Nido / Livensa Living
Nido and Livensa Living are CPP Investments PE-backed accommodation brands operating across student, flex and hotel properties in Spain, Portugal and Italy. I joined as Chief Digital Officer to lead end-to-end digital transformation across product, data and technology.
Resident App
Digital home for 30,000+ residents across Europe
Data Platform
Real-time property and resident intelligence at scale
Livensa Labs
AI-powered innovation lab prototyping the next generation of tools
Nido and Livensa Living came together through M&A under a focused CPP Investments PE board with clear value creation targets. The two brands had grown independently, each with their own systems, processes and digital touchpoints. The pressure to drive value at pace was real, but the foundations needed to be right first.
I was brought in to identify where digital could have the biggest impact and build it. The answer was transformation across the full stack: unifying two disparate technology platforms, building a true data foundation, and creating a high-quality digital journey that residents would actually use and value.
The Problem to Solve
Two brands, two separate tech stacks, no shared data platform and a low-touch digital in-life resident journey. The business had grown through M&A, bringing Nido and Livensa Living together under CPP Investments PE-backed ownership with an intensely commercial board focused on value creation at pace.
The starting point was understanding where the biggest leverage was. Disparate property management systems, no unified resident identity and a fragmented in-life experience pointed to digital transformation as the highest-impact opportunity.
The mandate was clear: build the digital and technology foundation that would let the business scale across student, flex and hotel accommodation, across Spain, Portugal and Italy, without fragmenting the customer experience.
Platform & Data
Delivering the full platform stack required bringing together a unified data warehouse, web platform with property management and booking, and a resident app managing the in-stay experience.
The data layer was central. We aggregated property, booking and resident data into a unified warehouse, giving the business real-time intelligence across the portfolio for the first time. Clean data enabled better decisions at every level, from board reporting to day-to-day property operations.
A modern cloud-native architecture replaced legacy point solutions, enabling the product and engineering teams to ship faster, integrate more reliably and give the business the flexibility to adapt as the portfolio grows.
Web Platform
The web platform was rebuilt to attract and convert prospective residents across both Nido and Livensa Living, handling the complexity of two distinct brands, multiple markets and multiple property types.
The customer journey was redesigned end-to-end: from discovery and property search through to enquiry and booking, creating a coherent experience that could convert at scale without fragmenting across brands.
Deep integrations with the property management system and invoicing platform brought the back-end in line with the front-end, giving the business real-time visibility of availability, bookings and payments in one place.
Resident App
The resident app became the digital home for every student and young professional staying with Nido and Livensa Living, their companion for everything from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave.
Residents could raise maintenance requests, book shared spaces for a film night or a study session, invite guests, access building information and stay connected with their community, all in one place, designed for simplicity.
Events, messaging and community features made the app a genuine social platform for the building, not just a utility. The result was a resident experience that felt premium, personal and genuinely useful across 30,000+ residents in Spain, Portugal and Italy.
Livensa Labs
Livensa Labs was established as an innovation function to rapidly prototype and validate AI-powered concepts across the business, identifying opportunities outside the core that could create step-change value across the portfolio.
Three initial focus areas were defined: AI-powered workflows and information sharing to surface insights faster and reduce operational overhead; a campaign management tool to give local property teams the ability to run targeted marketing without central dependency; and asset investment intelligence to support board-level capital allocation decisions.
Labs operated with a startup-within mentality, running fast experiments to prove what was possible before committing to full builds. The model was designed to create a sustainable pipeline of innovation that could be scaled across the business over time.