business benefits. First, there’s complete alignment between new features and customer needs, which strengthens the customer experience. Second, all stakeholders can track exactly where their request stands at any point of time, speeding up communication and workflow efficiency. “The feedback is coming from our customers. It either finds its way to the product, or we determine it doesn’t have a strong enough business impact and we don’t do it. It’s very end-to-end," says Alan.
Enhancing leadership visibility
One of the most profound advantages monday.com has enabled at Vistra is greater trust from company leaders thanks to clear visibility into projects and progress. Quarterly PowerPoint presentations and emailed status reports are largely a thing of the past. Instead, board members and senior leaders have direct access to real-time project dashboards that show both high-level overviews and granular views of how initiatives are progressing.
"It gives them confidence to give us more resources," Alan says. "Traditionally, those that held the purse strings had no idea what was going on in production. They'd get a PowerPoint every other month or an annoying email once a quarter. Now it's very open. They can see exactly what's going on, they don't feel they're going to get embarrassed, and naturally, that leads to them being more relaxed about opening the purse."
What's particularly valuable is how this visibility extends to Vistra's steering committee and their private equity owners at EQT. These stakeholders can log in anytime to see real progress, rather than waiting for — and relying on — updates. This transparency has helped Vistra's digital transformation team earn the trust needed to accelerate the pace of change in a traditional corporate environment.
Driving beyond digital transformation with monday.com
What started as an effort to remedy the customer experience has enabled Vistra to transform its internal processes and pursue ambitious new business goals. By streamlining its software development lifecycle, enabling seamless cross-functional collaboration, and providing unprecedented visibility to key stakeholders, monday.com has helped create an environment of trust and transparency that's transforming how Vistra operates.
This new way of working — where information flows freely and decisions are made with full context — has enabled the digital transformation team to shift into high gear. Vistra is leveraging this foundation of trust and efficiency to realize its vision: to make operating globally borderless and frictionless. By leveraging its global scale with new technical capabilities, Vistra aims to provide businesses worldwide with seamless access to corporate services, data sources, and government services to support its client’s growth ambitions and help deliver global progress. With monday.com helping keep teams aligned and stakeholders informed, Vistra can drive its digital transformation forward and make good on its aspiration to achieve progress without friction.
