Tollring marked 30 years in business last year and, following its strategic equity alliance with Amity Solutions, the company is now looking forward to greater success moving forward.
Tony Martino, Tollring’s CEO, has been with the company almost since the start, joining a team of three as a technical support engineer in 1994, before rising through the ranks and eventually leading a management buyout in 2002. Since then, he has grown the company to 120 employees, with a global footprint, including a research and development centre in India.
“I’ve really only had one job,” said Martino. “After arriving as a fresh-faced 24-year-old Aussie in the UK, I found a job advertised in the Evening Standard for the role at Tollring and applied. Now, here I am more than 30 years later.”
During his time at Tolling, Martino has seen some big changes in technology, most notably the move from on-premise to the cloud, which, as an early pioneer, the company pivoted to in 2014. The next step in that evolution, he said, is the current push to AI.
“When I first joined, our main product was billing services, specifically call accounting software,” said Martino. “The primary focus was on outbound calls because large enterprises wanted to able to split bills by department, and we had a niche vertical in managed services offices and business centres who were renting out office space and needed to manage their telephony infrastructure and costs.
“In the 1990s, everything was on-premise and PBXs. Then we went through a period of deregulation and voice over Internet protocol came in, followed by the move to the cloud, and now we’re at the next iteration, with the drive towards everything becoming AI native.”
Early on in his tenure, Martino and his team established four core values for Tollring: teamwork, integrity, energy and performance. They are principles, he said, that have stood the company in good stead.
Another key focus for Martino has been on business resilience, which has paid dividends in an industry that is constantly being disrupted by new technological advances. Working with his team, he has successfully managed to scale the business too.
“You don’t win alone,” said Martino. “You need to bring people on the journey with you and, therefore, trust is key when it comes to building a strong team around you that buys into your core values and vision, is fully aligned with your ideas and strategy, and is motivated to succeed.”
Inclusive approach
Martino leads with an open, inclusive and pragmatic approach. That’s reflected, he said, in the company’s culture.
“There’s no room for ego in this business,” said Martino. “It’s key that you leverage everyone’s skillset and that’s an ethos that transcends throughout the business.”
Citing building Tollring from a small company of three people into a 120-strong concern operating across five countries as his biggest achievement, Martino has been integral to its incremental expansion. Growing at around an impressive rate of almost 30 per cent in FY2023/24, he said that the profits have been reinvesting back into its people, products and technology.
“We have established ourselves as industry leaders in providing compliant voice and call capture services and business communications analytics services,” said Martino. “It has been a big challenge, but we have focused on remaining relevant and providing products that our customers really want and need.”
Adding customer value
That successful growth attracted the interest of Amity Solutions, which is based in Bangkok, Thailand, and last year the two companies agreed a strategic equity alliance. For Martino, the partnership is a validation of the hard work that he and his team have put into building the business.
“We’ve had other approaches in the past, but Amity Solutions just felt like a good fit,” said Martino. “We wanted to find the partner who we had good synergies with, would allow us to maintain our strong company culture and autonomy around product innovation, to expand globally by opening up new markets, and, most importantly, we would be able to move forward with. We’ve already had a good start and look forward to continuing that successful journey together.”
As part of the tie-up, Amity Solutions will become a majority shareholder of Tollring, with Tollring being given access to its voice analytics software solutions with advanced generative AI capabilities. Amity Solutions will also bring complementary software solutions in customer engagement, including an AI-powered chatbot/voicebot platform, thus helping to address customer acquisition and retention challenges.
AI has been a big focus for Tollring as part of its wider innovation strategy, said Martino, with the technology being used to improve its software analytics and capabilities. Now, he said, it can also use the AI capabilities that Amity Solutions brings to deliver such solutions quicker, more effectively and in a way that adds value for its customers.
“We are all about applying data, knowledge and insights to enable customers to make better decisions,” said Martino. “Generative AI plays a big part in that, in helping our channel partners to deliver real functionality and value for the end user, and to enrich the customer experience.”
This interview was included in our May 2025 print issue. You can read the magazine in full here.