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The Connector Podcast - DFS Digital Finance Summit - Fintech Document Revolution: Roel from Docapi on AI-Driven Innovations and E-Invoicing Mandates in Europe
Ready to unlock the secrets of fintech innovation? Discover how Roel, the mastermind behind Docapi, is transforming the landscape of smart document processing. As a spin-out from IXOR, Docapi is setting new benchmarks with its revolutionary APIs for financial documents like invoices, receipts, and pay slips. Roel shares the strategic decision to bootstrap Docapi, with a hint at potential investment opportunities on the horizon. If you've ever wondered how AI is reshaping the way we handle both unstructured and structured documents, this episode is a must-listen. We promise you'll gain insights into Docapi's journey from a Belgian startup to an international contender in the fintech arena.
But that's not all—brace yourself for a deep dive into the upcoming e-invoicing mandates set to rock Belgium and Europe. Roel provides an insider's perspective on the shifting landscape of B2B transactions and the technological adaptations required. With looming deadlines and varying European approaches, understanding these changes could be crucial for businesses looking to stay compliant and competitive. As we explore these significant transformations, you'll come away with a clearer understanding of how companies like Docapi are poised to lead in a rapidly evolving market. Don't miss out on this engaging conversation that blends practical insights with visionary thinking.
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Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Cohen van der Hooydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another podcast in close collaboration with Belgian FinTech, and today I've got with me Roel. And Roel, can you please tell me who you are and who you work for? And I'm deliberately not mentioning the name of your company, because I want to leave that for you.
Speaker 3:Okay, thank you, koen. I'm Roel. I'm working for a company and founder of the company, called Docapi, and Docapi is a new company created in October and it's a spin-out of the company XOR, and XOR is a general AI and cloud company and we had a product that maybe your listeners know called XOR Docs, and Docapi is the new name of XOR Docs and it's also the name of the company, of the spin out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because we already had you in the podcast before yes, thank you so, um, I was very curious now to learn a little bit more about the new company, so can you explain us and elaborate more? Um, take us on the journey, please.
Speaker 3:Yes yes, so it has been. It has been a year. So in this last year we created the company and DocApris is a smart document processing. Smart document processing of financial documents, mainly Financial documents, meaning an invoice, receipt, pay slip, paypal receipt, and so on and so on, and we have now created basically two APIs in in doc api, two apis for developers, because dokka is really a developer focused company and and we have two apis for for developers. One api is treating all the non-structured documents, which is like pd we apply AI to recognize what is on a scanned invoice or a scanned receipt. And the second one is really structured financial documents, structured documents like the PEPL invoicing, things that are now really a hot topic, I think, in the Belgian market.
Speaker 2:No, no, absolutely, and I want to zoom into that a little bit later.
Speaker 3:What I'm still sort of looking for is why the carve out there are people working in the company as well as to our customers, our customers. I think for our customers it will be very clear what DocUp stands for, and we don't want any mistake between what Ixor is doing and what DocUp is doing. So focus is really one of the main things, of the main reasons why we created DocUp. But also because Ixor is a Belgian company, docup is really created with an international focus too and a growth focus too. We see that in Belgium we will talk maybe about invoicing afterwards, but things that we are doing in Belgium around invoicing can really be used in Europe entirely and also Southeast Asia and Singapore and Japan and so on. So the second reason is really to have the focus also on the international part of the expansion.
Speaker 2:But honestly, ruul, I think that's a general trend, and a trend that should be welcomed is to sort of start your company with a global focus because it sort of makes sense in the landscape that we live.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is, it is, it is, and we are quite proud that we did it bootstrapped. So, without announcing 100 million of investment, are you looking for investment? We did it ourselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great, but would you be open for investment?
Speaker 3:Well, one of the reasons is maybe that in an international sales story, money is burning fast and so, yeah, maybe it will be an opportunity to do this.
Speaker 2:I'm sure that also the audience is very curious why we sort of said we talk about what's happening in Belgium later. Maybe this is the time to maybe explain why and what's happening on the e-invoicing in Belgium and more general than in Europe.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah Well, e-invoicing in Belgium, maybe I think you already know already that e-invoicing will be an obligation starting in less than a year. Now it sounds like a year, but it's basically.
Speaker 3:Very short yeah, three and a half quarters away and it's an obligation between businesses, so business-to-business invoicing. But the same thing is happening in the rest of Europe. There are sometimes other deadlines and sometimes other technologies or platforms or options that are chosen, but the same thing is happening in different places and different situations all over Europe. But more recently, like in November last year, there's also legislation voted called VIDA. Vida stands for VAT in a digital age, so it's VAT reporting in a digital age and it's voted that by 2030, it's still.
Speaker 2:Five years away.
Speaker 3:Five years away 60 quarters, I think, but still, the idea is that there is really an uniformization between the different countries concerning VAT reporting, so that, yeah, it's getting close to real time reporting, because the idea is that 10 days after you've provided the service, you have to issue the invoice, and five days after the invoice issuing, it should be sent through the platform and sent to the government too, so it's like a real-time VAT. So it's a hell of a transparent move of.
Speaker 3:Europe. It is, it is, it is, it is, and it's always built on the technologies that we are building now. And that's, I think, the interesting part of what we do in Belgium now, because Belgium is sometimes not really happy with what's happening, what people are sometimes complaining about what's happening in Belgium, but for electronic invoicing, for e-invoicing, belgium chose to really stick to a European standard called PEPL, and so there's no way around it. In Belgium, people need to in 26, send their invoices and receive invoices through the PEPL network, using the PEPL standards, which is, for us, a good thing, because everything we developed, supporting these standards in a safe way, iso certified and so on and so on, and so on, can really be used in the rest of Europe and also in the future, in five years for VIDA, for example.
Speaker 2:And you mentioned global expansion, so do you see a similar trend happening in Asia, middle East, us?
Speaker 3:Well, yes, yes, no.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, no okay.
Speaker 3:So Middle East Asia, south-west Asia, is really looking to Europe for all these standards. So Japan, malaysia, singapore, australia, new Zealand yes, they're all looking for the same thing. Us no, in the US there is no VAT covering the entire United States. They are no, no, no.
Speaker 2:Maybe, yeah, should make a better vote next time. No, just joking 2035, maybe yeah exactly, exactly. Let's see how that develops. Um, now your company is for a long, long time in in cloud and ai. Yeah, I'm working on documents and stuff. A lot of things are happening in cloud and a lot of things are happening in ai. What, what do you sort of see happening today, and how does that in fact impact your business?
Speaker 3:yeah, well yeah, a lot of happening is is happening in cloud and ai um in clouds. Uh, it's, it's really helping us in clouds. Uh, well, we couldn't do what we do without, without a proper uh cloud provider we use aws and and without their, their possibilities, where we have a completely serverless architecture so we can scale really fast. So, for example, when everybody is now doing VAT declarations now in the first, January there's a lot of usage so we can scale really up.
Speaker 3:But 20 days ago, when it was Christmas, there was really not really a lot of activity, so we can scale down. And cloud is really helping us there, and there we use the term as standing on the giant shoulders. That's really helping us there. Ai same thing. Things are really evolving very quickly. We started using AI like five, six years ago with our proper models and our own technology, and some of the things that we've done are thrown away for the moment. For example, the basic recognition of characters in an invoice is available widely. You can ask ChatGPT and he will tell you more or less what's in your invoice, but he will not tell you precisely every time what is the exact amount of VAT that you have to pay. So that's where we use our own models, using the same also deep learning models, but applying financial knowledge and adding financial knowledge to these models.
Speaker 2:Uh, so, yeah, we use the mixture of what's happening in the in the world and then our own additional, uh, own, uh, proprietary models, to, to, to improve uh specifically the financial uh knowledge and validation on top of it so it's a combination, and I guess that's what you hear a lot nowadays is that many companies were using it, but the ones that they've yeah, the, the, the, the ones that actually stay relevant or those that actually make sense on the business, singly trained on a specific purpose.
Speaker 3:Exactly. Yeah, that's what we think too. That's why we think that our focus on a pay slip and an invoice and a receipt is a good thing.
Speaker 2:Do you expect a lot of development on that side in terms of how AI could help you even further in doing this, or do you think you're already in a sort of state of perfection?
Speaker 3:No, no, no, no, no, no. Perfection no, not yet. Certainly we can. Well, we have a lot of. We've put a lot of time into giving tools also to humans to more fine tune our results. Sometimes the order is not on the invoice and people tend, for example, to copy the invoice number or something to an order label. And when people do this twice or five times, our models learn what people are doing and improve and just take what you're doing into the next time. And I think on this we are now using AI also to like look at it and simulate validation using more general AI tools.
Speaker 2:That makes a lot of sense. What sort of comes to mind is when we talk about cloud. There's a lot of collaboration, doing things together, but you also mentioned that you offer your services to a developer's community. So how does that work?
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, well, docup is really. Its focus is really on helping developers with the difficulties from hiding, the difficulties from path poll or recognition, and helping developers inserting or injecting this tech into whatever they have as bright ideas. We see a lot of people having good ideas on how to help butchers and smaller companies managing their invoices or their costs, and really a lot of people are taking the opportunity of e-voicing to build these kind of tools and really a lot of people are taking the opportunity of e-voicing to build these kind of tools. We provide the tech to build in and to at least not worry about the compliances of people or the difficulties of AI, but really focus on what you want to do and how you want to help your customers, and that's why we think we are helping them a lot, helping them a lot.
Speaker 2:We're almost at the end and obviously I want to just wish you all the best with the new company, docapi.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 2:But how can people contact you? If they want to do business with you? Where do they need to be?
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course, there's our website, docapiio, and you can always contact me also on LinkedIn, roel Verbeek Docapi. I'm also available on the XOR address, so you'll definitely find me.
Speaker 2:A lot of ways that lead to Roel.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, Roel.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you also to the audience and stay tuned. We'll come up with more FinTech news. Thank you, you're welcome. Bye.
Speaker 1:Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to wwwjointhekonnectorcom or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.