Steve Flavell is responsible for LoopUp’s global commercial activities, based out of London. Prior to LoopUp, Steve was EVP and main board director at GoIndustry, the online industrial auctioneering platform. As part of its founding team, Steve played an instrumental role in the company’s success, which included six acquisitions, rapid organic growth and listing on AIM. Previously, Steve spent five years in strategy consulting with Monitor Company and Mars & Co, and two years with Mobil Oil. He has an MBA from Stanford and MEng from St. John’s College, Cambridge.
Company: LoopUp
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Steve Flavell: I co-founded LoopUp with my co-CEO, Michael Hughes, whom I met in the mid-90s while we were both studying at Stanford Graduate School of Business in the US.
Our first product was in the world of conference calling, where we brought a really simple software solution for richer and less chaotic meetings. We developed one of the first ever business BlackBerry apps, that essentially turned your mobile device into a ‘remote controller’ of the conference call, and we were proud to include 25 of the world’s top-100 law firms in our customer base. But the pandemic decimated that market, after which meetings essentially became just a feature within much broader Unified Communications platforms, such as Microsoft Teams.
And so, we moved into the world of Multinational Cloud Telephony for Microsoft Teams, where we enable global enterprises to consolidate how they buy and manage telecoms around the world. Why buy from multiple – often tens of – telcos, when you can now consolidate service provision with a single vendor? Why carry-on managing telecoms in a disparate country-specific way when you manage your primary Teams capability in a centralized and globally-consistent way?
Fast forward to today, and LoopUp is the world’s most multinational telecommunications service provider in the market, offering numbers and services in more countries than any other provider around the globe.
What emerging technology trends do you believe will have the most profound impact in the next 5-10 years?
Steve Flavell: Well, it’s hard to look beyond AI! AI’s impact is all-encompassing and will be so considerably faster than a 5-10 year outlook.
But closer to home for LoopUp in the world of telephony, a major trend is the integration of telephony into broader UC platforms, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom. These platforms grew exponentially in the wake of the pandemic and have become the nerve centres of remote and hybrid collaboration. Teams became Microsoft’s fastest ever growing product, with their CEO, Satya Nadella, commenting early in the pandemic that they had “seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in just two months.”
However, while out-of-the-box Teams is incredibly rich – messaging, channels, meetings, video calls and much more – telephony is the missing piece that needs specific and additional integration. As such, so many businesses have understandably been doing this integration so as to achieve ‘truly unified’ communications.
This integration enables users to make and receive phone calls from any device running Teams and enable companies to strip out all their legacy, on premises telco equipment, which they no longer have to maintain, upgrade and replace.
And full circle to AI… this integration also enables enterprises to incorporate their phone calling data and content into their broader AI data set, which agents such as Copilot can then leverage to boost real-time insights and enhance operational efficiency.
Can you share a specific technological breakthrough from your company that has the potential to reshape your industry?
Steve Flavell: LoopUp’s fundamental breakthrough in the world of telecoms is to turn a multi-domestic industry into a one vendor multinational industry.
Perhaps the most tangible part of our technology platform is ‘LoopUp One’, our global cloud management portal, which for the first time ever, enables multinational organizations to see and manage their global estate of phone numbers around the world. All numbers can be managed from one place, and users can be provisioned to and from these numbers as they join and leave the company.
Global analytics of usage and spend are therefore available on the portal, together with access to a single global invoice (or regional invoices if preferred) and a single place to manage all support tickets.
How do you approach innovation while balancing the need for practicality and market readiness?
Steve Flavell: Our approach to innovation is one of constant iteration and reinvention, rather than overly long-term planning and over-specification, which in today’s market, can be out of date before it’s even realized if development chunks are too large.
We take great care to understand that our cross-functional innovation or ‘Build’ teams truly understand the ‘why’ of what we’re trying to build, with an agile and continuous learning mindset and a readiness to change directions frequently based on learnings and data-driven feedback.
What challenges do you face in integrating cutting-edge technology into existing business models?
Steve Flavell: Integrating cutting-edge technology into existing business models can be both transformative and complex. The biggest challenge is often not the technology itself but the shift it demands across operations and mindset. Many multinationals continue to rely on legacy systems that were never built to coexist with modern cloud platforms. Introducing innovation in this context means navigating long-standing processes, fragmented vendor relationships, and varying levels of digital maturity across regions.
At LoopUp, we see this often as we support multinationals in transitioning from decentralized, country-specific telephony to a unified cloud-based model integrated with Microsoft Teams. This is not just a technical transformation but a strategic redefinition of how communication is managed. The key is to deliver technology that is future-proofed, easy to adopt, and aligned with broader business priorities.
How do you foster a culture of innovation within your organization to stay ahead in the tech race?
Steve Flavell: We try to foster a culture of innovation across the business by taking an integrated and holistic approach such that it becomes engrained into our DNA. This encompasses the right attitude and vision from leadership, mapping technological initiatives to broader business goals and measuring outcomes against ongoing expectations.
Our ‘Build Teams’ are cross-functional bringing aligned and shared ownership to initiatives, along with improved buy-in, reduced resistance to change, and a far greater sense of involvement and trust.
We try to ensure that diverse expertise and perspectives are brought into initiatives at the right time, getting into the weeds at the right and necessary moment, rather than prematurely or too late.
