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The Connector Podcast - APIX
Join the conversation with Sourav Ghosal from APIX. He talks about how companies can innovate in the Financial Industry. He gives several tips on innovating and collaborating using the APIX platform.
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Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
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.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 0:20
Welcome to another episode of the connector podcast. And today I'm with Sourav the Sourav all the way from Singapore working for a company called Apix Sourav. Can you explain us what you guys do and for whom you're doing this?
Sourav Ghosal 0:35
Absolutely. Thank you for having me on the podcast. And thank you everyone for listening in. My name is sort of I lead commercial and business operations. Sales and partnerships for a company called Apix are an online platform based out of Singapore. And we help financial institutions fintechs educational institutions, which includes the students studying there, around the world, to discover emerging solutions and to innovate very quickly, very efficiently and in a cost effective manner. So customers tend to be large banks, large insurance, they also tend to be large regulators and multilateral agencies. And do is they come on our platform cone to host hackathons or to expose their data sets that technology is on our proprietary Digital Sandbox, which is then used by startups and fintechs, to build applications to experiment, to collaborate, and to ultimately showcase themselves in a positive light to these.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 1:59
So in essence, you would say it's all about collaboration, is that right?
Sourav Ghosal 2:05
Absolutely cannot collaboration is at the heart of what we do. We have an ecosystem today that has more than 1800 startups and fintechs. Wow, over 90 countries. That's amazing. It's taken us it's taken us five years, four and a half years to get here, CO and so we're very proud of the community that we've created. So more than 1800, fintechs and startups 1000s of developers and students. And of course, our our main customers, our main clients are the largest banks and the largest regulators around the world. We have over 100 of them today, who are using our services, to collaborate and innovate with these fintechs. And with these universities and students,
Koen Vanderhoydonk 2:52
that to me, it sounds like Apix has really completely changed the collaboration between financial institutions and fintech. Could you explain how it came about? And potentially also, what has been the first success that was booked by Apix?
Sourav Ghosal 3:07
That's a great question go on. And, look, I don't want to necessarily say the revolution has something. But But yes, to put it rather only we have seen some success. The platform Cohn was set up in 2017. By the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which is both the central bank and the regulator in Singapore, and the World Bank. These institutions came together to create a platform, what they wanted to do was create an industry sandbox, right, a sandbox, which essentially a safe area for people to experiment for people to test for people to build new things without the risk of breaking anything. So, you know, Singapore has always been quite progressive in terms of driving innovation in terms of promoting younger fintechs and startups to build solutions here. And that's where this platform came from. It was used by hundreds or 1000s of fintechs, to showcase their solutions to build solutions, and to work closely with with financial institutions here. Now, over the last four years, five years, we've moved beyond the national borders of Singapore. To our listeners, you may or may not be aware, but Singapore is in Southeast Asia. And Singapore is seen as a little bit of a trailblazer a little bit of a leading indicator of how innovation, how financial services how how the industry has such moves in this part of the world. So over the last four years gone. As Apix grew as the collaboration and innovation on this platform grew. We we slowly expand ended scope to Southeast Asia, working with some of the largest banks and some of the most exciting fintechs in this part of the world subsidy, we grew and we are now present in India. And very happy to state that we've got some of our first customers who have signed up and are using our product in in all the way from Europe to the Middle East to Africa and North America as well.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 5:31
What an amazing journey Souraf. And for a financial institution, because you mentioned that financial institutions are using you, what could be the main benefits they get from using your platform?
Sourav Ghosal 5:45
That's a very pertinent question corn and absolutely, you know, innovation very honestly, can tend to be a bit fuzzy can can can tend to be a bit woolly sometimes. So it's very important for us to explain to our customers, what is it that you can do? What is it what what happens when you innovate quickly, what happens when you innovate cheaply, what happens when you innovate at scale, globally, right. In our experience, going forward four key benefits that we have seen our customers gain or obtain when they use our platform. The first is, when they host hackathons or innovation challenges on our product platforms, which is one of our main products. It helps them find vendors, it helps them find solution providers, okay to some really difficult business and technical challenges they might be facing. Right? So can you imagine you're a bank, who are struggling to come up with a really top of line compliant anti money laundering service provider. Come on our platform, you can host this as a challenge. And AML providers from all over the world can showcase their solutions to you. And you can then figure out if which one is relevant which one works for your business, right? As an example, NPCI, which is the world's largest payments. Processor, today in India runs the UPI network, wanted to find a biometric and security authentication partner for every payments transaction, they ran a global platform. And they found vendors who could do this authentication. So that's really number one, which is solving difficult, challenging problems, and really going to the world and saying, who can solve this for me, right. The second area gone, which customers and financial institutions use us for is to find talent. Today, very honestly, if you're looking to hire developers, it's hard to find high quality talent and to do that in an effective manner. Right. You may spend a lot of time interviewing people, you may spend a lot of time doing other stuff. So what we've done well, especially for the likes of Goldman Sachs is ability to help them find top quality, technology, talent, developers interesting design. And, and yeah, hire them very quickly, in weeks as opposed to months.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 8:33
Nice, because they actually can do something practical, right? They can prove they can show that they're good developers, and I think they've got a sort of exposure together. Perfect fit like this. Interesting. Cool.
Sourav Ghosal 8:46
You're totally neocon is that what we try and do with some of our largest institutions is to drive a fundamental cultural shift within the organization. What we found is that even if top management wants to innovate, even if shareholders regulators want to innovate, if the organization of every employee in the organization is important to it, innovation is not never successful. So what we try and do with our innovation challenges are hackathons or sandbox products, which are three key main main products is we host internal challenges. We host internal programs for the likes of Prudential, which is one of the largest insurers across Asia, to build this internal culture of innovation. So think about it as senior management. Middle management empowers individual employees to come up with ideas to improve their business to improve their lives, to improve their customers lives. And we've seen that dramatically increase the chances of success of any innovative thinking and new in any innovative idea. And then finally gone. The fourth. And the final way in which we find financial institutions benefiting from our products. And it makes us a platform more broadly, is that they use our platform to signal to the market, that they are truly innovative, they are truly differentiated from a competitive perspective, from a customer service and delivery perspective. Because when they are hosting these global innovation challenges, what they're really saying is that, look, we are spending our money time resources doing this. And the market picks up on it. So what we found going is our customers when they come to us, when they host successful innovation challenges hackathons and user sandbox, their NPS scores, their visibility, their, you know, customer satisfaction results, their shareholder perception, all going up as a result.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 11:10
Clear, interesting. So these are, this is nice to share with the audience, because these are four domains in which you foster this collaboration, which you set in the beginning. And you know, when times when you're having fun times goes fast. So we were already heading towards the end of our podcast recording here. But I wanted to ask you, maybe to give you three best practices, very short, powerful, best practices that we as companies can actually use to start this innovative challenges. So where do we start?
Sourav Ghosal 11:49
Today question, I'll tell you three ways in which you can start and obviously the end answer is,
Sourav Ghosal 11:57
obviously,
Sourav Ghosal 11:59
obviously, so. But jokes aside con, three very short and impactful ways in which companies and your listeners can innovate, number one, start small, do not try to change the world on day one, do not try to change your organization on day one, think of something small, do something in a pilot stage. And you know, the success will lead to more success. Number one, good number two is do not try and find a neutral external environment, which is safe and yet secure. To do this experimentation, because you are doing something new, chances are something may fail, something may may collapse, and you don't want it to impact your business on a day to day basis. So find a safe environment, which is external or different factors, which looks like yours feels like yours, but it's not really yours. Because then that will give you the comfort of truly taking risks.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 13:02
That's a nice one, right?
Speaker 3 13:02
And the third one is, and I cannot stress this enough, be inclusive. Right? Be we found that if you're doing something in a digital online, and a global manner, the quality of ideas that you get will be fairly very different from if you're doing it within your organization or within your country or within your state or whatever the case may be. So use a global platform, have a global outlook, and be inclusive in including different points of perspective, different people, different backgrounds, etc, etc.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 13:41
Well, you almost inspire me, Souravbecause I've got my inoperative books inside of me or like tickling me to to get started. So let me come to that $1 million question. How can people actually reach you them?
Sourav Ghosal 13:56
Absolutely. So, the listeners if you are interested in collaborating to innovate, whether it's via a hackathon, whether it's via an innovation challenge, whether it's using other tools like digital sandboxes, and so on, we are here to help visit us at Apix platform.com. You can also look me up, my name is surah. So you are v dot g at Apix platform.com. Happy to help you and have the discussions that you need to start your innovation journey.
Koen Vanderhoydonk 14:28
Thank you so much, Sourav of having you in your podcast and thank you also to the listeners and please stay tuned for more information about innovation happening in our industry. Thank you so much.
Introduction 14:39
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Unknown Speaker 14:54
All right