The Asia InsurTech Podcast was catching up with Amarit Franssen, a co-founder of Thai InsurTech Appman to talk about the impact of Covid, the future of motor insurance, and Appman’s latest funding round.
Find the full transcript of our conversation below:
Michael Waitze
Hi, this is Michael Waitze, and welcome back to the Asia InsurTech Podcast. This is the only podcast in Asia focused on insurance that gives entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and investors a platform to discuss how technology is reshaping the insurance industry in Asia. We’re super psyched, actually today to have a return guest. Amarit Franssen, a co-founder of Appman back on the show. Amarit, how are you doing?
Amarit Franssen
I am great right now. Start coming back to the office after I get my second vaccine already.
Michael Waitze
Oh, my God. Congratulations. I want to get back to the vaccine in a second. But I want to say when you first turned on your video, I was 100% sure it was a fake background. I almost didn’t say it because I was embarrassed. But when you stood up and walked away to get the water and you walked basically to like Korea, because it’s so far away. That’s real.
Amarit Franssen
Having some people back here already. So right now we still in working from home protocol. But anyone who missed the office can start coming back.
Michael Waitze
And where is your office again, just refresh my memory.
Amarit Franssen
Right now we are moving to FYI center in Asok area. So it’s very downtown.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, in Asok that’s a great building actually the FYI center. Congratulations.
Amarit Franssen
And a tech area. So we have a lot of tech neighborhoods around here.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, it’s really good, actually really, really good. Why don’t you talk a little bit. So we talked about last year, and you just mentioned that people were coming back to work. Maybe we can talk a little bit about your experience during COVID. I mean, it’s been a while since we’ve had you back on the show. You did do some roundtables with us last year. And I remember actually, back in a much more innocent time, we did a roundtable about COVID and thinking like Yeah, when is this gonna end? Like maybe a month from now, kind of thing? Well, that didn’t happen. So why don’t you tell me what did happen?
Amarit Franssen
Yep. But actually, I think last year, Thailand was still very lucky. Because it happen in a very short period. We have a very long period of coming back and repeating open, like normal. But until this year, I think we hit very bad if you see by the number coming up every day. So that’s why we start working from home in April already. Yes, we have one case in the office, and then we start shutting that office right away.
Michael Waitze
But what was the impact on business though, in other words, the office stuff I want to talk about later, because I’ve done an entire couple of series of podcasts on like WFH, work from home.
Amarit Franssen
I think the most difficult part is to try to get the team to still connect with the office to connect with the people around so if not, you’re going to be you know, have like video call all day long, and you don’t have really a real connection with the whole team. I think that is the main major problem for everybody. And also, to connect it with other departments, not only the department that you’re dealing with only, I think that is the most important part and the social area that we have like this that we prepare for our staff to help some social and connectivity between each other is all gone. So everything you’re going to do I think everything turning to you focusing really on your metrics, and to make your metrics keep going. So I think that the social part is all gone. And that’s a problem.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, it’s kind of problematic. So I’m just remembering when I was working at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, and I would say at the end of almost every single day, we would end the day with like, Who wants to go downstairs and just like to chat a little bit more, right? We’d go to the oak door, we’d go to just some bar downstairs and just chat. And it was important not because we talked about important things, but because we bonded with each other, right? It was during that time where we felt like, kind of that’s when we became teammates. And that’s when we kind of networked and created those strong bonds. Are you feeling like that? is separating a little bit? Do you know what I mean? That it’s harder to create those bonds now because people aren’t seeing each other every day?
Amarit Franssen
Yeah, I think very hard. You need to do some measured way of working that you’re focusing on a metric even more during this period. Because everybody want to survive, I think. So. I think that a lot of disconnect and a lot of not misunderstanding and And that is I see what a lot what hap happening. And also with working with clients outside the company, so most of the day you couldn’t have like video call all days and try to get things move, it’s very hard, call to follow up, because everybody so busy with the video call.
Michael Waitze
Do you to do you find like that there are disruptions. In other words, a lot of the research that I read, and I did a whole podcast with Microsoft about like hybrid work and recent trends and the work index around those. And one of the things that they found was that people were way more productive at home. But there was some backlash around, they felt like they were just working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And then even though they were more productive, they didn’t feel as connected to work in a way that feels a little bit. Do you really mean?
Amarit Franssen
Yeah, I understand. In some ways when you can focus on your own task, you are more productive. But it’s not about only focusing on your right, that everybody for focusing on their thing. So everybody gonna work on their one plus one thing become only two. When you becoming a team with about one plus one becoming three, four, five.
Michael Waitze
Exactly. But how do you like as a manager, or your senior-level management team, right? How do you try to get people back into a mode where that kind of day to day networking and you know what I like to call like serendipity, these meetings that you have that aren’t planned, we just kind of bump into somebody and say, hey, how’s that thing you’re working on? I think I may have a solution for it. How do you get that to happen? Or how do you try?
Amarit Franssen
Oh, actually, we try a lot, many, many ways. We’re spending online ads which are super expensive and inefficient. So we trying to move around, like finding referral contacts from friends or friends, something like that. Right. Right. Right. And sometimes we do some have some gather networks, small network with, with our existing clients, and ask them to bring around some new people there and do a small group. This kind of thing actually does help during the COVID. Period. But we have like, a private office. So sometimes we invite people here or sometimes we go to the client’s office. And we discuss a lot of things.
Michael Waitze
Do you find that people now, like we talked about this before, if you go back to March and April of last year of 2020, you know, Thailand came out of the first and even the second wave of COVID in a way that I thought was really powerful. Like people paid attention, people masked up people did social distancing. There kind of weren’t even a lot of cases last year. And then as we came into March, like you said, this year in Songkran, it just kind of exploded now in relative terms to be fair, not as bad as some other countries. Yeah. But are people afraid you think to come back to the office now?
Amarit Franssen
I think still. Still, until they get fully vaccinated. And then if you throw something in the office, and I believe that people will keep coming back, because right now with our HR team, what we see is, HR start bringing a lot of activities to do online to get a start connect. So we have like, some games or games playing what you are some photo contest on your work from home workspace, or today, I we what we found out that a lot of people have office syndrome because they are they working through without pause and you somehow you need to stretch your neck. So we get some people from fitness center to do fitness or live for the whole company.
Michael Waitze
Really?
Amarit Franssen
Yes. During the day at work, working time period.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, it’s funny you say that, right, like so I do a lot of these recordings. And I find that in the middle. Yeah, I can see you’re stretching your head as well. And I’d like to stretch out my back a bit, right?
Amarit Franssen
During, like, after April. I have like, video calls like around 12 hours per day, right? And yes, and I’m hurting my back here, very bad and up to my neck. So we need to go to do treatment and to do therapy completely. And nothing helps. Only stretching helps.
Michael Waitze
Yeah. So that’s what I try to do and I can’t help it like you on the phone like this. It’s so funny you say like on zoom calls because I’m like 10 years older than you or 15 years older, I say on the phone, but I’m constantly stretching out. And when it first started last year, I was a lot more are self-conscious about it? Like I wouldn’t do it because I was afraid it was gonna be embarrassing. And now I’m just like, I don’t care. I’m just stretching, because it’s so hard to like it hurts a little bit, you can see me stretching out now,
Amarit Franssen
You wouldn’t be like in a video call I just talk to a client, I need to stand. I can’t I can’t sit this long.
Michael Waitze
Do you get the same feedback from clients as well, right? Like as you’re trying to still survive and thrive through COVID? Do you get the sense that clients are going through the same thing?
Amarit Franssen
I think last year, people don’t believe that because especially now clients in the insurance business, we launched a solution called Digital Face-To-Face. We start with Earth. Because last year for the regulator, what is starting they launched a new regulation policy, which helps the insurer to sell face-to-face product in a digital way. Normally, you need to meet face-to-face to do sorry, signature, right? So basically, you can do it through video calls do it through chat, this kind of thing. So last year, we tried to adapt it into the chat system to help the agent chatting with the clients do proposals in the chat and signing. But adoption is not coming up. Because eventually, Thailand comes out from Covid pretty fast, right. And people believe in a second wave at all.
Michael Waitze
But now like now that we’re back in, it’s not really locked down. For us, it’s very different than it is in other countries. But do you think these sort of chat and digital channels we talked about a lot about this in sort of the e-commerce space, right? Conversational commerce? I see the same thing happening in the insurance and in the insure tech space.
Amarit Franssen
Actually, for last year, as I told you, we come out too fast. So the new normal is never really there yet. Until this year, we see a big run of the insurance coming to us, asking for us to help them to work with digital solution on, on video calls, especially. So we have a new digital face-to-face solution, which helped the insurer to to do to get the client on board buying, they can sharing the screen and send some action for clients to do like PDPA kind of thing for personal data for the clients who confirm that. And then you can stream out their proposal plan, they can do e-application for client. And at the end, they can do automated KYC send action for the clients you do take a photo of their ID card, we extract the data, take a photo of their face, we do face compare, send the payment directly in one go. So it’s helping the agent a lot. Because last year, what they did, everybody have been trying working around using many kinds of solution for video call, for email. So a lot of work coming for coming, coming as a spec for this. Because they then trying to move around by. Let’s say they try to work around their way to get the digital face-to-face going. But actually, we bundle everything in one solution. So basically, the agent can just send one link into the client’s mobile phone, and they can tap the link they’re open the video call session right away without the client need to load any apps.
Michael Waitze
So did you build your own tools? Or did you just build a framework that consolidates a bunch of tools together?
Amarit Franssen
No, we built our own tutor connection video call right away, right?
Michael Waitze
So you have your own video chat app?
Amarit Franssen
Yes, we do. We do videp call app and video streaming. And it can be done on mobile phone with a link, that is a big breakthrough that we are in. And then the agent, then some action for clients to do the {D{A confirmation. And then they start displaying the application this kind of thing through the video call and at the end as I say, like we can do OCR that is our proprietary to extract data. And the other part like the face recognition we can plug in from other partners.
Michael Waitze
So let’s say I’m on the phone with you and you’re an agent, right? Yep. And I’m on the phones so I’m talking to you. And we’re going through this conversation and I’m a new client and you say to me, can you take a photo of your ID. So I can in the middle of the call. Yes, kind of switch into that. That part of the application, take a picture of my ID gets all the data on it. You do some OCR magic on it, and then it uploads it into some sort of back end CRM system
Amarit Franssen
Not like a CRM, it’s more like a video call session that combines this whole thing. And we do recording, right? So they can start recording during the period that they need to consent about buying.
Michael Waitze
So you record the call, not the whole call we just the part where I say like, Yes, I want to have this policy. And yes, I want to do this. And yes, I agree to whatever I’m agreeing to. Yes, you’re right. Wow. And what’s been the reaction from clients? And I wonder if it’s, I wonder if it’s different by age group, right? In other words, I get late, like a 25-year-old who’s watching tik tok gets that. But what if it’s like a 55-year-old?
Amarit Franssen
Actually we, we start launching this, this June. So we don’t know about the reaction yet. We launch it out. And right now a lot of clients coming in for this kind of solution.
Michael Waitze
It’s just kind of cool. You know, it’s kind of fun, right?
Amarit Franssen
I think it’s kind of better than you work around with several apps, right? You need to send ID card through Line. And then you need to have one video call session. And then you need to confirm something to email, this kind of thing. And you add in the insurance, call you again, confirm. So there’s a lot of fragmented journeys all around. So we’re trying to get that into one journey and make the best user experience for clients who buy insurance.
Michael Waitze
I think it’s interesting. It’ll be interesting to catch up with you again, in like three to six months and see what the feedback is like, I think and I’m curious what you think. I think that because of the way we’ve been living for the past, it’s almost a year and a half now, right? Yep. Because of the way we’ve been living with sort of a face-to-face separation. I don’t think it’s going to go away. In other words, back in the middle of last year, I met an insurance agent at a coffee shop at the end of my soi. And because you know, back then there wasn’t the COVID situation wasn’t that bad. And we didn’t feel scared. And I had a mask on. And she had a mask on as well. And fundamentally, particularly in Asia, and definitely in Southeast Asia insurance is a face-to-face business. Yeah, but I haven’t seen her since then. Right. And not just because I’m concerned, but because she’s also concerned. And I think that because of the frictionless way that this can take place. I’m curious to see what happens with all of these tools that you’re building now going forward. In other words, once COVID goes away, and it will kind of go away?
Amarit Franssen
I don’t believe that go away actually is undeserved demand before for this kind of stuff. Because imagine at the end of the year, and you forgot to buy tax-saving products, and you wanted right away right now Now, and the agent, he needs to serve many clients during that period. Right? He couldn’t serve everybody at the same time and need to travel around bringing your stuff. This can be done within that day for multiple clients.
Michael Waitze
Yes, that was my point, right? In other words, you know, this, whether I’m getting on the BTS, the MRT driving around in a taxi, or I have my own, you know, driver in my car, if I need to go to Asok, I need to go around the city. Maybe I can only do four meetings a day. But if I can do it using these new tools, I can do 15 meetings in a day. And I think that’s the way we’re going to go regardless of whether there’s a pandemic or not, what do you think?
Amarit Franssen
Yeah, of course, if you imagine that all the agents, normally the peak load at the end of ythe month, you also need to commit the number of alone. So the last three day of the month, is a very peak load day. So this stuff can help them a lot during that period.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I just don’t think this so I think the pandemic is gonna go away. But I don’t think that the result of the pandemic and this sort of virtual face-to-face thing is gonna end like I’d much rather have you right now sitting in my studio, having a face-to-face conversation. But I think that that’s going to happen less and less.
Amarit Franssen
I think that completely depends. If something like I really want to meet you like this. I want to be I want to see you but for buying insurance, you don’t need to go to see that. You don’t want to see the agent, right? You just need it right now. That’s all after.
Michael Waitze
What do you think of some of the other trends that you’ve seen over the past? I don’t know, pick a timeframe, year.
Amarit Franssen
I think the big problem right now what I see is in the motor business,
Michael Waitze
in the motor business. Tell me why.
Amarit Franssen
You seen not so many cars running around, right. And if you look into the claiming process normally the car that claim a lot is the car that have insurance first class, right? Yep. And most come from the commercial car.
Michael Waitze
Got it, like delivery trucks and stuff like that. Yeah,
Amarit Franssen
Well, well, no, no, no, no, I’m not talking about that. Maybe like a when, for bringing people around for the two hours, this kind of thing. We don’t have to resume, like corporate cars that need to run for equity. Right, and it won’t go out as much as before. So this kind of people, this kind of cars claim less, that’s the main problem, the first problem, the next problem, they start not buying their first, the first-class insurance. We now see the impact a lot in this.
Michael Waitze
So what do you think happens to motor insurance over time? This is a topic I love actually. In other words, and there are a bunch of different things that can happen. In normal times, right? With no COVID and everybody just driving around as usual, most people still leave their car at home 80% of the time. And do you think and let’s separate this out at this point,
Amarit Franssen
that that kind of car? Normally they don’t crash?
Michael Waitze
Yeah, they don’t crash but but should they have yearly insurance? Or should they have pay-as-you-go insurance?
Amarit Franssen
Actually this a thing later on come out like three they can buy like three months, something like that is a new innovative product. So so I think that this kind of product, you will see it come out more often, like the small, smaller sizes ticket are used for the usage only. And also you see like some people bringing like pay per mile thing like the one like the one they have in us to see this kind of stuff coming out. But at the end goal, right. So I don’t know that if people will still need cars in the long-term future at all, not because you see in a lot of stuff like this Grab going around and you see a lot of new public transport coming up. Actually, I’m the one who prefers public transport.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I mean, I probably ride the BTS more than I get into a taxi. What do you think happens when autonomous vehicles take over? And I want to set a stage for you, though a little bit. So let me just finish the thought. Today, we insure cars, for accidents, right? I crashed my car into yours or I crashed my car into a wall or something and I want to get damaged insurance. But if autonomous driving actually happens, and I think it’s going to happen sooner than most people think. Now my car is actually an income stream. Or could be. So is there a way to? Does motor insurance then change or morph into like a parametric way to determine whether I’m losing income because something happens to my car? So as opposed to just like getting into an accident? Maybe it’s just now parametric for income? How do you see that moving? And you could say like, it’s not a fully formed thought like, I don’t know yet. But that’s the way I’m looking at this stuff. Like, do you think about?
Amarit Franssen
Yeah, I think it’s gonna be a big thing for people to invest, like the way actually it’s not only not, you don’t need even need automated car, right. This day, I saw a lot of people who want to run their own fleet. And run through Grab that. That is already happened. It has. It has.
Michael Waitze
So is there. Is there a parametric way to understand and it’s tricky, right? Because do you put a telematics device in the car? Do you use a phone that has a GPS and it’s understood when the car is actually working? And when it’s just your own personal driving?
Amarit Franssen
It’s going to be the same as agriculture, agriculture insurance product, right. So you hit hatching when the circumstance that makes you lose income. I think there’s my somewhere that the insurers might step in, in the future. But what I’m really looking to like cyber insurance, that is where people not really stepping in yet much. It was very difficult to find a good code for us. Because what we do is we also collect or collect a lot of personal data right before and people aware that our OCR tech, we do not collect the data. If we leak it out. It’s going to be a problem. If we leak it out they’re going to have a big problem or something like that. So, eventually, we stop collecting this kind of data. So we train our own model on our own data, and we can generate stuff on our own to train it back, which don’t need a lot of data from the clients at all. But what we see happening is the insurer still afraid, or other clients still afraid of this kind of stuff. And they don’t have the right kind of product that best fit for this kind of leak because what the Cybertron they’re talking about mostly is about credit card stolen thing. So this kind of stuff is completely different.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I mean, internet outages matter. And connectivity matters. Like all these things are gonna come together. It’s not just cyber where like someone’s hacking in. It’s just the pure connectivity as well. And remember, if your car just to get back to the motor thing, if your car is connected, what happens when your car lose connectivity, particularly for people you’re talking to has, you know, we’re trying to build fleets and stuff like that, like, a lot of new things are going to happen in the insurance industry, I think. Yes,
Amarit Franssen
Definitely. I think everything around people need to have this kind of security for what we call, what we don’t understand fully yet.
Michael Waitze
I agree. So let’s just move on a little bit, because I feel like we could talk on that topic forever. But you Appman itself was funded, right? And I love this actually. just refresh my memory. When you started Appman, how long ago was that? You said 10 years ago, more than
Amarit Franssen
10 years already but most of the beginning years, we were a software house. Right. trying to build many kinds of thought up until we come into the InsurTech. Market.
Michael Waitze
That’s what I mean. Right? So Appman itself was never meant to be like a funded company, at least at the beginning. Right? It was like doing software development. You hit on this insurance thing. And now it starts like moving. It’s cool, kind of in a way. But now you got funded for the insurance part, because that’s where you’re really excelling. That makes sense. Yeah. It’s, it’s kind of cool. So talk to me about this funding, what it means how it happened, and how that’s going to help you grow.
Amarit Franssen
Actually, what we were really lucky, we have a lot of synergy investor, who are like banks, and brokers. Who are who are our clients that one one badly, to have our solution in the cheap way to help them deploy a lot of stuff to make it more efficient and selling. Because it’s their core business, right? So, so we need to get more people on the platform. So to make our solution become even cheaper. So that is where we have the idea of, that’s why we need a funding to to get more people to come to us a platform. Because before before we started this, we are only focusing on life insurance. And in life insurance business, they have a lot of money, right? They can spend a lot on on the tech side. But in terms of broke apart, they can’t spend that kind of money the way that they spend, like a insurer spend. Right. So we need to rethink how can we make our solution become cheaper, and, and more accessible for everybody?
Michael Waitze
How closely do you work together with your biggest clients for software design? In other words, is it the case that you just sit with them almost like roundtable style and say, What do you need? How’s the stuff that we’re doing already? How can we improve this? Or do you kind of just go away and try to figure out yourself based on what your team knows about the insurance industry? And then present products to them?
Amarit Franssen
Actually is, yeah, it’s more like that. We start doing stuff on our own and we start build little by little and go back to them keep going back. Okay, is this fit your business? Now we have this cortex that can help your business, this kind of thing before we go into launch with them, or what we keep doing our own stuff already before we go to meet the clients. But the key is, how could we do the right thing to get focusing? Our focus, right, actually, that is always a big debate in the company.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I mean, it’s, there’s no, there’s no fixed answer, right. In other words, it’s somewhere in the middle, where you have your own ideas that you think are gonna be great. And then your clients think, just tweak it a little bit kind of thing. Yeah. Right. It’s got to be somewhere in the middle. How many people are at Chapman now working on the InsurTech stuff? I’m afraid to hear the answer. Why now is about 200 people, Ray. Oh, my God.
Amarit Franssen
Yeah, Billy. So we expand from I think 100 something last year to 200. And the plan is for this funding round, we need to increase our headcount in 300 to 300 in three years. Before are we planning to raise the round maybe very soon.
Michael Waitze
Where do you find all these people? Like, where do you find great, I presume a lot of the people that you’re hiring are developers, right? Guess what do you find them as your company fundamentally, mostly Thai developers, you have an international group of developers. Well,
Amarit Franssen
we had a few good international group of developer, but very few, but most of them are Thai. So we have regular cash our team that helping us to get people in and the other part is also we work with Xing my university costly to build, to build up like curriculum to build a student to send to us. So we have our first batch, like, around I think about 11 to 13 people who come in like especially for man traded by, by man so we this curriculum that this is what we are very proud of, is the first year that students learn about order, ology general education thing, and they have a six month boot camp. And then right away after their six month boot camp, so another one year and a half, they come to work with us, and they can have three had have they, they can graduate within three years. So it’s good water, their period of, of studying around one years already, and those one year and a half day stay as our employee, and they get some benefit also.
Michael Waitze
So I think this is the new way of education as well. I love the fact that you’re doing this and to be fair, you know, I live in Bangkok. I love Thomas, Chula, like all the great universities, you know, wrong said that are in Bangkok. But the fact that you’re working with CMU, I’ve been there, I’ve been part of their programs, I’ve done some stuff with them. I love Chiang Mai University, the campus is beautiful. And they’re very focused on building a relationship with startups, whether it’s in the food sector, that the regular tech sector, and now in the inshore tech sector, it makes me happy actually, that you’re working with Chiang Mai university because I feel some sort of connection to them. I love what they’re doing. And I love the fact that the kids get credit for working with you, and that they can graduate faster. I think that’s kind of like the future of education as well, at some level. No.
Amarit Franssen
And I think like during that period, that they are working with us and they get paid already. And I think it’s helped them a lot, then then then sending them to school. And once they graduate to becoming senior developer really.
Michael Waitze
It’s a much better way. In other words, when I went to college, you know, we spent four years studying economics and had very little work experience. And then you just throw you on to Wall Street and just say go, I didn’t know anything. Right. But now what you’re doing is you’re saying during the time where you’re at school, you’re learning all these things, helping us build products, and when you graduate a year sooner than you expected. Now you’re just like a senior developer? Huh? That’s a great thing, I think no.
Amarit Franssen
So we’ve been doing this for three batch already. Good stuff. Our first batch just arrived. This just arrived at our office this January. So about like we were working without a six month already.
Michael Waitze
Okay, that’s great. Do you see the opportunity to work with other universities as well? Like, is there a reason why CMU did this? Or is it?
Amarit Franssen
definitely definitely we are very lucky that we working through Federation industry that set up this curriculum where where we’re at CMU. And we also work if the any university you want to open this kind of program we really happy to participate in?
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I mean, I can see some of the big universities across the country, really wanting to do this, not just with you, but with other companies like yours, where they can give the students and the kids that are coming out to graduate just the work experience beforehand. And then by the time they get to you, they’re already super productive, but also enjoying it as well. Right? It’s not just about the productivity, it’s about their dedication to the things that they’re doing. Yeah, sure, sure. And getting real life experience. Go ahead.
Amarit Franssen
So what what we do is normally do we need to sign a contract with or the client or the or the employee who know or the student who’s becoming the intern for us, right? So so what we need to do is, we need to send our HR team do attitude test, this kind of thing. Would they be having good attitude enough to go through this program? So basically, it’s like recording at the early day.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, recording from day one. Right? And maybe not that early, but pretty much. I want to ask you one last question or just bring up one last topic as you I mean, you’re have 200 people. If you’re going to expand to 300 people in the next couple of years. Do you look at expanding outside of time. I learned I mean, there’s a guy who’s an international guy who speaks English, you can talk to anybody in any country. Are you thinking about expanding outside the country? And if you are like, what are some of the challenges to doing that?
Amarit Franssen
Actually, we are looking into areas right now. One is expanding to other country without existing solution. And also, another part is expanding our solution to new industry, to new industries. In new industry right now we have crypto business, who will be coming out by and we spin off our OCR tech for them to use for for doing what? Yeah, KYC onboarding. And we have automotive industry who just join us want to use our real core tech to doing to replacing people who want to buy secondhand cars, so they can, they can sell away the car before the buying the car to the secondhand shop. So this is brand new for us for new this new area. So we are really excited, exciting to expand to other industry as well.
Michael Waitze
So do you do any? This is an interesting thing, right? So you can use what’s called your OCR technology, which has to be very sophisticated to do this. But if I own a car, it’s five years old. It’s like a Honda Civic, it has no dents on it, I want to sell it. But I don’t want to drive around to like 15 other drivers. Maybe I want to work with karo. Right, is building this big sort of used car business. And but they don’t have like maybe the tech to do this, I saw that look on your face. I don’t know what it means. But if there’s an efficient way, like I sold a car a couple of years ago, I think I got a good price for it. But I had to go to a bunch of different places to do it. My car was in perfect condition. No, how does all this work, then if you’re switching industries?
Amarit Franssen
Well, basically, we also have all this solution, right? It’s pretty the same. So we can send a link to the client clients. And they can do so when they when they buy the video call and do the step that we need to the agent can control through through the through the laptop or through through the the iPad, the iPad app through weighing this kind of thing. And we are looking not only that we want we want to help security company we want to help crypto company to do onboarding the way we can do sophisticated lever dangerous.
Michael Waitze
I understand. I think you have a really big problem actually. I don’t think 300 people’s gonna be enough. No, I think you need like 500 people.
Amarit Franssen
Yeah, maybe if the next round coming in food.
Michael Waitze
Yeah, I mean, I think if people that listen to this, and let’s see the success that you’re having. There’s just so much happening in the tech space. I hadn’t thought before we started speaking about how to take the technology that you’ve already built, and move it into other sectors. But the idea Remember, you talked about this, like digital face to face thing, right? Yep. There are plenty of other places where that technology that you’re building can be effective in making those relationships able to thrive online?
Amarit Franssen
Yeah, sure. Sure. Actually, I think I will. Not only I think I believe that some kind of stuff, you don’t really want to meet that person or waiting for that person. So you can send something to do that service right away?
Michael Waitze
Do you think that it changes? Let me back up for a second. So right now, most of your employees are where are they in Bangkok? In Bangkok? Right? Yeah, but if your technology is really good. And you can use some of your own tech to hire people that are in Chiang Mai, or in Shanghai or in Cancun, or in Phuket or in other places, right, because now you’re creating a mechanism where the face to face thing can be facilitated through technology, then your pool of potential I call this this sort of democratization of employment, right? Yep. And that means that you can have somebody in Estonia that fits into your company culture, and you can hire them via the tech you’re already building for your clients and use it for yourself. Does that make sense?
Amarit Franssen
Actually, you we don’t see that plus, as I told you before, it’s about connectivity and a teamwork, I understand. So we want to plus two to become five. So that is the part that that are different. But this kind of part is some stuff that you really don’t need to see the garage people to come to visit your car, right so you can on your own web. There are some there supervising around or you can do like some, some, some small surveying of the house or what we’re using also in some way that the insurer don’t need to survey in order to house this kind of stuff. You’re also That is possible, right? You know, you just don’t want to wait. You just want to finish it right away to do to go to next step. Nobody interrupt.
Michael Waitze
I got it. I got it. I got it. Okay, look, I’m gonna let you go. This was awesome. I’m so glad we got a chance to catch up. And when this other stuff is over, I got to come to your office. I want to see this physical space. And I want to meet you face to face. And maybe the next time we record I can bring my mobile studio into your office and we can sit like at the same microphones and have a conversation like this. I really appreciate your time. Amarit Franssen, co-founder of Appman. This was incredible. Thank you very much.
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