The Connector Podcast - DFS 2022 - Trensition

Join the conversation with Vincent Defour from Trensition. He talks about resilience and trends in the financial industry during the Digital Finance Summit 2022 in Brussels, organised and sponsored by Fintech Belgium. 

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Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com

#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech

Transcript

Introduction  0:01  
Welcome to the connector podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs banks and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets. This episode is proudly sponsored by

Sponsor  0:23  
FinTech, Belgium, the digital finance Association by and for fintax. Live from the digital finance summit 2022.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  0:33  
Hello hello, and we're back with our podcast live and kicking from Digital finance summit in Brussels. And I already had a few nice people to interview today. But now I've got Vincent with me. And Vincent has been one of the founding fathers of a company that identified trans if I got that right. But not only that, he also won the contest last year. So could you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Vincent Defour  1:04  
Yeah. So thank you for having me. First of all, my name is indeed Vincent Vincent De food. I'm co founder and CEO of a company or startup called transition. And it's for itself. Yeah, indeed. And our company is all about helping companies becoming future proof, becoming resilient, by scanning drivers of change, scanning what's going on in the world, and anticipate helping them anticipate what that means to them. So how they can mainly anticipate that change. So yeah, indeed, last year, we worry at DFS, it wasn't here it was in another location. And we wonder could occur or tell the jury awards? Yeah, so good memories on the youth memories.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  1:52  
Yeah. So that's nice. And I hear that you have to go back on stage to basically tell your story about what happened in the last year. Right. So what happened in the last year, what are you going to tell to the audience, a lot

Vincent Defour  2:04  
happened, if you're in the startup business, if nothing happens, you're not moving fast enough. So for us a lot has happened. We have worked, of course, a lot on the product. So we're in an AI business, we need to train AI algorithms. We are working more on the process side of product management. So really listening to our customers to be able to give better value. We usually work for strategy teams, or innovation teams for all kinds of teams, which give advice to C level or boardrooms. So it's really strategic insights that we're looking for. And that means that we really need to listen at that level, what that means and how AI can add value in that case. So that's on the product side. And otherwise, commercially, we're moving into different industries, we're not only linked to finance. So we're not only a fintech. We're basically industry agnostic, we can work for any industry. And we've actually raised funds. That was officially launched a couple of weeks ago. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. And this is more on scaling our business internationally on from a commercial perspective. So this is what we will be doing the next year, then. years to come a nice journey ahead. Yes, indeed, a nice exciting journey. So it's about scaling on on all different axes, talent wise, process wise, product wise. So a lot of challenges and opportunities coming our way.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  3:27  
But since you already know what the trend is, you will be fine, I'm sure.

Vincent Defour  3:30  
Well, we actually have a small gimmick at the company before we launched, we use our own AI algorithms to be able to define whether our business would be successful.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  3:41  
I'm not going to ask the outcome. I think I'm still here. So yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, today we have a talk about resilience. And it's kind of funny the way you use the word resilience in your introduction to me, it sounded something like it's something happening in the future, you have to be resilient towards the future. But in all fairness, for me, resilience somehow came very close to me when when thinking about what has happened in the past, because you're resilient to survive a situation. So I guess it's maybe a definition that could be put the way you want, but how would you define resilience?

Vincent Defour  4:22  
Resilience to me is all about adaptability, all about agility, all about anticipation. And I think anticipation is the key word here. If you look at how we add value, so being able to anticipate possible future scenarios will help you in the end, become a resilient agile company.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  4:46  
But when you looked at sorry that I'll take you back in time a little bit, I mean, I feel that urge from you to go to look in the future and I gonna go back a little bit by having Corona on the table, because I think that Corona pushed a lot of back banks to work remotely to almost reinvent themselves. So what have you noticed? Have you? Have you seen any differences between different banks and even different industries as how they anticipate to this?

Vincent Defour  5:17  
Yeah, first of all these kinds of events like COVID, they're once in a lifetime if you're in the data business and scouting trends, so is it a Black Swan, right? It's actually a green Rhino, if you would look at it from a taxonomy perspective, but the black swan is more known to people. So indeed, it's, it's an event that happens without anticipate or that you couldn't have anticipated, although something like a pandemic he could have anticipated. So, but to answer your question, yes, yes, we see, we actually saw a couple of things. First of all, during COVID, a lot of companies asked us what will happen post COVID. And then you saw a lot of buzz on remote working, everybody will stay at home, nobody will come to the office anymore, everything will happen in a hybrid way, and so on, and so on, and so on. But actually, we already saw that it was a, it was overhyped at that point in time. And it wasn't really a durable trend. If you look at the Harvard 20 volts, we saw that in some cases, it was just a lot of buzz that was created. And we will already advised companies like the truth will be somewhere in the middle, it won't be all remote, it won't be all physical, you will see that there will be hybrid models appearing more. And this is exactly what you see happening now, a great we still work at home, we still go to the office, it's somewhere in the middle. But it's not full one way or the other. This is one thing and maybe on the finance side. And what we saw actually was a even a more acceleration of digital channels. So pushing towards digital payment, cashless payments, has really accelerated the digital transformation programs of banks globally. Due to that change in consumer behavior, and even an insurance which was typically not so digital, you see a lot going on with embedded insurance. So embedding insurance, digital insurance products, into platforms thinking from within an ecosystem, where they supply insurance products, to retailers, in their platforms, and so on. And especially in some parts of the world, like Southeast Asia has really accelerated that pace.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  7:23  
And why would that be a difference? Is that something that you also investigate or have a view on?

Vincent Defour  7:28  
Yeah, well, from a trend dynamic perspective, it's always the same, you see that trends evolve differently in industries and in specific regions in the world. And it all comes down back to the consumer who, whose behavior is changing. So if you're in if you're in a context, where you have a complete Society, who is really digital mind that young people with no increment or less increment processes or companies, then you see a faster acceleration towards digital. And also, of course, legislation is a big or decelerated or accelerator of that change.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  8:02  
And then I guess, when you come into South Asia, I mean, we all know in the financial world, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which is very progressive, in terms of anticipation and collaboration with the industry. Yeah, it makes sense. So yeah. Transit transcends your transition. I always say that right. I guess with any with rendition transition, while so you identify trends, you do that by using big data, advanced analytics AI. But can you tell us a little bit more about how does that work? And then I'm not asking you to reveal the secret sauce? That's not what I'm saying. But I'm sure that the audience would be interested like, what what? What are the mechanisms? What are the methods that you use to go about?

Vincent Defour  8:48  
Yeah, so in the core capabilities, basically, we monitored the Internet. The idea is simple. If you monitor the internet, you have a pretty good idea of what's going on in real life world, because they're like communicating barrels, even the opposite around if you look at, you can you can spot something on the internet who has an impact on the real live world and vice versa. So that's, that's the basic thing. So think about Google, we monitor all kinds of publicly available data sources, a lot of news, but also academic, what's happening at universities, pattern databases, startup news, VC news, a lot of industry news. So think about high volume of data about half a million each day that we ingest into our engine. So news articles, this is one thing you need to be able to build your own Google if you can. And then you need intelligence layers on top to be able to analyze all that data, understand what it's all about. And see the data and emotions, sentiment emotions, linking trends to industries looking what companies are doing with that trends, looking at new disruption, what is going on, and you need to connect all these dots and patterns and once you are able to do that in a continuous high volume way, you can build dashboards on top of that really added value. And yeah, give better insights to all kinds of executives, like strategy and innovation. So we won't replace really decision making we augment decision making by taking away a lot of effort and time that they need to put into the research. We do that in a more efficient, automated way. Yeah, it's

Koen Vanderhoydonk  10:18  
like almost bring them into the matrix, right?

Vincent Defour  10:22  
Yeah, yeah, indeed. Yeah. I sometimes say that. My chief of science. He's Nemo, because he looks like data, like it's really matrix kind of code. Yeah.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  10:34  
So we're gonna go to your website and figure it out. Right?

Vincent Defour  10:37  
On the website, it's more digestible. So you find really interesting dashboards and insights that normal people like us can understand, excellent to be able to steal their business. Yeah, Kool

Koen Vanderhoydonk  10:49  
What always strikes me about identifying trends, I really love it. It's nice because it helps you indeed, to make decisions to view at the world to put a position as a human being. But I've been speaking to Trent, watch this before. And some say that, because you know what's happening, you can also manipulate you can also start building your own trends. Is that something that you also felt by being so close with all the data that you can alter the future?

Vincent Defour  11:20  
I wouldn't say older the future, we're not that big. But yeah, for sure, we can see data patterns. And we can see similar things in similar industries. And we always call it like spillover effects. What happens in one industry might be interesting for another industry. So at that case, we can see really the hot the hot topics, cross industry, within verticals within specific trend domains. If every company in the world we use our insights, I could say yes, from a less ethical perspective, you could steer on what would happen. But of course, this is not what you but that's why you're scaling. Right? Yeah. World domination is the next step on the agenda. Of course,

Koen Vanderhoydonk  12:05  
your earliest that you recently got some fresh money, which I think in recent times, it's it's literally an achievement. So therefore, well meant congratulations. But that you feel that it's more difficult nowadays for startups scale up to get fresh funding into the company or not really,

Vincent Defour  12:25  
on a personal level or on a on a transition level. Yes, you see that VCs and other types of investment funds become more conservative, and they think twice before they spend their money. Valuations are lower than it used to be. You see less exits, and so on and so on. So the market is slowing down and is really preparing for an affair is cooling off for the recession that might be short or long term, we don't know. So you see that was hoping

Unknown Speaker  12:53  
that you would give me the answer? Well, from all this,

Vincent Defour  12:56  
I don't shoot me if it's in the wrong direction, but from all the signals that we're seeing finance and country level, and we anticipate that it won't be take that it won't be that long of a recession. So one year, one year and a half, two years, something like that, oh, that's a nice takeaway from all of that, in the end, you see is a cooling down of VC money. And that's also why we chose for a stable Belgium partner where we know who will think with us, the project, the next steps, and and it's not purely in it for a time x.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  13:33  
But is that not per definition, a better way to do it? It's smart money. It's it's, it's purpose, purposeful investment. Yeah. For us,

Vincent Defour  13:41  
it was it was a logical next step and the majority that we have, but I sometimes see, I don't know if it's a mistake, but you see startups really looking too fast at external money. So really, US based UK based all kinds of global money, because there are a lot of incentives out there, right? If you're a startup and you do stuff that they find interesting that basically come to you. So you need to be really careful about that. And you need to choose your best partner for the face of your startup that you're

Koen Vanderhoydonk  14:08  
in. Would that be one of your lessons that you would say to other startups that are more earlier in the process than yourself? Are there any other lessons to learn?

Vincent Defour  14:18  
No, I think that's a good lesson, especially if you're a Belgium startup. For me, it's like let's be chauvinistic. Here there is money in Belgium, there are good VCs, there's other type of money available in Belgium. Why look externally do it with Belgium partners with the Belgian ecosystem, so that you can drive and have impact on a Belgian level too, so really feel strong as with all the founders, I'm not the only founder that this is the best way forward.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  14:48  
In a globalized world, of course, that will give you also a solid base and I think a solid base is probably the best place to start your scaling

Vincent Defour  14:56  
for for law indeed. Especially if you The high the with the recession coming or with some parts that will slow down on investments. A solid base is what you want to have. And and yeah.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  15:11  
And maybe last question you talked about. And I really liked that gimmick that you did some trendwatching on your own success. And what was in the White big glass bowl? How could you see that? What was the next steps in the next couple, six months, for example.

Vincent Defour  15:29  
The next six months I was back a couple of years ago. So what we saw was that the business that we're in is basically decision intelligence, AI driven intelligence, all kinds of intelligence, where AI can can add value. Yeah, we saw an emerging trend, we saw something that wasn't really mature yet. It was like first signals, weak signals of something going on. But we saw on a global scale that this was really picking up speed. And and this is exactly what we've seen the last couple of years. You see all these startups appearing within that space? I think even from Gartner. It's like their 2023, one of their biggest strategic tech trends, decision intelligence. So yeah, so another gimmick is that we once did a competition, Gartner versus transition because they have their hype cycle. And we ended at zero 10 for transition, because we could make better forecasts and better predictions about trends than anything

Koen Vanderhoydonk  16:23  
that's, that's leaving our conversation with a blast. So if people are the listeners would like to know more about you and your company. Where do they go?

Vincent Defour  16:32  
Well, they go to our website, transition dot u with an E, and there they can find everything. Or of course, follow us on LinkedIn and cool to stay up to date on the daily stuff.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  16:43  
And maybe one last more thing. What did you like the conference so far?

Vincent Defour  16:47  
Yes, yes. I had a couple of good keynotes, I was myself and a panel discussion on resilience. Really, I'm not going to see some other peers on the pitch battles. And, and yeah, DFS is always like the place to be in Belgium if you if you're in finance and digital finance.

Koen Vanderhoydonk  17:03  
Yeah. Good. Good. Nice to hear that. I'm sure that DFS would like that too. And our Belgian FinTech guys and girls, that's how many thanks for your participation. It was a great conversation about resilience about your company about trends and the future of the company. So thank you very much again. Also, thank you very much to all the audience, obviously also Belgium fintech. And please stay tuned because there's more of this nice conversations that we will share on our podcast channel. Thank you very much.

Outro  17:35  
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