The Most Impactful Unicorn Companies to Watch 2019

www.insightssuccess.com April 2019 VOL-04 April-2019

ISSUE-05

The Most Impactful

Unic rn Companies to Watch 2019

Editor’s Choice Impacts of Artificial Intelligence has Started Resonating in CRM Industry

Franchise Ecosystem Is Franchise A Profitable Stroke Of Business?

Revolution Precrafted Constructing the Dream Infrastructures

E A Stature, Every Start-Up Desires For

T

hey might have stumbled at start, but their desires of triumph have never seen the glimpse of dusk. Their passion and effortless contribution in their distinctive field, took their ventures in achieving its current unicorn stature. These individuals or commune, referred above as ’they’, are the leaders and workforce behind the impeccable architects of their businesses. Altogether such entities form a systematic enterprise which facilitates best products and services to stand apart from the competition.

Unicorn status is gained by those privately owned start-up companies who are valued over $1 billion. As most of you might know, the term was first coined by a venture capitalist named Aileen Lee in order to acknowledge the statistical rarity of successful ventures. This special edition of Insights Success focuses on such companies who exceptionally have attained flagship in their respective industries. Through quoting—“Opportunities don’t happen. You create them,” sales advisor of Tesla, Chris Grosser exemplifies that to reach the uttermost heights of success an organization must create own opportunities rather waiting for them to occur.

Personally, I believe that an organization or a start-up must craft a full-proof business structure in order to tackle the capricious phases of markets further gaining more benefits from such fluctuations. These organizations hold the potential to create an enormous disruption in the future. As being funded with a billion dollars valuation makes them a promising venture or else they would not have been funded with such. The most common required characteristics to attain such stature are: to be disruptively inventive, gaining first mover advantage, technology paradigm shift capitalization, to be consumer focused, and has to be private company.

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Unicorn is a valuation through which a startup could revolutionize the business to heights.

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Bhushan Ghate

With ‘The 20 Most Impactful Unicorn Companies to Watch, 2019’ edition, let us admire such unicorn companies and appreciate their contribution in evolving the customary ways of businesses. Insights Success takes pride to address some of them companies in this issue.

The cover story comprises the global leader in branded prefab structures, Revolution Precrafted. Launched in 2015, the organization offers branded prefab homes, pavilions, glamping accommodations, medical and commercial pop-ups, museums, furniture and soon office spaces. It has become the fastest company to be labeled as a unicorn in Southeast Asia. It is currently in the middle of an aggressive expansion program and is on the cusp of opening its regional headquarters in Dubai, and New York among others. Revolution Precrafted is consciously introducing its ground breaking technologies to regions of the world that need more decent, stable homes, including parts of South and Central America, Africa and Asia. At the same time, it provides customers from developed countries and regions an alternative choice in terms of their homes. At the moment, it has footprint in 27 countries with total projected gross market value of over $9 billion.

Let’s unveil such alike, inspiring interviews and stories of many such significant business leaders and educators in this special edition and spread a word about their contribution in making this world a better place. Also, flip through the CXO standpoints presented by some of the leading industry experts to taste the glimpse of industrial revolutions.

Happy Reading….

Revolution Precrafted Constructing the Dream Infrastructures ARTICLES

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Industry Trends Key POS Trends Reshaping the Retail Sector

Editor’s Choice

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RY O T S

S T EN

T N O

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Impacts of Articial Intelligence has Started Resonating in CRM Industry

Franchise Ecosystem

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Is Franchise A Protable Stroke Of Business?

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Expert’s Outlook

Expert’s Opinion

Industry Insider

AsiaPay: Expand your eCommerce business into Asia Gold Mine

Transforming the World with Data based Solutions

Fintech: The Next Big Thing

Beam

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Changing the Way of Banking

Boatsetter

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Sailing towards Global Success

EntrenaYA

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Assisting in Accomplishing Fitness Goals

Faception

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A Trailblazing Security Solutions Provider

GetLinks

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Fostering Asia's digital transformation through uniting its technology workforce

Kabam

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A Winning Streak in the Gaming Industry

Lingokids

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English Learning Made Simple

PlateJoy

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Discover the Easy Way to Eat Better

Tinfoil Security

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Security for Developers and DevOps

Editor-in-Chief Pooja M. Bansal Managing Editor Anish Miller

Executive Editor

Assistant Editors

Hitesh Dhamani

Jenny Fernandes Bhushan Kadam

Visualizer

Art & Design Director

Associate Designer

David King

Amol Kamble

Shubham Mahadik

Senior Sales Manager Co-designer

Co-designer Rahul Kavanekar

Business Development Manager

Passi D.

Peter Collins

Marketing Manager

Sales Executives

John Matthew

David, Kevin, Mark, Avadhut

Technical Head

Business Development Executives

Jacob Smile

Steve, Joe, Alan, Anup

Technical Specialist Aditya

Digital Marketing Manager Marry D'Souza

SME-SMO Executive Prashant Chevale

Research Analyst Patrick James

Database Management Stella Andrew

Circulation Manager Robert Brown

Technology Consultant David Stokes

sales@insightssuccess.com March, 2019 Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com

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Cover Story to Watch 2019

REVOLUTION PRECRAFTED Constructing the Dream Infrastructures

“A home is one of the most important purchases any person can make, so we know that there will always be demand.

We hope that more and more people will appreciate the benefits and convenience of a prefab home”

Robbie Antonio Founder and CEO

aunched in 2015, Revolution Precrafted is the global leader in branded prefab structures. The organization offers branded prefab homes, pavilions, glamping accommodations, medical and commercial pop-ups, museums, furniture and soon office spaces. It has become the fastest company to be labeled as a unicorn in Southeast Asia. It is currently in the middle of an aggressive expansion program and is on the cusp of opening its regional headquarters in Dubai, and New York among others.

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Precrafted, is the visionary behind the company. He conceptualized the idea of branded prefab, changing the way the world perceives prefab structures and debunking misconceptions about the industry. In fact, he contributed to the acceptance of prefab structures for homes all around the world. He has also been chosen as one of the “25 Pioneers Who Are Transforming the Built World” by BuiltWorlds.

The Singapore Straits Times has also named him as one among “50 Asians Who Are Transforming the Way We Live”

Revolution Precrafted is consciously introducing its ground breaking technologies to regions of the world that need more decent, stable homes, including parts of South and Central America, Africa and Asia. At the same time, it provides customers from developed countries and regions an alternative choice in terms of their homes. At the moment, it has footprint in 27 countries with total projected gross market value of over $9 billion. It has bookings of over 40,000 units for the next 3-4 years. In order to provide more value to its customers, the company is also considering ways to offer additional products as part of its brand extension initiative including fintech, hydroponics, affordable housing, and hotels among others. The organization is also planning to offer products and accessories related to housing and home lifestyle.

To date, he has worked with 13 Pritzker Prize Architects/firms such as Zaha Hadid, Philip Johnson Alan Ritchie architects, Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, I.M. Pei, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and Christian de Portzamparc, as well as designers such as Ron Arad, Campana Brothers, Tom Dixon, Philippe Starck, and Marcel Wanders. He has worked with over 103 notable brands in various fields—including fashion, Hollywood, luxury, design, and art. Robbie has established the largest number of luxury branded real estate developments across the globe, by working with Giorgio Armani for Armani Casa, Versace Home, Missoni Home, Paris Hilton, Lenny Kravitz and Wallpaper Magazine. He also became the youngest person to be included in the Forbes Philippines 50 Richest List in 2017 and 2018.

Unique Solutions Revolution Precrafted offers assistance in securing global brand partnerships for its real estate projects, and prospective businesses exclusive access to its retail, fashion and food & beverage concepts. The company also takes care of the architectural and interior designs as well.

Revolution Precrafted also acts solely as a supplier of prefabricated structures to the project site and provides a chance to develop its projects in the chosen territory.

The organization uses advanced robotics to simplify fabrication processes, resulting in faster and more efficient construction of parts. Recently, the company has also introduced smart technologies in order to ensure the security of each home.

Dreams Constructor Robbie Antonio, the Founder and CEO of Revolution

“We are a global supplier of branded, limited edition prefab homes, pavilions and other related structures around the world. Our business model is B2B2C and we operate on an asset-light, risk free business model.”

He is one of the youngest and most prolific collectors of international modern and post-war contemporary art in the world. Because of his accomplishments as an art collector, he has received a number of awards from many different organizations. In 2014, Artnet recognized him as one of “20 of the World’s Most Innovative Art Collectors”, while in 2015, he became the part of Artnet’s “Top 200 Art Collectors Worldwide”. Artnet also recognized him with two awards in 2016: as one of twelve young art collectors to watch out for, as well as one of the top 100 art collectors for that year. In May 2018, he was named “Real Estate Personality of the Year” by PropertyGuru.

His passion for art has also led him to collaborate with artists such as Marina Abramovich, Maurizio Catellan, Francesco Clemente, Damien Hirst, Zhang Huan, David La Chapelle, Marilyn Minter, Takashi Murakami, Julian Opie, and Julian Schnabel.

Sustaining the Dignity Revolution Precrafted believes that it was fortunate that its journey towards becoming a unicorn company was a relatively smooth sailing one, with few bumps and rough patches along the way.

Robbie Antonio states that, “I think it is largely because of the very strong business model that we have. It is truly unique and revolutionary. As soon as we got our star architects on board, there was already a lot of support and interest from customers, investors and the real estate world.”

The team of Revolution Precrafted is working round the clock to elevate the status and image of the company to ensure that it sustain the reputation and value that it has built over the past few years.

Overcoming the Obstructions Revolution Precrafted sees challenges

“Our goal is to become a company that plays an integral role in the built industry. We want to be present in 85 to 100 countries by the year 2020. I think we are on track of achieving that.”

“We want to offer something different and unique to the market. We want to democratize design and make it accessible to everyone. Because of our business model, it is now possible to own a branded, limited edition home at a fraction of the cost.” as opportunities which are waiting to happen. As the market can be flimsy and the demand for homes go in cycles, then also, the firm respond by continuously offering new products, and improving its product portfolio so both of its corporate and B2C customers can have a lot of options.

The team of Revolution Precrafted believes, homes are the most important thing any human can buy, so there will always be a demand. It’s just up to an organisation how it will market itself along with its products.

While there had been challenges in the beginning, Revolution Precrafted was able to overcome them. Since its launch, the organization has struggled to grab numerous projects including its flagship $1.1 billion Batulao Artscapes project in the Philippines. The project received a lot of attention during its launch and it completely captured the essence of what the company is all about: the marriage of architecture and branded design and art. Envisioned to be the world's first livable art park, there are homes and museums designed by some of the world’s leading architects and designers. The list includes Pritzker winners Jean Nouvel, Philip Johnson Alan Ritchie Architects, Tange Associates and Christian de Portzamparc.

Another landmark project for the company is worth $750 million, which is Flavorscapes project where the company has committed to supply 14,000 homes. The main amenities of this project include a museum of ice cream, museum of candy, chocolate gallery and microbrewery with beer gardens.

Future Framework Revolution Precrafted is currently offering eight product lines but there is so much potential when it comes to

branded prefab structures. The company is looking into branded medical facilities, schools and offices along with the new technologies that would enable it to build vertical structures above the usual 4-5 storeys. Revolution Precrafted is looking at opening offices in United Arab Emirates, France, USA, and Brazil among others.

Revolution Precrafted’s goal is to become big enough that it will have an integral role in the lives of many. The organization wants to be able to serve as a vehicle for people around the globe to finally own the home they dream of, and they deserve. The firm already has its footprints in 27 countries, and also wants to be present in all regions, across all demographics.

In order to sustain its tremendous growth, Revolution Precrafted is looking at some financial exercises that will help the company to finance its future projects. It is also looking into bitcoins and a possible public offering by the year 2022.

The organization is also looking forward at ways to create additional revenue streams and one of them is to market by products related to housing and home lifestyle.

Revolution Precrafted hope to launch a global CSR campaign that will allows us to give back to the global community. We have some ideas but we are finalizing them still.

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Expert’s Outlook

AsiaPay: Expand your eCommerce business into AsiaConsumer Gold Mine

About the Author Joseph Chan is the founder and CEO at AsiaPay, where he is expanding the standard of e-payment of several businesses and applying technology in the financial industry globally.

Joseph founded AsiaPay in August 2000 and leads the company and its product development together with his qualified management team, to become one of the most successful electronic payment service and technology company in Asia. At present, AsiaPay operations are covering 16 countries worldwide with its unified payment solutions. With his successive positions in banking and finance industry, Joseph has consolidated his expertise and experience in strategic planning, management and implementation of financial, electronic banking, Internet and mobile product services and systems in Asia.

"The passion to apply technology in the financial world drove me to boldly start an e-payment business," asserts Joseph at the China Daily Asia Leadership Meet.

Before AsiaPay, Joseph worked at various management positions at Barings, Citibank N.A., Bank of America, and Dah Sing Bank. He carries Bachelor of Science degree and Master of Economics degree from Monash University in Australia. He is also actively participates and contributes to the development of e-Commerce and e-Payment in the community and is an active member of various renowned associations in Asia.

Joseph Chan CEO AsiaPay

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APRIL 2019|

C

ompanies in the North America are beginning to see the Asian market for what it is: A consumer gold mine. Any global company that does not at least try to penetrate into this market is at a major disadvantage. Yet, there are still a vast number of them that are not willing to ‘launch out into the deep’. This is mainly due to concerns about bringing their product to a largely unknown foreign market.

One of the most worrying factors is Cyber security. For example, a US online retailer needs to know that their product can be safely shipped and delivered to its Asian customers. This means maneuvering through the logistics and custom duties of both countries. Once this issue being sorted out, then the challenge of having a secure payment method is the most important component. The transactions would have to be completed online and you will need a trust worthy payment provider.

Making the Jump It is true that launching your product to another country or region is a huge project. The culture is so diverse that there is a fear of a policy problems, culture differences, competition etc. There are few companies that can make this process much easier. The key is to partner with industry experts who already know the cultural challenges of penetrating the markets. Take for example, AsiaPay which is one of the top electronic payment solution and technology providers in the Asia pacific region.

AsiaPay is an ISO certified payment service provider in Asia. We provide a one-stop comprehensive payment processing in the Asia-pacific region (multi-acquirers and local settlement) and across various prevailing alternate payment methods and channels. This is especially the case for Asia where payment is very different from the West.

While Americans and Europeans are still attached to cash and credit cards, China has ditched them both. The major payment method is directly through one’s phone through applications like WeChat and AliPay in China. AsiaPay has the widest payment processing and settlement network of ‘Credit Card Acquirers’ and ‘Alternative Methods of Payments’ across 14 countries. This enables the organization to provide merchants, banks, and other payment providers the best combination of payment methods per country based on local infrastructure and consumer preferences.

Besides, AsiaPay has specifically designed its payment gateway platform to deliver unparalleled security, customizability, scalability, and reliability. It is also one of the few providers in Asia to be certified as Level 1 PCI DSS. Importantly, AsiaPay’s bank-grade security is APRIL 2019|

recognized by acquiring banks and card associations worldwide.

Presently Asiapay is processing a total of 144 currencies in global transactions in real time. This creates simplicity for the merchant who is able to use one base currency for multiple currency processing. It also creates transparency for the customer who can see a clear currency conversion to his or her domestic currency. This is very crucial in the checkout process. If the customer can see a near accurate price, they are more comfortable purchasing the product.

Partnering with companies like AsiaPay makes the transition process significantly easier and provides a streamlined system for analyzing payment data.

In summary, North America’s online retailers should consider having a strategic entry plan into the Asian market. Without doubt, Asia is the new super power in terms of population growth, economics and purchasing power.

A Focused and Clear Vision AsiaPay has achieved tremendous success in a short span of time. A large part of the credit goes to its founder, Mr. Joseph Chan, who is also the CEO of the company. He established AsiaPay in August 2000 and led both management and product development during the challenging early days.

He today contributes to the company by focusing on strategic planning and management in the areas of finance, electronic banking, and internet and mobile product services.

Joseph has also contributed to the growth of the industry by filling the role of an inspirational and insightful leader. His contributions to the industry has been recognized with various awards and commendations, including “China Outstanding Innovative Entrepreneur Award”, “Asia Pacific Entrepreneurship Awards 2013”, “the Most Promising Entrepreneurship Award” , “EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2014” award, “Cards & Electronic Payments International (CEPI) Asia Disruptor 2016” Award，”2017 (Industry) Influential Leader” ， World Business Leader 2017– Award”，and 2018 ‘The 50 Most Influential Payment Professionals awards’.

Joseph work tirelessly to take AsiaPay forward with a focused and clear vision of growth to guide the company to becoming a leading global electronic payment company.

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Beam: Changing the Way of Banking Aaron Du Founder & CEO

Beam

B

anking today is a competitive world, where it’s difficult to truly differentiate between the loan or asset side. According to American Bankers, the deposit side of the balance sheet, however, is going through a radical generational shift, with millennials constituting over 40% of the U.S. workforce by 2022. How banks choose to leverage mobile banking technology—more than being an industry “hot topic”—is a key competitive differentiator, one that can substantively fortify a bank’s core deposit franchise and its M&A valuation. Beam is here to provide a proven solution.

Driven by a mission to inspire justice and simplicity in banking and beyond, Beam provides a bolt-on, software-asa-service, referral-based mobile banking solution to banks looking to build and differentiate on their consumer core deposit franchise. Beam leverages state-of-the-art technology that can help a bank implement an in-house direct banking business with no substantive upfront capital investment, marketing, IT or staffing costs. It’s the “Marcus

by Goldman Sachs” equivalent for ambitious community banks who wants to be a part of the millennial future.

Leading from the Front Aaron Du is the Founder and CEO of Beam. Du has more than 16 years of experience working in the financial services and digital technology industries as well as extensive experience as a web/mobile product designer and a technology entrepreneur. Prior to Beam Financial Inc., Du

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founded and built an internet e-commerce business in Asia which attracted over $50 million in venture investments.

The company eventually grew to an operation involving 4,500 full-time employees across 102 cities and generated over $180 million in annual revenue.

Prior to his career in technology, Du worked at a variety of premier financial firms, including private equity at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, where he was involved in a number of investments in the retail banking and technology sectors, and investment banking at JPMorgan Chase & Co., first in its Financial Institutions & Governments group and later in its Mergers & Acquisitions group. Du’s other financial service experience include stints at Merrill Lynch and W.R. Hambrecht & Co. Du received his M. Eng. and S.B. degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, as well as an S.B. degree in Economics, from MIT, where he graduated with honors with his education fully sponsored by the Teh Ching Li Foundation Scholarship. Du received his MBA degree from Harvard Business School, and studied at Cambridge University in its Faculty of Economics and Politics.

A Beam of Vision and Innovation Beam envisions a future in which it becomes a trusted household name for millions of U.S. consumers. The organization is devoted to this vision and has demonstrated APRIL 2019|

a knack for balancing software engineering and financial engineering to solve problems for consumer depositors and financial institutions.

for Beam’s innovative services and millennial-friendly solutions. Beam’s core values and the beliefs of the company have played a vital part in its remarkable success.

HOW BEAM WORKS—Jack’s Beam Journey 1.Start. A prospective depositor, Jack, is referred by a friend who uses Beam to https://meetbeam.com and signs up the free, no-obligation “Beta” email waitlist.

2.

After a few weeks Jack receives an email to open a “Beta” account at Beam, which is FDIC-insured

by Beam’s bank partner. Jack downloads the Beam app on his phone, and within 30 seconds, completes the KYC process which includes a live Driver’s License verification. Beam then swiftly walks Jack through an animated tutorial, guiding him through how to fund Beam with a single swipe, and start earning.

3.

But journey doesn’t end here. All Beam users receive a guaranteed 2% “Base Rate” and there are several ways to use the Beam app to boosts the reward rate through an innovative, playable “Billie system”: Ÿ Every day from 6—9PM, Jack receives a free “Billie” which is a reward token that boosts his daily rate above 2%, sometimes over 4% daily rate. Jack can also accumulate Billies for later use. Ÿ For each friend he refers to Beam’s free, noobligation email waitlist, Jack earns 3 more Billies. Ÿ Interest rewards are paid daily, and Beam makes it easy for Jack to check his daily earnings and whom he had referred.

4.

With only a few taps, Jack can share a Beam invite link right from his Beam app to his friends.

Friends of Jack can download Beam from App Store of Play Store right away, which sets them up for a Beam “Trial” account and also adds them to the “Beta” waitlist. While waiting for “Beta”, they can also refer friends to join the waitlist. For each referral, they not only move up their waitlist spots, but also earn the same 3-Billie reward. The journey repeats.

According to Beam some of its vital attributes are: The most important aspects of Beam that govern everything from Beam’s grand vision to its day to day operations are its laser-sharp focus on prioritizing its resources to promote efficiency, soundness in making good decisions with independent, rational thinking, bringing a rigorous A-Game approach to maintain excellence and success, and finally exemplary service which is the heart of what Beam does.

“Millennials today are increasingly value-driven and joy-driven. Bank accounts today don’t maximize either; Beam is here to lead this change.”

Overcoming Adversities and Assuring Future Beam believes banking innovation takes time and changing banking is a marathon, not a sprint. Ensuring customers of innovation and it significance during the practice phase has been the major challenge for the company since its inception.

However, the combination of expertise overlaying banking repertoire and software repertoire is what differentiates Beam from its competitors. By creating these solutions, the company envisions becoming a trusted household name in banking by 2022.

WHAT BEAM VALUES In the modern era, where simplicity and customer word-ofmouth are everything, offering an innovative approach to essential but time-consuming banking necessities is commendable. Banking industry veterans around the world have recognized the same and have expressed admiration

APRIL 2019|

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Industry Trends

Key POS

Trends

Reshaping

the Retail

I

n recent times, the retail industry hasn’t seen a more exciting invention since the invention of cash register.

With new and innovative technologies helping shape both online and offline experiences for consumers, the landscape is continuously changing in a way which was unimaginable even few years back. The best part is that there seems to be no end of the innovation, which only influencing the purchase decision of the consumers.

Nowadays the main focus of retailers is to create a safe, engaging, and unique shopping experience for its consumers, it’s very important for the retailers to understand the importance of Big Data and in-store analytics and adapting to the cloud. With the retail industry at the verge of massive transformation, we are listing out few key trends that everyone needs to know to be successful in the ecosystem that is transforming quickly.

Multi-system Integration Multi-system integration with various applications gets the utmost priority from top retailers. Most of the retailers list out POS integration with other applications as a key priority alongside the implementation of dynamic marketing content through mobile devices. This is mostly due to the retailer’s interest to store all the customer information and purchase history in a database, which is completely centralized that could be easily integrated with multiple applications.

However, in order to do that, a retailer needs to use an ERP database that can handle all these.

Speed People always look for quick solutions for everything. A clock starts ticking the moment a customer enters, no matter how good the product is, if the process is slow and the attention to details are missing, then customers will leave

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Sector

disappointed. As a retailer, one cannot please everyone, but with a modern and efficient POS, the service can be improved. A modern POS simplifies the communication between various departments and can save a lot of time for both the retailer and the customer respectively.

Managing Stocks Keeping and managing inventory is a nightmare for most of the retailers, and it’s quite natural. Managing inventory is a never-ending task and takes a lot of effort, time, and manpower. However, it is quite important to manage inventories when it comes to long-time survival. An efficient POS system always makes the process of managing the inventory much easier. The best part of a POS is, one can monitor the status of stocked items, shipped products, and new orders anytime. This is a huge time saver for a cumbersome and a tedious process, and eventually helps retailers to focus on other important aspects of running the business.

Customized Experience With POS systems, retailers just need to provide personalization that scoops out every shopper. Every passing year, retailers are adapting to personalized technology solutions that allow an interactive user experience. Thanks to the emergence of all new mobile POS technology, now retailers can offer its customers more choices to accommodate their shopping habits by letting them to complete transactions anywhere in the store. Now with the invention of improved POS marketers and customer service teams can contact the buyer at each point of their purchase decision. With so much data retailers and consumers can have better customer service, quicker payment processes and access to better offers and real-time personalization.

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Promotions and Marketing at its Best Nowadays with the advent of digital technology, marketing involves maintaining a digital presence as well. A POS can integrate all the advertised offers with transactions, making it easier to keep track of all the campaigns. Additionally, it can integrate with CRM and track customer behavior. When an offer gets popular among the masses, then the retailer will see it in his transaction data.

Usage of Big Data analytics In order to compete with e-commerce, retailers are now taking the help of Big-Data and in store analytics just to have a better idea about what’s happening inside the store.

Big-Data analytics helps retailers to track how frequently a specific item moves from shelf to shopping cart allows retailers to know the trends that are dominant in the market.

Analytics helps the retail industry in a big way to better understand consumer purchase pattern and behaviors.

Keeping Track of Employees To run a business smoothly a retailer, need few people. A POS system enables to manage them with great accuracy.

With a Point of Sale system in place, employees can sign on or off easily and the system will automatically log their work hours and break hours.

Security Above all, a POS system offers great security protections that help keeping customer data safe. Retail stores and businesses are always prime targets for Cyber Criminals, and a data breach is not good for a business. So, by using standard encryption and firewall, businesses can be secured from cyber-attacks and customers can swipe their cards with a peace of mind.

So, here we have listed out few of the POS trends that will shape the future of the retail industry. As we look ahead, these trends will be on focus for both retailers and customers. The main advantage of an advanced POS system is greater efficiency and optimization, it links all the departments together which eventually allows to have better control over the inventory, better profitability, and to manage processes in an efficient way.

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Boatsetter: Sailing towards Global Success Jaclyn Baumgarten Co-founder & CEO

Boatsetter

P

eople’s love for water activities is inexplicable, and having a pleasure of such activities is one of the memorable experiences.

A Fort Lauderdale, FL headquartered platform, Boatsetter exists to connect the boating world in a way it has never been connected before. It connects boat owners and licensed captains with renters; enabling anyone to enjoy almost any type of on the water experience they desire cruising, active water sports, fishing, blue water sailing, and more - regardless of their boating experience. It is the world's leading boat rental platform with boats throughout the United States, Mexico, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, South America, and the Mediterranean. Founded by seasoned industry veterans in 2013, Boatsetter offers the most convenient and safest possible boat rental opportunity for both owners and renters, with 24/7 customer support on and off the water, America’s most comprehensive insurance for peer-to-peer boat rentals, covering owners, renters, and captains; and best-in-class insurance coverage internationally.

Creating a Horizon of Opportunities Boatsetter is first of its kind peer to peer boat rentals platform with world first peer-to-peer marine insurance policy. To ensure the Boatsetter a realistic possibility, its

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Founder and CEO, Jaclyn Baumgarten extensively worked with the world’s leading insurance platforms. She came to the conclusion that the traditional recreational boat insurance policies preclude owners from renting their boats, and traditional commercial policies are cost-prohibitive for occasional peer-to-peer renters.

On the contrary, she set Boatsetter to offer “Airbnb of Boating Experiences”, allowing private boat owners, for the first time, to easily, safely, and legally rent their boats directly to other people. It allows renters to easily rent highquality, personally-owned boats all over the world straight from their computer or smartphone. Boatsetter also makes it possible for renters to easily find and hire a captain to take them out on the boats, making boating available to everyone, regardless of their boating experience.

Jaclyn not only built her company but the entire P2P boat rental sector. With Boatsetter, she is making the boating experience accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Boatsetter has succeeded in introducing entirely new demographics to boating. Today, in the US, the average age of boaters is 59 and aging, and 87% of boaters are male. On the Boatsetter platform, 39% of users are women, 79% of users are under 45, and 55% of users are under 35.

Jaclyn has created an entirely new industry - peer-to-peer

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boat rentals - that is turning around a three-decade aging trend in the boating sector, and bringing three new generations - Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z, as well as women of all ages into boating.

Addressing the Root Cause According to Jaclyn, for optimizing the best performance of your company, it is essential to address root cause instead of wasting important resources on temporary solutions. She recalls a pivotal experience that helped Boatsetter to mark its global success.

During its initial period Boatsetter launched a push to increase the number of successful rentals on Boatsetter. The company had various options to pursuit this goal increasing marketing, improving UI/UX, growing the sales team. However, within few weeks the company realized it was harder than expected to get renters placed with a boat given the large number and great fit of the boats that were listed on Boatsetter. After researching, the team of experts found that a significant number of owners were rarely accepting renters’ requests to rent their boats. Taking it further, Jaclyn and her team spoke directly with those boat owners and discovered that many of them didn’t have the time or didn’t live close enough to manage their boats themselves. Hence, they decided to build a boat management program to allow third party professionals to manage boat owners’ boats and rentals for them. Jaclyn mentions, “If we wouldn’t have analyzed or discovered the root issue and just focused on solving the more superficial symptoms of the core issue, we would have never succeed in optimizing at the most efficient point, at the base of the issue.”

Success Mantra Boatsetter believes it must continue to invest in development of its product and build it to scale well, which will further fortify the exponential growth coming at the company. Because with marketplaces like Boatsetter, Airbnb, etc., growth tends to increase exponentially, while it’s hard to grow highly skilled human resources faster than logarithmically, companies like Boatsetter evidently have to build great technology that will ensure its success.

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Jaclyn at the helm of the company affairs asserts that as an entrepreneur and the CEO my area of expertise is in identifying a market need, and then pulling together and leading the team, funders, partners and etc. which are necessary to conceptualize and build the solution to cater the growing market needs. She visions to continue the same and desires leading the company growth with her expertise.

Testimonials of Excellence “Used Boatsetter for my 30th birthday and it was amazing!

My group of 6 sailed around San Francisco Bay and I could not be happier with the service they provided.” - Scott W. Thornburg

“Boatsetter is the Airbnb of boating experiences.”

“I had an unbelievable experience using Boatsetter! I was completely new to renting boats and had only been on the water a few times, and the true simplicity of reserving a boat online with someone showing me the ropes at the marina right before launching out was awesome! I can just imagine how difficult this whole process would be without Boatsetter! Just like the iPhone, once you use Boatsetter once, you can never imagine renting a boat in the old way again! Thanks Boatsetter for an awesome day, I'll definitely be seeing you again soon!” - Jonathan Timianko “Easiest way we’ve found to go out on the water! Great site, the boats are beautiful. The captains were super professional and friendly. I recommend looking here first if you're looking to rent a boat in the US, the Med, or the Caribbean”. - Angela Armenakis

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EntrenaYA: Assisting in Accomplishing Fitness Goals Javier Wasserman Co-founder & CEO

EntrenaYA

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hysical exercise is essential part of our lives. We all love to have a toned physic and a healthy lifestyle. Every one of us choose various activities to keep ourselves fit; be it diets, cross fit, yoga, pilates, dance, cardio or any other gym exercise we try everything. Although essential, at some point of time, due to laziness or any of the reasons most of us stop the exercise. When asked we blame lack of guidance, temporary health issues occurred during practice or other difficulties affecting consistency. It is also an unwavering fact that sometimes pertaining to lack of guidance we choose an unsuitable type of exercise or diet which results in quitting the endeavor.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina, EntrenaYA is unique alternative acquisition channel for fitness centers that enable its customer to choose suitable physical exercises and suggests the best options nearby. Making it more interesting, the platform offers exciting packages and discounts across Argentina and other counties worldwide, ensuring the utmost customer satisfaction.

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Reforming Health Habits EntrenaYA was founded with a mission to improve health habits of busy workforce around the world. It has developed a platform that helps users find a suitable health activity in their near location, which plays a crucial part in improving their health. The company believes alike every industry there is a specific buying and selling pattern in the fitness industry. The potential customers are initially driven by the powerful motivation to begin the training. However, most of them quit the training before three months because of the extensive and sweating training methods. Gym owners find it difficult to retain such volatile customer base. EntrenaYA envisions addressing this issue by offering the training at customer’s convenience. Its alliances with gyms and other fitness institutions enable it to offer unequivocal discounts including first three months of personal training programs.

The company has been delivering a great service and results for both users and associated gyms and fitness centers, for last four years. Its evident success in Argentina has developed array better opportunities for

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the platform. In next six months the company is aiming towards a growth in Spain and Chile, and investing diligently to begin its operations in respective countries.

Additionally, the company is willing to offer additional digital services for mid and large gym owners as a digital agency as it has witnessed an exponential growth as an e-commerce platform for fitness industry since its inception.

The Path Breaker Javier Wasserman is the Co-founder and CEO of EntrenaYA. He believes one must have vision and intuition to create something innovative. EntrenaYA is pioneer in fitness broker platforms and is considerably different from other fitness platforms online. It’s UI and even offerings are inimitably exclusive and efficient than competition. Javier asserts his unique academic credentials have been the major factor behind the platform’s distinctiveness. He has worked as software developer in several industries for the last fifteen years and has extensive tech background. However, he mentions he is skilled in several digital disciplines and perhaps specialist in none of them. Hence, he likes to mention himself as an innovator instead of tech geek.

EntrenaYA was one of the first and foremost online fitness broker platforms. Today, more than thirty platforms has marked their presence and EntrenaYA has been the inspiration for them.

Shaping the Future Bringing a new business model in Argentinian market is comparatively difficult due to the excessive tax pressure and complexity. In addition, there is a very small venture capital scenario compared to other countries in this region. These two key issues make the most of the noise in the growth of disruptive startups like EntrenaYA. Thus, entrepreneurs are required to be more creative and adaptive while introducing an innovative platform or solution in Argentina. Ensuring these issues are addressed with precision, EntrenaYA has been able to attract significant number of customers in this region.

The company is positively working towards its

“We help fitness enthusiasts to find the fitness activity they most like, and enable them to keep on doing it until they accomplish their fitness goals” expansion plans in Chile and other South American countries. With its exclusivity and sculpted vision it will surely shape the future of new age fitness platforms.

Work is Life!

EntrenaYA’s both the founders, Javier Wasserman and Nicolás Cohen walked a long mile to make the company what it is today. Javier recalls during the exponential period in 2015, Javier and Nicolás had an opportunity to accelerate EntrenaYA’s growth with 500 start-ups in Mexico DF. For more than six months away from home and everything owned, they worked extensively to prove their mettle. The experience of dedicatedly working for the cause itself flowered with lifetime learning and earning. Working for the company is a sole purpose for Javier. He states he can’t imagine another way to create and live in a company which is all about them. He believes weather its coding, calling clients, strategizing for further expansions or learning something new, everything is work and this work is life.

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Expert’s Opinion

Ondrej Tomas CEO

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Transforming

Data based

Solutions Ondrej Tomas is the CEO of CleverAnalytics.com CleverAnalytics is Location Intelligence and Analysis platform driven by the business cases of CEOs, COOs, Network, Sales and Marketing executives. It excels in processing really large data sets and combining internal and external data into one data model.

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or quite a few years now Data is a new business mantra. Data is strategic asset, data is a key to unlock real business potential. Everything seems to dance around the data fire. So why would there be any need for more data, more data analytics, more tools?

Obviously the challenging part is turning the data into information and turning the information into valuable insights. I personally went through many iterations of this value chain. I was on the vendor side providing data warehouse technology and business intelligence tools as well as being on the customer side, trying to find the right tools, getting the IT environment together with the business one, fighting for the data to give answers. It is not easy!

Especially when you have a very precise idea what you want and what the outcome should look like. All that leads to some frustration and complexity issues.

However, the world of technology changes fast and a lot of frustrating tasks from the past are nowadays so easy to resolve. Why is that?

I am observing a few key trends and elements for this development. First and foremost, it is cloud computing adoption, secondly, it is machine learning and artificial intelligence principles and thirdly it is new large data sources that bring the “material” that can be and should be analyzed.

Cloud computing is the biggest democratization principle found in last decades. Cloud computing scaled down and brought up super advanced analytics to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Just a few years back only the biggest and wealthiest companies could afford to run large data centers with huge racks and server farms running all that expensive software tools from prime vendors. Today you can rent that technology for just a few moments to run your job at a fraction of a price and with the possibility to pay with your credit card. Not only can you rent infrastructure you can also rent software and you can choose from tens and hundreds of tools. When you don’t like the tool, you just stop the subscription and move to some more convenient tool. This is a true revolution. You own all the possibilities of this modern world with a single credit card in your pocket! What a massive impact this has. For example, any company in the world can decide NOT to have any IT! I mean servers, hardware, IT people... You can just run on cloud services. Without any back-office and in fact, you do not even need a physical office or company cars!

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Machine learning is closely connected with cloud computing. Without cloud there would not be machine learning in the form we know it today. Machine learning works only when you have enough data for the machine to feed. And that exactly is the role of cloud. That applies also to ML software capabilities. Few years ago there was just nothing except for some super expensive and proprietary tools. Nowadays you do a few clicks on AWS (amazon web services) and you run your first ML query! Needless to say what amazing possibilities this brings to data turning into information.

For our own technology (location intelligence platform) this meant an interesting breakthrough. All of a sudden we could provide our normal users with a simple analysis after initial data load that showed basic behavioral patterns. Just on one click. Amazing! Using computing power and know how of people that we would not be able to buy in a lifetime…

But machine learning brings more. It learns every minute, every day some more, it learns more with more data.

Thanks to this we all got used to using Siri on our phones or Alexa in our “smart” homes. All that being more capable every day due to machine learning. What a life changing technology!

My third topic was new large data sets as a raw material to be analyzed. And there are so many! We have a rising star internet of things (IoT) together with Blockchain, internet browsers related data, smartphones generated data, etc..

And sometimes you do not even need a new source of data.

Sometimes you just find a new use for the data already existing. Such as for us utilizing the location based data.

There is a location element in more than 80% of all business related data today. Almost everything can be localized. Your phone calls, your card payments, your car parking, your web browsing… All this represents large data sets that wait for exploring. The fun part is that this is only a start of a new trend. There will simply be more and more data - i.e. more possibilities for turning them into a valuable insights. Yet only 0,5% of all data is now being analyzed.

95,5% of all data are not being touched! It is like our knowledge of oceans. Yes, we know a lot and we are learning fast, yet we only know so little :-) So, exciting times are ahead thanks to all this amazing technology. And where politicians fail in their attempts to pursue democracy, it is technology that brings democracy into our lives as the most natural thing.

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Faception: A Trailblazing Security Solutions Provider Shai Gilboa

Co-founder & CEO

Faception

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n an interview with Insights Success, Shai Gilboa, Cofounder and CEO of Faception, shares his experience and gives resourceful insights on security solutions and its future. In addition to this he has also noted about Faception, its products and motto of the organization along with the future goals in revolutionizing the industry.

Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Shai and Insights Success: Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness and its vision.

Faception developed Facial Personality Analytics technology. Our breakthrough patented computer-vision and AI technologies analyses facial images in real-time.

Backed by Social and Life Science research and proven results, our solution enables security companies and agencies to be more effective in detecting anonymous persons of interest.

Today the main use of Facial Recognition is for Identification and Authentication. Using state-of-the-art AI technologies, we classify traits and behaviors correlated to facial characteristics from video streams, databases, or online sources, allows Preventive Actions and Automation in physical security. Lately we have successfully completed POC’s and Field trials with both tier-1 technology vendor, federal agency, SI and other clients.

Faception creates new AI domain of Facial Personality Analytics. Strategically, we seek market collaboration with tier-1 System Integrators, Service Providers and technology vendors in the HLS, Public Safety and Smart-City domains,

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and in the future, in the FinTech, AI, and human-robots.

Today, we intend to collaborate directly with security companies and agencies and collaborate with technology providers with complimentary solutions, cameras install base and access to clients. While these solutions focus on identifying known individuals with a history of offense, our solution provides alerts on anonymous potential offenders, enabling security agencies to focus their attention, detect and prevent potential threats.

Growing fast our distributions channels yielded in >$25M pipe-line projects processes for the upcoming 12 months.

Our team includes world-class experts in the areas of Intelligence, Computer Vision, Face Analysis, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Psychology, Technology and marketing.

What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by Faception?

In HLS, Security, Public Safety and Safe Cities Clients we solve main physical security problem – we detect anonymous offenders, which facial recognition cannot do.

Our solutions used in border control/restricted areas/mega events, in Intelligence; do prioritization in investigation, in combating terror or criminality. It can be used to make a real Predictive Screening and allow for Preventive Actions (imagine alert on hooligans in sport event).

In future, AI and Smart Machines/robots: use for pure personalization and man/machine human interaction, without monetizing on people privacy, and in an objective path.

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Retail, HR, Gaming – anonymous personalization FinTech: predictive under-wiring (clients without credit history) Generally, we do personalization anonymously, do not monetize on people, but on service. Our solution is a software, which can be easily integrated to any infrastructure, include mobile and SaaS. Give a detailed description of the featured personnel’s influence over the company and his/her respective industry.

It’s about vision, focus, persistency and team up the company, along with early-adopting distributors who consistently assist in shaping the Product Fit. Shai Gilboa’s leadership is the essence, mutually with CTO Itzik Wilf which is one of the best engineers in computer vision and AI. We successfully develop a “too good to be true” solution to the security market – detect anonymous offenders, while all computer vision industry is fighting on accuracy features (matching people in the databases to images), we overcome the people who ARE NOT in the database.

Also, the personalization is the “Holy Grail” for many markets. Faception solution has unique proposition (accurate, anonymous, objective) to many manufacturers, people and also make AI disrupt.

Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of your organization in becoming a Unicorn company.

When we reached technology proof, it was in the online industry monetization. We needed to re-think of the Technology impact use. Becoming “from the future” we needed to find “present simple” market case. So, we replaced our marketing and product teams, customers and complete mindset. Al lot of assistance we got from SF 500Startups team.

What are the challenges faced while providing solutions and services in a volatile and competitive market and how is Faception serving to tackle them?

We are Single Source which is mostly helpful. But, as our solution is so revolutionary and somehow most use-cases are confidential, we need early adopters. Unfortunately, most of government agencies are late adopters and sales processes are long-term. Also, the market is dominated by giants/incumbents with NIH (Not Invented Here) approach.

Kindly provide a few examples of Faception’s services.

For Public Safety: Murder Case: someone was murdered in a place/event.

The Police have the images of all attendees during the crime event. Now Police will search for suspects that

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Faception shows high level of potential to be murderers.

Pedophile Case: Ÿ After the fact: a child was sexually attacked in public place/school/area. Police has the images of all attendees during the crime event. Now Police will search for suspects that Faception shows high level of potential to be pedophiles. Police will get a list of high scored people images. Ÿ

Predictive Screening: means preventive actions; when somebody with high potential to be pedophile is present in public garden/playground/place with children, there are many preventive actions that can be executed. Like projecting, questioning, guarding Robot who patrol, lighting camera/projector, etc.

Thief Case: A thief stole a wallet with money from a TOURIST, in hotel lobby/restaurant/event. Police has the images of all attendees during the crime event. Now Police will search for suspects that Faception shows high level of potential to be a Thief. Police will get a list of images of suspects with high score.

“Our Vision is to teach computers to understand humans through a single piece of personal information: an image of a face.”

Drug Dealer Case: There are specific alerts based on prior intelligence, so Police has the images of all border passengers/access control/prison visitors/etc. These people will be in dataset of the border control/prison visitors/etc.

Now Police will search for suspects in the above dataset that Faception shows high level of potential to be a drug dealer. Police will get a list of images of suspects with high score.

What according to you could be the potential future of your field of expertise/operations and how do you envision sustaining competency?

We believe on closely partner with tier-1 Technology vendors, while we are focused on classifiers as our Core competence, supply API and SDK. We also partner with System Integrators and Service Providers on same mode.

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Editor’s Choice

Impacts of Artificial Intelligence has Started Resonating in Industry

CRM

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loud computing has changed the face of customer management by providing every SMB’s an opportunity to unify data and communication platform without investing heavily on ‘onpremise’ IT infrastructure and staff.

Now it’s the turn of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Those (companies) who adapt AI will remain in the race and those who won’t simply lag behind and eventually might lose in the longer run.

Facets those are Attracting Enterprises towards it AI along with PA (Predictive Analysis) have potential to make all aspects of CRM better, from sentiment and intent analysis to product recommendation, upselling and lead scoring. Moreover, the ability of AI powered tools to scale the efforts of sales team by gleaning useful patterns of data, finding successful courses of action and taking care of the bulk of the work for addressing customers’ needs and grievances plays a crucial role in managing CRM operations in an efficient way.

The efficient usage of AI and PA teach organizations to do much better job in terms of targeting potential customers and decision makers by calculating which personal and professional attributes holds the maximum value.

The potential of creating a system of continuous improvement for sales and marketing teams is somewhat attracting organization towards these technology, since ‘sales is the fuel which keeps the wheels of an organization running.’

Landmark Solutions that are showing Future Direction Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and Adobe are some of the Industry giants those are investing heavily on AI and even successfully developed many landmark products and service based on AI that have the potential to change APRIL 2019|

the landscape of CRM industry forever.

By looking deeper into those products and services one can predict: what kind of road CRM industry is going to traverse in coming times?

Salesforce, the leader of CRM industry has last year developed a groundbreaking product Einstein, an AI assistant which has the ability of continuously process colossal amount of data which Salesforce collect from sales, e-commerce activity, emails, social media streams and others. This powerful assistant help sales representative to focus on the most promising leads based on engagement data analysis and gives advice on when to trigger email campaigns according to customer response history.

SAP, another prominent player of tech space has joins the AI race and added new AI features to its S/4HANA cloud ERP. Its tacked-on features provide automated insights into the business data which the system collects. This includes monitoring accounts, preparing chart of top vendors for an organization based on their past performance, pricing and ability to deliver.

Oracle also shown a great interest in AI and announced a distinguished project known as Adaptive Intelligence. This project will test feasibility of adding series of applications to its cloud suite.

These apps have the potential to combine third-party data with real-time analytics to provide optimize decisions and recommendations. For example, AI enable app’s to merges data from the company cloud and the Oracle Data Cloud to extract meaningful insights related to individual customer behaviors and provide personalized offers.

Amelia is a bot that assist customers in resolving their queries using natural language processing. It understands customer’s queries and provides them

desired answer based on data gathered from previous interactions and the knowledgebase. Generally, this bot is able to solve 55% of incidents and when it does not have the answers or senses a frustration or hostility, it passes the baton to a human operator.

Economic Impact of AI in CRM Leading market intelligence firm, IDC (International Data Corporation) has forecasted that AI enabled CRM activities could increase global business revenues by $1.1 trillion and create eight lakh new jobs apart from two million additional indirect and induced jobs. The global market for AI powered CRM is estimated to grow from existing $7.9 billion to $46.3 billion by 2021. This huge revenue boost will lead to increase productivity and lower expenses due to automation.

According to report, the year 2018 will prove to be a landmark year for AI adoption as more than 40% companies are ready to adopt AI in upcoming future (may be within next two year).

IDC further estimated that 75% of enterprises will include AI or machine learning functionalities in at least one of their business application. 46% of the AI adopters report that more than 50% of their CRM operations get executed through cloud. Therefore, cloud vendors are expected to lead the race of delivering AI solution to customers.

With all these great advancements, better functionalities and positive economic projections, it would be fair to conclude that AI and PA hold great importance in deciding the future course of action for CRM industry. But only time will tell how deeply these technologies will continue to disrupt not just the CRM sector but other businesses as whole. It will be interesting to watch how this seismic shift toward an intelligent and proactive approach will eventually plays out.

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GetLinks: Djoann Fal

Fostering Asia’s digital transformation through uniting its technology workforce

CEO & Co-founder

GetLinks

“

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top dreaming about working in Silicon Valley; let’s build the next Silicon Valley in Asia!”

Carrying this mission ahead, GetLinks stepped into the market to support people to build their skills, their connections, their teams, and their careers.

GetLinks is a platform and ecosystem connecting tech talents to opportunities across Asia. Its platform empowers organizations to connect with the largest engaged technology talents database in Asia effortlessly.

Tech Talent Community GetLinks has built a community of talents from across the tech world, ranging from developers, designers and digital marketers to data driven operations managers and Saas sales leaders. It calls its Asian wide talents community of 500,000 technology individuals ‘Humans of Tech’. Generally, it is a social network in the form of mobile app, similar to Tinder for networking, where people can meet new people based on filters. The company is continuously expanding this network by organizing events, producing content, supporting talent mobility and digital transformation. Over 3,000 organizations have used GetLinks including Alibaba, Accenture, Garena (SEA), Grab, and Line.

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GetLinks’s other products includes Online Tech City, “the map of the Silicon Valley in Asia”, similar of Glassdoor but with much more data & localization for Asia market including companies data from Greater China; Adaptive Talent Dashboard, a dashboard for talents in tech to know their market values & receive personalized recommendations on what skills they should learn to increase it, exactly where & how to find a job that can afford their salary expectations; and Tech Hiring Marketplace, a hiring platform and service for tech companies to send interview offers to talents in the network. This is how it monetizes its pool of talents passively open for jobs.

For Talents, GetLinks is a candidate-centric platform. Its user experience is designed to give sense control and freedom to its candidate users. It is free-of-charge for all candidates and every talent gets a dedicated talent coach for free advice. For companies, it is a SaaS (Software as a service) based platform, providing 2 pricing models, which includes yearly subscriptions for unlimited hiring and a pay-per-hire model. These models are cheaper than any headhunter service at 10% of the hired candidate’s Gross Annual Salary. All its tech talents are been curated by its AI powered semantic algorithm along with its APRIL 2019|

qualitative approach. Hence, the company has confidence and takes pride in the candidates with companies for the long run on both hard side (talent skills) and soft side (talent values).

An Astute Leadership One of the visionaries leader of GetLinks is Djoann Fal, the CEO and Co-founder. Djoann is passionate about driving social impact and meaningful change in the world using technology. As CEO of GetLinks, he oversees operations across ‘4 countries, leading a team of 17 nationalities over 120 employees. Djoann has previously worked as Regional Digital Marketing Executive at Rocket Internet GmBH for Lazada, acquired by Alibaba in 2016. Prior to that, he served as intern Marketing Consultant in EY Shanghai.

While studying Masters in Management at ESCP Europe in Paris, Djoann co-founded La Paillasse, one of Europe’s first and largest maker space. Today Djoann keep close relationships with the technology, hacker and maker space community across US, Europe & Asia. He is the Regional Organiser for a technology networking event operating in 12 cities across Asia and supporter of Angelhack, the largest hackathon and developer community in the US. Bridging the Gap of Tech Talents Djoann firmly believes that with one developer, designer, and digital marketer (3D), a business can change the world. Hence, the core focus of GetLinks is on connecting together tech talents. One of the competitive advantage of GetLinks is that it also operates with a hyper localized focus, with localized talents data providing deep understanding of the diverse Asian landscape. This is what sets GetLinks apart from other established players.

the gap of tech talents supply, redefining a new tech skills supply chain”. Thus GetLinks aims to connect candidates with the most innovative companies not only in SEA, but across major tech hubs across Developing Markets by providing a local platform for tech talents to upskill themselves and a pipeline for companies to access to these “technology market adapted talents” at scale. Djoann see this as a new economy that he calls “the Adaptive Economy” and he is currently writing a book to define what he see part of this new economy.

“Create and catalyze “serendipity” around you.”

Redefining the Future of Work The company’s goal is to “Bring Humanity to Technology”, redefining the future of work, by creating an “Adaptive work community”. It aims to create an online and adaptive talent platform that will simultaneously up-skill employees, whilst providing them an open opportunity work with tech companies across Asia. Its priority at the moment is scaling up its community database in existing markets of South East Asia and China as well as opening new jobs verticals for tech freelancers and tech remote workers.

In a recent interview, Djoann said : “Today the world evolves at the speed of tech, and building the next Silicon Valley in Asia will be only possible by bridging

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Kabam: A Winning Streak in the Gaming Industry Tim Fields CEO

Kabam

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ould you like to be an Avenger or a Transformer or a member of the Fast and Furious Family? We know whenever you watch these blockbusters the thought of stepping in the shoes of these amazing characters tickles your mind.

Although it’s not possible for us to help you to be part of these humongous franchises but interestingly we can enable you to build a team of Avengers or Transformers in your own gaming world. The enticing games like ‘Marvel Contest of Champions’, ‘Transformers: Forged to Fight’ have given us the opportunity we ask for. Many of the passionate gamers around the globe have already played these games and experienced its surrealism. Some of them have even said “Best phone game I’ve ever played. Plenty of stuff to do and keeps your mind occupied for months on end.”, “Can’t put my phone down” and the things like “Oh my god the most thrilling game I have ever played in my life”. Their words of appreciation are enough to picture the perfection of these irresistible games.

Meet the creator of these games, Kabam. Founded in 2006, and headquartered in Vancouver, BC, Canada, Kabam is a world leader in developing entertaining, immersive, and highly social multiplayer games for mobile devices. It has merged consumer behavior with the art of game design to create experiences that are enjoyed by millions of players across the globe. Each of its games has raised the benchmark in mobile gaming, bringing high-quality graphics, next-generation

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technology and revolutionary gameplay to the console in every player’s pocket.

Leveling Up the Global Scoreboard Within ten years of its inception, Kabam has partnered with leading entertainment brands like Disney, Hasbro and Universal to create mobile games based on some of the world’s most iconic franchises.

Kabam’s flagship games, Marvel Contest of Champions and Transformers: Forged to Fight are available on the App Store and Google Play Store. Kabam’s games have generated hundreds of millions of downloads globally, and have received multiple awards such as Apple’s Editor’s Choice and Google Play’s Best Game of the Year.

Champion: Ready!

Tim Fields is the CEO and the main player of Kabam.

Tim Fields oversees all aspects of game development and operations at Kabam, from concept, to build, to live operations. Tim has led development and operations efforts on Kabam’s Marvel Contest of Champions, Fast and Furious: Legacy, and Transformers: Forged to Fight games. In this role he oversees all elements of production, publishing, financing, and operations of the studios and games.

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A 24-year veteran of the video game industry, Tim has held various positions ranging from executive producer, to lead designer and director of business development at major publishers, including Capcom, Microsoft and Electronic Arts. His game credentials include hit franchises like Need for Speed, Halo, Call of Duty, Brute Force, SSX, and others. In addition, Tim is active in the game development and financial community as a consultant, writer and speaker. He has authored a number of books on game design, production, monetization, and analytics. Tim is a native of Austin, TX and a University of Texas alumnus. He lives in Vancouver, Canada now and loves making games and working with teams to let millions of players around the world play with their friends.

environment has enabled Kabam to stay ahead of it competition.

New Updates Available The games, technology and entertainment industries are evolving so rapidly. Kabam always strive to envision where things will go, but also delights by innovations that other industry players come up with. From Fortnite’s true cross-platform play, the wonderful interactive narrative of Bandersnatch to the beautifying retro game design of Dead Cells. It believes there’s so much to enjoy and learn from the competition and envisions learning more every day. In coming time the company is launching more exciting games and enabling gamers to play more.

Challenges Ahead Today, games made by Kabam are played across 180+ countries, and these are very discrete populations. The company mentions the modern games market is very complex as so many of the humans in the world are gamers now! It demands continuous up gradation to deal with some complicated solutions.

For example, Kabam now supports more than 16,000 device variants on its games. The difference between an entry-level Xaomi phone and a high-end iPhone now is distinctive. It is essential for Kabam to make sure that people get a great experience on both! The same complexity exists when it comes to bandwidth both in terms of latency and data quantities; these differ hugely across different regions.

“We want to entertain the world.”

Reviews For Marvel Contest of Champions:

In addition, there are huge differences in the way people interact with games. How much time will someone play the game each day? How much money is a comfortable amount to spend? The answers to these fundamental questions differ massively from person to person. How do you make a game that gives ALL of them a wonderful experience based at whatever level of commitment excites them?

Kabam spends a lot of time each week thinking about all of these complexities. These discussions and evolvements allowed it to comprehend about the current market and its needs. Over the years the company has learnt about how to treat its players and employees right.

And more specifically learned a lot about working effectively with great partners, and about how to build and operate great games. This constant learning

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“Very nice game, beautiful graphics and nice gameplay” “Awesome game, really addictive” For Transformers: Forged to Fight “The bestgameever. Amazing graphics, local yet, multiplayer gameplay, the satisfaction of metal on metal really “calms” me as well as pump me up even more!”

“This game is one of the best games that I have ever played! It’s really fun to fight deceptions and autobots.”

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Lingokids: English Learning Made Simple Cristobal Viedma Founder

Lingokids

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onvincing a proactive 5 year old child to sit still and study in front of a textbook can be a daunting task for parents. New generations are blessed with a capacity to gain and adapt knowledge quickly and from various sectors. In the digital age where artificial intelligence is advancing rapidly and with a world of information available at our fingertips, new generations are demanding simpler, more efficient and enhanced approaches to learning. Recognizing this need Cristobal Viedma founded Lingokids, a Spain based organization that envisions making language learning simple for families across the globe. Today, it is renowned for its English language learning platform designed for children 2 to 8 years old, with over 8 million registered families in more than 190 countries. The platform offers a customized approach towards learning which is makes lives easier for parents and even educators who wish to teach their children or students effectively in today’s world. In an interview with Insights Success Cristobal Viedma shared valuable information about the product and his vision for the company.

Below are the highlights of the interview between Cristobal and Insights Success Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness and its vision.

Lingokids is the leading English language learning platform for children between 2 - 8 years old, the best time to learn a new language.Our platform provides a complete and

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structured English language course, with hundreds of activities designed to make learning fun and easy for the little ones. We make the learning process fun for the kids, easy for parents providing them an interface to track their child’s progress, while simultaneously bringing down economic and physical barriers to high quality educational content. All you need is a smartphone or tablet to download the app.

Our mission is to break down educational barriers and provide equal opportunities for children around the world.

We do this by increasing worldwide access to high quality and innovative educational content.

Lingokids’ unique selling point is the specialization in early childhood language learning. We have found the perfect balance between education and entertainment for these ages.

What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by Lingokids?

We provide a solution to the problem of access to quality educational contents for young learners. We do this by providing an E-learning platform that reduces burden on parents and educators while also bringing down price barriers. What makes our platform unique is that our learning activities (videos, games, songs and traceables) are immersive and personalized to the level of the child. While the games are mainly focused on teaching English they also help with basic motor and cognitive skills while also

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increasing the child’s motivation for learning in general.

Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of your organization in becoming a Unicorn company.

We’re about to turn 3 years old as a company, so we still have a way to go before we become a Unicorn. That being said, we are on the right path, growing revenues and our user base at an impressive rate.

One of my main takeaways is to not settle when it comes to hiring talent. We look for the best of the best and that’s how we managed to create such an amazing product that people love.

Another takeaway is to have a purpose. Employees at Lingokids have a real passion for the product and we make sure that everyone is aware of the benefits we feel we are providing to society through consistent communication of this aspect.

Some highlights have been winning Mom’s Choice Awards in 2016, Best Startup in Social Impact in Education at this years South Summit Awards and reaching 8 million families just one month ago. Another one of our most notable achievements has been the opportunity to present our project to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook during his most recent visit to Spain.

What are the challenges faced while providing solutions and services in a volatile and competitive market and how is Lingokids serving to tackle them?

The challenges are endless. Education for early childhood learning is a challenge in itself and a lot of players entering the market underestimate this thinking methods of learning are similar for all ages. In this way we are incredibly consumer centric. Our team conducts user tests and focus groups weekly and tests absolutely everything there is to test to make sure we are offering the best possible solution.

Another challenge is that your target audience (i.e. the ones that make the decision to download our app), parents, are not the final consumers of your product, in this case children. We tackle this by involving the parent in the learning process allowing them to see the full value that Lingokids offers and giving them full transparency of what the child is doing on the app with progress report as well as a full list of completed activities.

to find the right balance. Lingokids specializes in E-learning, but we also develop offline materials.

Eventually we hope to incorporate more languages and eventually subjects such as programming.

Testimonials “Aadi went from not speaking too much English to framing his own sentences. I thank you all who are involved in creating such an amazing platform and bringing education to people like us who are far away from places where English is a native language” “They are learning and enjoying at the same time.”

“My 2 year old LOVES the Lingokids app. I have a few apps for him on my tablet, but he always chooses Lingokids first”

“Our goal is to be the vehicle to offering a brighter and better future for children everywhere.”

“I want my children to learn English because I want to give them the opportunity to live outside of Russia, to study somewhere else in Europe, and to be able to travel a lot and see the world. I will highly recommend Lingokids to our friends!”

About the Leader Cristobal is the Founder and CEO of Lingokids. He helps to oversee all company operations - Financial, Product, Marketing, and Business. His main task at the moment is representing the firm and liaising with investors.

Cristobal is a reference both in the Spain’s startup space and globally when it comes to Ed-tech. He’s recently spoken in events such as GET2018 (Global Education Technology Summit) in China.

What according to you could be the potential future of your field of expertise/operations and how do you envision sustaining competency?

Classrooms will never disappear. We feel blended learning is the future of education. There are benefits in both electronic and traditional face-to-face teaching, the point is

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Franchise Ecosystem

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FRANCHISE A PROFITABLE STROKE OF BUSINESS?

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echnology, technique—name it, the world has bestowed some remarkably adaptive implications and stimulated them into becoming a global brand. Yet, many organizations are striving to attain the full benefits of being a globally recognized brand. To stretch out confinements, various organizations often offer franchise licenses to franchise owners in potentially profitable regions for acquiring a better customer approach. Instead of starting from a scratch, an individual can purchase a franchise and start with a proven business model that has a more probability of achieving success.

With adequate management and guidance, one can easily flourish in the business world. Franchise business strikes down certain hardships and struggles that might be faced in the start-ups. Choosing franchise

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businesses over a start-up could prove as a better idea, as it has more fruitful beneďŹ ts that of any initial-staged businesses.

An Established Open System Unlike any start-ups, a franchise business allows an individual to carry out the operation directly from the established foundation. From brand cultivation and marketing to future plans and customer base, a new franchise owner is blessed with almost everything. An outlet of a franchise ensures the idea of following the similar business modules and operational methods can be more effective. And, implementing some new tweaks in such absolute aspects makes the task easier for a distributor.

In addition, it also allows professionals to overview the business reports and key performance indicators which aid APRIL 2019|

one to adapt and make appropriate business decisions. Besides, a strong support system is often a necessity rather than a want. It supports an individual in maintaining balance between both independent ideologies and the brand’s business modules. The support mostly includes the vast knowledge about the franchise and an expertise outlook on products. With such system, many new business personalities can perpetually sustain in the massive markets.

Less risk factor and Higher Success Rate One of the primary concern factor and the misconception in franchise business lies within the limitation of autonomy. Unlike individual enterprises, a franchise business might be facing some problems regarding receiving a full scale autonomy which can be overruled thereafter. It requires

compassion over choosing a franchise which is more suitable with a purchaser’s business ethics. This reduces the risk of being dominated by franchisors and other investor entities and helps in drafting own rules to follow on.

Though a franchise comes with a wellestablished platform, it does require consistent efforts on bringing the organization upwards. According to various reports and facts, it has been also stated that the success rate of franchise business is quite higher than an independent entrepreneurial venture. As franchisees operate under a systematic business model, they get an indirect training in marketing as well as staff handling. With a large-scale marketing, the franchisees can promptly attain more customer attraction resulting into a higher growth rate.

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Instant Customer Access Customer engagement is one of the most crucial and difficult processes in a business to bear. To gain more number of customers, an organization has to invest their time and efforts on processing various marketing aspects.

In case of franchise business, the odds are quite similar but with fewer efforts.

As most of franchise brands have a national or a global recognition, franchisees are required to contribute into a “marketing budget” through which the parent companies could process out an extensive promotion campaigns. Meanwhile, franchisee can also start an independent campaign in order to gain instant customer engagement.

Below are some methods through which franchisees can uplift the business, independently.

Focusing on target audiences—instead of exaggerating over customer approaches, one can narrow down the target audiences to highly qualified prospects. It allows business owners to concentrate and come up with best prospects to deliver.

Return-policy—being the most traditional and effective way to attract customers, utilizing return-policies in franchise business will aid the franchisees to get better customer approach. Providing something in return and offering various schemes helps in creating an adverse marketing network.

How Franchise Business works?

Quite a few requirements are needed to be fulfilled by a prospective franchisee owner in order to get qualified for licensing the brand’s name. The qualification requirements significantly vary from one franchisor to other. It often includes maintaining a higher net worth and a good credit score for a larger initial investment. In addition, a franchisee must be having another source of income also an industry/management experience for guiding business effectively.

Subsequently considering all the factors, the franchisor determines whether the prospective owner is worthy enough to be qualified for the business or not.

A Franchise agreement includes certain sets of terms which are required to be followed by the franchisees. After being qualified, an individual signs an agreement where he/she has to pay a franchise-fee in order to acquire the license to use the brands name and its business processes. Simultaneously, the franchisor assists franchisees with allocation, supplier connections, storemanagement and staff training.

However, it also bestows various facets like specific tested operating system, with creative marketing strategies.

Initially, the opportunities of implanting reinvention in franchise business are narrowed down as the focus of a franchiser is on delivering a consistent experience across all the locations. A multiple franchised locations, a franchisee can easily attain increased purchasing power. Also, Franchise business allows business persons to be flexible to try new products or services in order to test in the real-time market scenario. Thus by considering above aspects, it can be concluded that the franchise business is most secure and best option to invest in.

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PlateJoy: Discover the Easy Way to Eat Better Christina Bognet Co-founder & CEO

PlateJoy

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6% of Americans want to eat healthier, according to a recent Food and Health survey. But despite this goal, Americans are unhealthier than ever.

70% of the US population is overweight or obese, putting them at higher risk for chronic conditions like heart disease and Type 2 Diabetes.

Diet change is the #1 recommendation for these conditions, but between busy schedules, the prevalence of unhealthy options, and a lack of personal guidance, behavior change is challenging; 80% of diets fail. That’s why innovators have started to realize, in order to help people eat healthy and live healthy, technology is the key.

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in San Francisco, CA, PlateJoy is a personalized nutrition service which assists in preventing or managing chronic disease by creating customized meal plans designed to help you eat healthier, and avoid the common roadblocks people have to changing their diet.

PlateJoy started by personalizing nutrition plans for any health goal, schedule, allergy, or household, with a consumer meal planning subscription for $99/year. It

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uses over 50 data points about your health goals and preferences to determine what you should be eating each week, and sends a personalized, weekly shopping lists and recipes, making it easier to follow through.

Now, the company is going one step further, using these meal plans in programs that target conditions like obesity and diabetes.

Inspiration Lies Within Christina Bognet is the Co-founder and CEO of PlateJoy. A MIT neuroscience graduate, she experienced her own struggles with healthy eating. After losing 50 pounds by modifying her diet, Bognet created PlateJoy in 2012 with the vision of making healthy eating easier and more sustainable through personalization and technology. She raised a $1.7M seed round to launch the company’s personalized meal planner.

In 2017, Bognet was featured in the list of the ‘Forbes 30 Under 30’ in consumer technology, and PlateJoy continued to evolve. Now, PlateJoy employs its personalized nutrition technology in larger digital APRIL 2019|

behavioral health programs that target chronic conditions. PlateJoy’s diabetes prevention program launched in the fall of 2017, and is now covered by insurance for over 60M people nationwide.

Problem and Cure Diet and behavior change, specifically weight loss, is widely accepted as the best most effective treatment for conditions like diabetes. In a 2002 National Institute of Health study, lifestyle management programs were shown to be nearly twice as effective as the leading medication at reducing progression to Type 2 diabetes in those with prediabetes.

But although doctors agree on the efficacy of behavior change, they typically don’t have time with patients to counsel them on the details of eating better.

PlateJoy has tailored solutions to those problems.

PlateJoy’s personalized quiz allows it to understand about your dietary preferences, time constraints and personal tastes. Then it creates a customized meal plan and grocery list that not only meets users’ dietary needs, but also reduces food waste and saves time.

PlateJoy’s diabetes prevention program pairs this meal planner tool with weekly video lessons, virtual coaching, fitness and weight tracking, and a free digital scale and Fitbit, so that participants can monitor their progress toward their goals.

Promising Future PlateJoy’s vision is to improve existing models of eating better: make it easier, cheaper, and more sustainable. It has integrated with grocery delivery services to cover all the pain points to healthy eating: from the planning and the nutrition management to the convenience of sameday ingredient delivery. It will continue to add more features and more value to its services in coming years, as well as expand it’s disease treatment offerings.

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Motivating Client Admirations “A few products have changed my life so much that I have a hard time remembering how I managed before they came along: Uber is one of them, but PlateJoy is the one I can’t live without.”

“My husband is a diabetic and has struggled with weight issues for many years. This is the FIRST healthy eating plan I’ve tried where he compliments the dishes. His snacking between meals has cut down, and he is losing weight, slowly, but consistently. Most importantly, his

“Feel great, eat better”

glucose levels are coming down, and his doctor is talking about lowering his insulin dosage. I, also, am losing weight, and have reached one personal goal, and my doctor is considering taking me off one and maybe two medications. Great Job!” “I signed up for PlateJoy after losing 20lbs. I didn’t want to continue dieting but didn’t know how to get myself back into cooking healthy meals. PlateJoy has been extremely successful in helping me maintain my goals. Not to mention I don’t have to meal plan or be creative at meal time. All I do is push a button and it’s all laid out for me. We’ve also ended up saving grocery money because there are no more late last minute trips to the grocery store.”

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Tinfoil Security: Security for Developers and DevOps Ainsley Braun CEO

Tinfoil Security

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n an interview with Insights Success, the CEO of Tinfoil Security, Ainsley Braun shares the vital contributions of Tinfoil Security to the security industry. Tinfoil Security was founded in 2011 by Ainsley Braun and Michael Borohovski, two MIT and intelligence community alumni who were tired of seeing their own information insecure on the internet. Tinfoil Security streamlines the security process and focuses on developers, providing the first line of security tools that easily integrate into the DevOps and development processes. Today, many companies are using Tinfoil Security to secure their websites.

Below are highlights from the interview conducted between Ainsley Braun and Insights Success: Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness and its vision.

Tinfoil Security builds cybersecurity solutions that empower DevOps teams. With the most comprehensive and usable security products on the market, Tinfoil streamlines your security needs with tools that easily integrate into any DevOps process or SDLC. Your DevOps teams become the critical first line of defense, increasing bandwidth for security teams to prioritize and focus on more strategic security initiatives. Tinfoil Security works to continuously improve the state of the industry’s tools in combating

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attackers around the world. Tinfoil’s vision is to empower Developers and DevOps teams with full and continuous cybersecurity integration.

What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by Tinfoil?

API SCANNER: The Tinfoil Security API Scanner is able to detect vulnerabilities in any API, including webconnected devices such as mobile backend servers, IoT devices, as well as any RESTful APIs. Tinfoil’s API scanner has been built, from the ground up, to focus on APIs specifically, rather than jury-rigging a web application scanner to be able to handle APIs half-well.

WEB SCANNER: The Tinfoil Security web scanner checks for over 70 classifications of vulnerabilities, with hundreds to thousands of specific checks for each type, including all of the OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks.

Additionally, they are always adding more as new zero-day vulnerabilities are discovered. The company scans each time a new version of its clients’ site is deployed, and can also log into any website, including SAML / Single SignOn authenticated sites. Its patent-pending Login Recorder allows companies to teach the Tinfoil Security scanner how to authenticate into their applications by recording their login sequence. Tinfoil constantly updates in real-time, so customers can be confident that their applications are being protected against the latest threats. The platform regularly APRIL 2019|

incorporates new tests, and consistently scores higher than any other scanner on open-source benchmarks.

Give a detailed description of the featured personnel’s influence over the company and his/her respective industry.

I realized that I wanted to be a leader and innovator in the cybersecurity industry during consulting with Booz Allen Hamilton, where I worked upon graduating from MIT. I teamed up with fellow MIT alumnus Michael Borohovski to build Tinfoil Security. I am also a member of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, and a Board Member on the council for Women in Cybersecurity at California Technology Council (CTC), working on initiatives to help educate and attract more women into the industry. I’m fairly involved with StartX, the Stanford-affiliated startup accelerator, mentoring teams as a Neighborhood Lead, sitting on the Female Founders Board as a Member, and as a part of their Selection Committee.

Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learned that have shaped the journey of your organization in becoming a Unicorn company.

In the early years, Tinfoil was focused exclusively on SMBs, as it was an underserved market that sorely needed help with their application security tooling and process. As we grew and gained SMB market share, we discovered that enterprise organizations actually had very similar problems and lacked solutions to bridge the gap between the vastly increased speed of development and the relatively smaller security teams. We quickly realized in order to steer Tinfoil Security in the direction of becoming a globally competitive player in this space, we had to switch our focus into the enterprise. This strategy has led the company well into profitability, while still maintaining, supporting, and selling to tens of thousands of customers in the SMB market.

What are the challenges faced while providing solutions and services in a volatile and competitive market and how is Tinfoil serving to tackle them?

At Tinfoil Security, we understand that for large enterprise companies, development teams are hundreds to thousands strong, while security teams are often vastly smaller. Their development teams continually test for functional bugs (unit tests, integration tests, etc.), but due to the complexity and time it can take, there is zero or very little testing done for cybersecurity-related issues. We have focused on creating the most comprehensive, transparent and usable APRIL 2019|

security products on the market to solve those challenges.

What, according to you, could be the potential future of your field of expertise/operations and how do you envision sustaining competency?

Security is constantly changing and it’s important to stay ahead of the game as much as you can. I see security becoming more seamless and automated as technology progresses. I see so many organizations where the security team can’t keep up with the development teams; faster security can only be achieved by giving the development teams training and tools to implement security. In the world I see, security teams will be distributed across the

“We focus on providing security for developers and DevOps teams with real-time security reports pushed directly into your their workflow.”

organization and collaboration should increase over the next few years.

I also see security engineers getting more training on attacking systems. Corporations are slowly creating their own red teams (attack teams) to analyze their systems on a continuous basis, and more and more companies are beginning to use Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions to train their employees on attack and defense.

Testimonials “Tinfoil Security makes our developers’ lives easier - and they actually want to use it. Not only can they find exactly where to fix vulnerabilities, but the developers gain education and knowledge on why vulnerabilities need to be fixed, increasing collaboration.” - AL GHOUS, Senior Director, Cyber Security, GE Digital

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Industry Insider

Francisco Mariscal Co-founder & CEO

Fintech The Next Big Thing

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e are at a time in which technology advances at an incredible pace, unlike other generations, today’s society is accompanying technology, allowing it to develop without fear of looking back. Unfortunately, regulation and laws cannot advance at the same speed, and that is creating dangerous gaps that can destabilize the economy as we know it today.

The crisis we have experienced during the last decade has shown the shame of the economic system, and its fragility in some aspects, such as its banking dependence. The latter has allowed alternative investment to hatch, and with it many ďŹ ntech tools, blockchain systems, tools based on peer to peer, etc ...

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The problem we are experiencing is that, with the mentality of breaking the rules so as to write them again (something that in principle should be positive for society), we are forgetting the basic rules on which our society is based; data protection, right to privacy, capital controls, or protection of retailers, are basic rules that should not be forgotten, because if we do so, we are going back in time despite being in the most advanced technological cycle in history. And this can lead to a spiral as much or more dangerous than the crises we have experienced in recent decades.

Do not mistake the passion necessary to advance in a disruptive business, with moving forward at any price, the next decade will be marked by major changes in many sectors: Fintech, Insurtech, Foodtech, Legaltech, etc. As we can see in their names, they all rely on technology, in which in most of the cases there is no regulation or jurisprudence, so we must be cautious with the rules on which we write, because if we do it in the wrong way we will be wasting the opportunity that is being given to us.

A clear example of the above is that the majority of cryptocurrencies, which as we all know are written under Blockchain technology. The blockchain technology is very reliable, but it is not infallible, and unfortunately the states are not prepared for its supervision and control, so even though its survival and development is clear, here the market is not ready to hatch, and unfortunately we are seeing how it advances at a speed of madness, and possibly we will see scary situations, because the vested interests are very high, and possibly some are not entirely licit.

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About the Author Francisco Mariscal is a Founding Partner of Fellow Funders.

Telecommunications and industrial organization engineer from Universidad Europa, he has a master’s degree in Quantitative Finance from AFI and an Executive MBA from EAE Business School.

volume under management with this type of product has multiplied by 5 in direct investment on the same type of asset, I do not say that that is bad in itself. But when we see that companies that have not been able to finance themselves by normal alternative investments, manage not only to do it by this method, but also obtain three times the capital they needed, it looks like we are facing a bubble, and that if it is not controlled can only bring problems to the system, and possibly the ones that will pay for this will be the usual ones, the retail investors. All this will bring fear into the tools that are being born now, and could end up becoming a mere frustrated attempt, instead of a complement of the future.

Both examples described above are allowing us to generate inflation in value and price, something which we all know what it will bring us ... It is

clear that crises, like wars, generate poverty, although in the long term these allow the pillars upon which the economies are built to be more solid, and with that comes certain economic evolution and improvement, at least to date. Therefore, my insistence on control, at least in what affects citizens, the companies can take risks, but without transferring them to people.

In general, the fintech sector has a huge market for its development potential, disintermediation and the creation of value for the user will mark the next decade. The new generations want products that provide value and that do not generate captivity of anything or anyone. And this is my reflection, to generate value to the user, it is something more than just to provide a friendly and easy to use tool, we must protect the users and explain the risks to be assumed. We are seeing how many investment platforms sell highrisk products to their users through marketing tools. It is clear that we could not live on a banking product eternally. But what can not be allowed is that the rules of protection for retail investors are violated, because in doing so we will be destroying a complement of value to the traditional banking product.

As a conclusion of all the above, almost all the Fintech tools have a long life ahead, the regulation is tracking behind, but if we want it to last over time, we must not forget the basic rules of user protection in all its aspects.

Although there are no rules in most cases we must use common sense, which in many cases we are demonstrating that it is the least common of all the senses. Users are our loudspeaker to change things, and if we mistreat them, all they will say is that we are another failed attempt at evolution.

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