DUBIT
22 August 2005
YFM has invested £250,000 through The Yorkshire & Humber Equity Fund (YHEF) into Dubit Limited, a communications services group which is specifically focused on the youth market.
Based in Leeds, Dubit has traded commercially since 2001, when Ian Douthwaite, the managing director, helped develop the ideas of a group of Young Enterprise teenagers into a profitable and innovative business. Where these teenagers found that youth marketing was wide of the mark, and youth banking provided poor service to their audience, Ian leveraged their insight and harnessed another 340,000 young people across the UK to produce marketing campaigns that stand out in their market. Not least of these was the teenagers’ redesign and development of the ideal youth banking service, one which immediately gained approval from the financial sector.
Dubit now has four divisions which operate independently within the group, though the group itself provides a full service solution to businesses involved in or entering the youth sector. The four divisions are research, marketing, web design and DubitCard. Whilst the investment by YHEF will provide working capital to further develop all divisions, the development of DubitCard is the area identified as the one Teenagers sign up to the card, which is free, via the website www.dubitcard.com and at present participating retailers such as Pizza Hut and Vue Cinemas provide discounts or special offers to DubitCard holders. Retailers pay a monthly fee to participate on the card which offers them access to the entire cardholder database or any specific subset of it which they wish to target. The next phases for the card are to introduce loyalty / reward points for participating retailers and to develop the card into a fully enabled debit card, in conjunction with a forward-thinking high street bank. This will provide an age verification check of purchases to overcome the problems originally identified by the teenage founders.
Richard Taylor, investment manager at YFM, who was responsible for the investment by YHEF commented:
"We have invested into a business, which in DubitCard, has a product that is unique in the market place. Under the leadership of Ian Douthwaite, the business is now consistently generating profits on a monthly basis, has a growing list of blue chip clients across all its youth marketing divisions, and most importantly from an investment perspective has huge upside potential in the continued development of DubitCard."
Ian Douthwaite, managing director added:
"We are very excited by the expansion possibilities that this investment presents us – from increased research into youth lifestyles, through to launching the perfect youth banking service."