Koen Vanderhoydonk (The Connector)/ Jerome Leclanche (Ingram)
What if your AI chatbot could handle payments, revolutionizing the customer-business interaction? As a tech enthusiast, your curiosity must be piqued. Welcome to a conversation brimming with innovation and forward-thinking ideas, featuring Jerome, founder of Ingram. In this chat, we delve deep into the realm of fintech, cyber security, and AI as Jerome introduces us to Ingram, their latest venture that embeds payment systems into AI chatbots. Listen along as we explore how this technology could not only transform customer service but also redefine responsible AI usage.
We continue our deep-dive into the concept of 'responsible AI' and the role of regulations in this rapidly evolving field. Jerome's insights into how AI can enhance customer experience, especially in the financial sector, are nothing short of fascinating. However, he also highlights the challenges that arise due to outdated regulations and the need for this sector to catch up. If you're interested in tech, fintech, and AI trends, this episode is a must-listen. Plus, we'll let you in on how you can reach out to Jerome to learn more about Ingram. Tune in for an episode packed with insightful discussions, innovative ideas, and a peek into the future of AI.
Thank you for tuning into our podcast about global trends in the FinTech industry. Check out our podcast channel. Learn more about The Connector. Follow us on LinkedIn.
What if your AI chatbot could handle payments, revolutionizing the customer-business interaction? As a tech enthusiast, your curiosity must be piqued. Welcome to a conversation brimming with innovation and forward-thinking ideas, featuring Jerome, founder of Ingram. In this chat, we delve deep into the realm of fintech, cyber security, and AI as Jerome introduces us to Ingram, their latest venture that embeds payment systems into AI chatbots. Listen along as we explore how this technology could not only transform customer service but also redefine responsible AI usage.
We continue our deep-dive into the concept of 'responsible AI' and the role of regulations in this rapidly evolving field. Jerome's insights into how AI can enhance customer experience, especially in the financial sector, are nothing short of fascinating. However, he also highlights the challenges that arise due to outdated regulations and the need for this sector to catch up. If you're interested in tech, fintech, and AI trends, this episode is a must-listen. Plus, we'll let you in on how you can reach out to Jerome to learn more about Ingram. Tune in for an episode packed with insightful discussions, innovative ideas, and a peek into the future of AI.
Thank you for tuning into our podcast about global trends in the FinTech industry. Check out our podcast channel. Learn more about The Connector. Follow us on LinkedIn.
Welcome to the Connector podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting Vintex banks and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen van der Hoijdon as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
Welcome to another episode of a Connector podcast in collaboration with Vintek Belgium, and we're running up to DFS in December, and today I have with me Jerome. Jerome, who are you and where you work for? Hello, hello.
Jerome Leclanche:
So I'm Jerome. I've been in tech for about 20 years now, and seven, eight years ago now I founded Gaveny. I live in Brussels, gaveny is in Belgium, and today we are announcing Ingram.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
Ooh tell us more An announcement. That's always something you're like. What is Ingram about?
Jerome Leclanche:
Ingram is our new AI branch and we're inaugurating it with a completely new product, which is embedded payments for AI chatbots.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
And what does that mean for the general audience?
Jerome Leclanche:
It means that customers will be able to pay directly when talking to an AI chatbot. This enables completely new ways to pay. It enables completely new paradigm of a relationship between the customers and the business. Could you give?
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
us a few examples maybe.
Jerome Leclanche:
Well, today you have more and more companies adopting AI chatbots to replace sort of their antiquated customer support chatbots. The ones where you only have a couple buttons to answer, and they're orienting themselves more and more towards very natural ways to interact with the customer, and the next step in that is enabling the customers directly to pay for the service from the chatbot itself.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
Wow, that's really innovation. We hope so Cool. And when you talk about this, would you then consider yourself more as an AI company, because bots are a lot to do with AI nowadays, or would you consider yourself as a payment company?
Jerome Leclanche:
We sit right in the middle. Gavenny's background was always in fintech. Our biggest partner, stripe, has really enabled us to be a player in the fintech space, and we've always had our three layers of expertise fintech, cybersecurity and AI. Ai has really boomed in the past year and we're seeing a lot, a lot of demands, so this is why we've decided to enable a whole new branch of the business to be centered around AI.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
And if you look at the overarching business as we speak. So when we talk about AI, do you see other applications where AI can enhance the customer experience or, in general, finance? So fintech at the top.
Jerome Leclanche:
I think this is a very, very new field. We're having, every single day, a ton of discussions around the role of AI, not just in the fintech space, but in the commercial space as a whole, and it's difficult to say where it's going to go, because we don't want to just remove humans from the equation in where businesses interact with their customers. But at the same time, it also enables businesses to talk to more of their customers, rather than have them be faced with extremely impersonal menu trees, extremely impersonal hierarchical trees that do not solve their problems. Now the customers have the ability to explain more of what their problem is to the AI and have a more bespoke experience at scale.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
Is this also why Ingram was founded? Is that the foundation of why you want to have payments into that chat experience?
Jerome Leclanche:
We want to enable businesses to use AI more responsibly and in more interesting ways as well, because most companies are just not tech companies even today, and non-tech companies will easily go for solutions which have been mass produced for businesses of that type, and Ingram will want to offer a much more bespoke experience. This is why we're trialing this new product.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
What would be your ideal customer for this new product?
Jerome Leclanche:
We're looking for B2C services that wants to trial new ways for their customers to pay for their product. We're also looking for B2B businesses that offer AI chatbots and want to expand the capabilities of their chatbot.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
We're heading up to the 8th of December. We'll have to make a cool event. Dfs, what are you expecting from the event?
Jerome Leclanche:
Well, this will be my first DFS. I'm not really sure what to expect your maiden flight. Ah, yes, I always love these types of trade shows. I really like the networking aspect. I really like meeting new people, finding new problems. I always find these events are very inspirational as well, and for the team as well it's very inspirational. We will have a booth there, of course. I'm not sure what else to expect at this point.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
It's great that you're coming to DFS. I'm sure it's going to be a very interesting one, even if it's your first one For me. I've been going for many, many years, I think the team for this year is about AI and regulations. You talked about it briefly. You say responsible AI, but could you guarantee that there is responsible AI in the experience that you bring with Ingram?
Jerome Leclanche:
Well, the way our product works the end business is responsible for tweaking the prompt, making sure that the AI follows the script it's given, just as that AI would be responsible for keeping the AI in line with the script for customer support and so on. We don't offer a pre-packaged AI chatbot. We enhance the ones that the businesses already have.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
Now what you then typically integrate With the existing chatbots. How does that work? Is that an API integration?
Jerome Leclanche:
Yes, so we are. It's not an API integration. We are changing the prompt itself and adding some client-side code, so this requires some level of access to the existing AI, but that is something that most AI chatbot solutions offer today. But, of course, we're also looking to work with AI solution providers themselves in order to add this capability for them.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
Well, a few times you mentioned the word prompt, so it almost brings me automatically to chatgbt. What is your view on chatgbt? What will we see in the financial industry?
Jerome Leclanche:
So I remember where I was on December 1st 2022. For me, that is the date. Of course, it's the date when chatgbt was released and I immediately saw the potential.
Jerome Leclanche:
I showed it to several of my friends many of them who are not in tech yet, and I remember a couple of them were like how is this any different from this or that? And then I started talking about the impact that AI can have when it has so much autonomy. And it has improved a lot since and we're seeing a huge amount of improvement in the AI field, a huge amount of improvement in the models. So it's not just about where it is now, but it's also about how fast it's going. Regulations I mean we've seen this before. Regulations will have to catch up eventually, but for now it feels very much like the wild west.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
Oh, that's a heavy statement.
Jerome Leclanche:
Elaborate please. In tech, we very often don't have up-to-date regulations with the capabilities of the technology. With AI, it has never been more true, Not just because the capabilities are evolving at a crazy pace, but also because, on the other extreme, you have many people, including regulators, who have these ideas about the capabilities of AI that are completely off the mark. So it can be both in what they can do and what they cannot do so.
Jerome Leclanche:
it's important to keep a conversation with AI experts and people well-knowledgeable in the domain to ensure that the regulations don't impede the potential of progress, but also are in line with the realistic capabilities of AI today and in the next couple of years.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
Makes sense. So we're almost at the end of this podcast, so I was wondering if people wanna contact you and get to know more insights about Ingram, where should they go to? Well?
Jerome Leclanche:
you can reach out to Jerome at ingramtech. Our website is ingramtech and we're looking forward to see you there.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:
Thank you very much. Thanks for having you. It was a great insights. Looking forward to the kickoff of the new product, and thank you also to the audience. Stay tuned for more fintech news.
Jerome Leclanche:
Bye-bye, thank you for having me.
Introduction:
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