The Asia InsurTech Podcast was catching up with John Brisco, the CEO of Coherent. The last time we had John on the show was in December 2020, you can find the episode here, and a lot has changed since then. We talked about Coherent’s new product, Spark, and the company’s expansion globally.
Find the transcript of our conversation below:
Michael Waitze 0:04
Hi, this is Michael Waitze. And welcome back to the Asia InsurTech Podcast. Today we are joined by John Brisco, the CEO of Coherent. And John, it’s great to have you back on the show. It’s been a while actually, how have you been?
John Brisco 0:19
It’s great to be back in the show, Michael, thank you very much, everyone. Very good. Although I’ve been traveling a lot all over the globe over the last eight to nine months, which I’m sure we’ll talk about as part of this. But I’m pleased to see that the world seems to be getting a little bit normal again. And I think that’s good for everyone.
Michael Waitze 0:37
You know, it’s so funny, I was thinking about this, the last episode that we recorded was in December of 2020, I went back to check and I’m trying to think without going back and listening to it, like, Did we mention the pandemic or not? And I don’t even really want to talk about it so much, right? Because it’s like, I’m tired. I’m really tired.
John Brisco 0:52
I think it was a bit of an unwritten rule that we tried to say let’s try to not talk about it. Yeah, but it was, it was one of those things where I’m sure it inevitably came up as part of one of the discussion points. But yeah, it was, it was certainly I’m trying to forget it from my sort of system as well.
Michael Waitze 1:11
Same here. But so it’s interesting. You’ve been traveling a lot over the last eight or nine months, which is awesome, right? And for me, like my first time getting on a plane was on June 1, I believe, or maybe may 30. I can’t remember anymore. But not that long ago. And I went, it was mostly to go to ITC Asia in Singapore. I think we missed each other there. But it was just good to get back on a plane again. I mean, it’s got to be awesome to travel around the world, not just to meet your team, but to meet potential clients and all that other stuff. It’s just different, don’t you think?
John Brisco 1:38
No, is it’s like the trips remind you of actually what human life should be like? What we all anticipated. I do think what’s quite interesting, or because of the pandemic, I actually think people try to make the most of those physical face to face meetings. Rather than usually when sometimes people may have been a little bit reserved on some of those meetings, I think people appreciate that actually can’t take that for granted anymore. And I found a lot of those interconnections really enjoyable from first meeting initiation. So I think I think that’s a really good sign for trying to build businesses in different parts of the world versus the old way of maybe you’d have to fly all the time before people really disclosed various things. I think it’s becoming a bit more of an open world.
Michael Waitze 2:31
No, I think you’re right. And it’s kind of funny, right? I was in Singapore for that month, and I found it super productive. But I also think people felt like, Who knows when the next time is we’re not going to be able to travel again, like it was like North Korea for everybody for two years. You couldn’t even leave your own country, or you couldn’t even get back to your own country. It was just a weird thing. Anyway, the last time we talked, we spent a lot of time also talking about product factory, and Coherent connect that much that much work I did do. But I actually want to learn something today, I want to move up the stack a little bit and talk about Spark. There have been a bunch of recent announcement about Spark two. But what’s the new thing here? And is the market looking at it in a different way? Like this is the thing I’m really curious about? Right? Because I think what you were doing was so strange, a year and a half ago or two years ago. But do you feel like the markets kind of caught up to you, and that people now are waiting for this? Like, okay, now I want this thing really badly? Like there’s less explanation necessary kind of thing?
John Brisco 3:31
Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting question. From, from our perspective. And if you recall, in the last session, we always had this perspective that in nearly every enterprise globally, so much of the logic, the calculations of rules, which actually help businesses operate, do come out of Microsoft Excel, or Google Sheets, I should we forget about shoes, wherever. But that tends to be the Business Source of, of control, in essence, but there’s always been this sort of gap and bridge between how do you turn those spreadsheets and to viable codes, and then code which can be enterprise grade to connect your different systems, whether it’s front, middle or back? And when we last spoke, Michael, I think the first sort of use case that we would exploiting in that case was around product development and insurance typically does come from a often created by actuarial teams, product teams in Excel. And then there’s always tended to be a bit of an inefficiency and challenge of how to turn that into the systems which the the big carriers or or any size, a carrier kind of antiques into their system to, obviously offer to the clients. But what we found over the last 18 months is that our mind about the potential of the platform has expanded exponentially. Beyond just product. It’s about any logic, any sort of use case, which you can think about from a an Excel perspective can be an end game for this platform. And therefore, we’ve probably developed our narrative to get a bit more thinking about where we’re coming over the real key part of the logic and data layer within an organization. Because the simple reality is, nearly every enterprise have a decent skill and size wants 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s of spreadsheets and their business often has a challenge of what we’re going to do with these. We’re the answer to that. I think that’s a very sort of big lesson for us over the last 18 months since we last met.
Michael Waitze 5:32
So one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned, and I’m curious about your perspective on this over the last 18 months or two years, right, not just from talking to people like you, but for talking to 1000s of other people, right is is this is that you can surmise what your clients need, right? And you can actually sit on the sideline, not even be in business and just think, oh, would be better if some people had this or that. But if you’re in business, right, and you have this one product that you can offer to people, right, so we can go back to a product builder product factory, yeah. But now you have something to go out and sell to people. So they’ll take the meaning. But what did it take for you to like, How many times did you have to hear people go? That’s great for products. But how about for all the other logic that we have in all these other spreadsheets? You know, I mean, like your sales team must have come home and said, You know, John, like, the product stuff is great. But there’s a whole bunch of other people that are doing how can we then take the this thing that we have and turn it not just into the product factory? But into like logic factory? You know wat I mean.
John Brisco 6:32
I can agree observation, but I think it was, it was a combination of two things. One being that the technology itself, we started enhancing the power and capability of, of that technology, engine, and capability post the CDC announcement in November. So we obviously placed a lot of kind of fortitude and capability around how do we expand the platform, power and potential. And by doing that, then we started realizing well, that the consumption period is, is even greater as to the types of things that we can do. So there was quite a lot of learnings on our own site about what kind of achieving what we could, but then inevitably, where’s the platform start to get released to initial clients? Those clients started going here, could you? Could the platform do x and y? Or is it and we said, well, conceivably, it should be able to? So let’s try out and then obviously, yeah, then then you get that experimentation. And then you start realizing, wow, we can do models that finance those models at rest does models of distribution and marketing is doing or operations models, and then you start realizing, wow, it’s solving so many problems in one platform and and then that’s when your clients become happy. And then we obviously start then having the process of how do we educate people about the potential of what this platform can do? And hence why you’ve probably seen the changing of our narrative, as well as the clarification of a number of different use cases than we had maybe previously.
Michael Waitze 8:07
Yeah, I want to get to that in a second. But I’m just trying to make this point that like, the key thing is just being in business, it’s so hard for me to explain this properly. But the idea is, you can be in business. And only if you’re in business and providing some kind of useful thing to clients, well, they then come back to you and go, Oh, you’re useful. But here’s other opportunities for you. Because you’ve already provided some kind of usefulness for us. And you’re like, yeah, and our products that we’ve developed, this can actually get extended to that. But if you’re not in business at all right, if you’re just sitting on the sideline, moaning about something, which is not what you did, then that opportunity is never going to come to you. Do you know what I mean? So like, you built this whole thing, and I felt it in my own business, and people will come and go, Hey, how about this, since you’re so good at x? Wanna do, you know, a B and see as well? Yeah.
John Brisco 8:57
Yeah, there’s, there’s the element of never got to stand still. And, and obviously, therefore, pushing your business. You make yourselves even more scalable, more faster, yeah. And thus, reacting to when those opportunities come along. Because the safe bet is just to kind of go, I could have quite easily said, Hey, I’m going to create this. And it’s just a great product for a factory and that would be good. But but then we realized, well, it’s probably going to have a time of a decent size. But but then when the new opportunity started coming, we realized, well, we might have something which is so much more than we even imagined to begin with. So you’ve got to, you’ve got to take that risk to kind of therefore go after that opportunity. But it’s
Michael Waitze 9:42
kind of neat internally, right? We’re all sitting around going wait a second, we thought this was amazing. You know what I mean? But actually, and as good as that was, this may be even bigger, and we don’t have to give this up either, right? Because this other thing that we can we can build on top of this. But do you have to do more? I mean, it’s I’d have an obvious question. But I’m curious like, what level of more development did you have to do to make the product now available, not just for the first thing you thought it was going to be good for. But for everything else, and the question for me really is when do you when does a founder realize you’re going from a product company to like a platform company, if that makes sense?
John Brisco 10:17
No, does? It does? I think I think the first part of that, we’ve always been very proud of our engineering sort of, remember that capability. And we’ve invested quite heavily into that for for a young company, often, you have, I think, seed companies see these companies actually, the investment they get is typically to kind of start investing much more than engineering like to fix this. But we actually did the opposite. We actually over invested in engineering, because probably, because of the background myself coming from large enterprises, knowing what you need to do in order to get past those enterprises. Yeah. The common the common roadblock, been if you’re not meeting all these enterprise grade standards, you’re not going to the dorms, yeah. So we always had that kind of mindset from the start. And then obviously, the evolution of some of the features, as well as some of the kind of technology capabilities then enhances the further I need from the realization of you have something which isn’t just niche, it can actually start solving a number of things so that that evolution from product to platform is obviously starting to become our strategy. And then also not just been a platform, but a complimentary connector to other platforms, as well, as is obviously something which is really exciting. And and here’s what I think is the trend and modern technology architecture within businesses, right? It’s not just about it used to be the days of use to buy a box for x a box or why the Oxford’s ended. And then that’s why you’ve got so much hardware, you think that exists across enterprises? Because that’s, that was the way people thought about technology. We’re now you’re trying to think Well, how should your logic, your data and your rules actually flow in the most effective way between different platforms in order to drive the right customer experience, distribution experience and become efficient along the way as well? Yeah. And that’s probably where we’re, we’re certainly positioned ourselves now.
Michael Waitze 12:15
So I’m curious about this, one of the companies that I think about a lot is Shopify. And I’ll tell you why. And I’m curious if you look to other industries, and for you, you know, we could have pigeonholed all of this just to insurance to have you’ve branched out past that, I want to talk about that in a second as well. But I look at Shopify, and I think they’re building all this software, right, to enhance and to enable retail online. But they’ve also built a platform, which is why I mentioned that word earlier, which says, we just don’t have the resources, and no company really does to build every idea. And maybe somebody externally could be better at this more proficient or has already built it, and we can just connect it. So do you think about coherent as well, in that way that if somebody builds something amazing, either you invest in it, or you just allow them connect to you, I mean, at the core, you’re an API company, right? So you understand connectability, that you let people connect to you. And then all of your clients get all of your product, but then the benefit of those software products as well. Does that make sense?
John Brisco 13:13
Yeah. So I think you’re probably kind of understanding where we’re going right? Thing to reality? Yeah, maybe a way to characterize it is, you could imagine us becoming the GitHub of enterprise itself. Go ahead. So the same so we’re using organizations, regardless if you’re in financial services, healthcare, whatever, you’re trying to think through what’s the best way of how I’m translating models from logic into API’s? And therefore, how can that community kind of leverage that in the best type of way and expand and improve upon that, so that there’s a there’s a benefit for every enterprise as part of that ecosystem? Yeah, that’s where we see the opportunity, right? Let’s face facts, Excel is used by a billion people. Every enterprise and F uses it. But it’s not been something which has been really deployed to its full potential. Excel itself has said billions of dollars in investment, we work regularly with Microsoft and, and to connect you and product ideas and product concepts. But the way of how to enterprise IT across a different way of how it can actually be something which can optimize the opportunity for enterprises is where we play. And I think that’s, that’s where we obviously see a massive opportunity for us ongoing.
Michael Waitze 14:32
So let me share an experience with you. I don’t think I shared this with you last time. When I was in, when I was at Morgan Stanley in Tokyo. I was one of the first guys to use Excel. Everybody was still using Lotus 123 No laughing but they were. And one of the things I realized was that, you know, Excel had Visual Basic built into it. And that I knew the steps that I had to go through and some of the API connectivity that I needed to some of our back end reports right. I was in the controls department. So I produced reports every day for the trading desk. But I figured out how to how to record Visual Basic without writing it, right. So this was serious low code before, there was no code, no code. I’m serious, though. And I wrote these, I wrote these visual basic programs, or macros, or whatever you want to call it. And the end result of this was that I would get the p&l reports to the traders before their day started, which was about 12 hours before they used to get it looked like magic to them. But you understand the difference, right? So you’re talking about all these productivity gains, but I lived through that. Yeah, like we did, I did that. So I have a few like a really unique understanding about this as well. And a lot of people will ask, Well, what happens if it breaks? Or if it changes, right? How do you fix that? Because all you’re really doing is taking what I did. And it’s not just this, it’s much more complex. But taking that Visual Basic and going, we’re not going to make it connective across a whole bunch of other systems. That’s what, that’s what API’s do. But people go like, Yeah, but what if it breaks? Then what do I do? Well, you built it, you know, where it’s breaking, you can just fix it in the same way and then just republish it using the API functionality that spark has, is that fair?
John Brisco 16:10
Yeah. So that is fair. On top of that, there’s the testing simulation capability, the platform, so sure, effectively, it shouldn’t be broke, because you should have be once you’ve loaded the model, turned it into an API tested, then therefore, what you’re anticipating to be your inputs and outputs from that test from that model should be fully sort of testing just like coders, right? Yeah, we’re just obviously shortening the cycle by two moments versus months and Terrans are doing that. And and quite rightly, if you want to change it, not just because you’ve made a mistake, but actually because it’s changed, changing the market, right? There’s new competition, there’s new regulation, that just basically this new inflation index is wherever you need to run that through your models and logic. It’s as simple as basically updating your spreadsheet and then all the floor impacts basically happen automatically. That’s my point that that’s that’s just that that’s what drives the business opportunity in the business sort of return on investment quite quickly. Versus Traditionally, when I was obviously, working in companies and enterprises. That would take weeks or months on systemic, some sample changes, right. And it would frustrate the business or frustrate IT teams, because ultimately, they can’t get on doing some of the bigger activities, because there’s such a walk of small change to get done. And that’s why actually changing experience with the heart. And that was always why I was really passionate about this problem.
Michael Waitze 17:35
Yeah, I mean, to be fair, the biggest and best IT teams that I dealt with whether it was at Morgan Stanley, or Goldman Sachs, they weren’t bogged down in the fact that they didn’t understand how the business worked. They were bogged down in maintaining and build doing making stuff because most of the people on the trading desk didn’t understand how the tech worked. And it was frustrating to right. So I completely understand that. I’m curious about this, though, you’ve moved out of insurance only yet because I think you’ve had this realization? Or maybe you knew when you started, I don’t know that these types of logical things occur in spreadsheets for every kind of company. Yeah. Has it changed the way you build incoherent or bringing in a different type of salesperson or sales strategy to think about to sell to different people? Because you come out of an insurance background? Yeah.
John Brisco 18:20
Yeah. Yeah. So I think that, that, that the reality is, obviously insurance is a core industry in the industry, we’re growing now, 90 plus carriers across the globe, working with some amazing players of the life, the health as well as the PNC space. So I think I think it’s it’s obviously a testament that we’ve been able to kind of understand that industry and then utilize a platform, which is adding value. But as you quite rightly mentioned, we we’ve obviously seen the opportunity in other industries. And we actually started having capital market players come to us, because basically, they went here. This is a bit of an issue for us as well. We’d love to chat. So what what does it mean? Really, one is that we’re not really changing the platform, as per se Yes, there are some UV systems that we feel we’re going to have to connect to so as part of our platform, ecosystem play, but the roadmap as to the kind of capability, the features etc. I think there’s a lot of crossover between industry, the biggest differences around the data tip of how you articulate what the platform does, and different segments of the capital market spare cities insurance, because the reality is nobody could you come from a capital markets background, in capital markets as investment banks, as asset managers, as hedge funds have PE etc, etc. And even within them, here we are, particularly in the platform is slightly a different message. And as to what to kind of take advantage of what they do day to day as well as basically what’s going to be the most sort of value point for them. So what we’re doing there for you streetman is bringing in capability and expertise who have an understanding of the new and sees the processes and the way that those businesses operate, and therefore can develop go to market and sales propositions that those sub segments can understand because it is different from insurance.
Michael Waitze 20:17
It is. It’s really interesting, right? Like I was having lunch with the founder of a business that’s completely unrelated to this. But he and I sat at lunch yesterday for a couple of hours. And one of the interesting things he said to me was, I’ve had to learn multiple languages. And he wasn’t talking, talking about like learning how to speak Russian or Japanese or Chinese, right? He was just learning how to talk to different sectors of people, do you feel like in a way that because the lingo is so different, that it is almost like learning another language, you know what I mean?
John Brisco 20:46
It says, and like I’m unfortunate, I had a stent in consulting during potential years ago, when I also I consulted to capital market and banking player. So I have a big a big knowledge of basically some of the term terminology as well as how they operate. But obviously, we’re learning a new literature as well as learning a new problem set as to what needs to be solved in those segments. So therefore, I’m not asking my insurance expertise team to basically evenly as the Capital Markets team, that’s why we need a capital markets can come into the business still investing insurance, because they Decatur is great. But there’s 6000 Plus carriers across the world. So there’s there’s plenty of upside opportunity. But But obviously, in capital markets, as it’s a new exciting opportunity for capital markets and banking, and evidently that it’s not just financial services, there’s obviously a number of other industries, which I believe we can stretch into bottle, like any kind of kind of business, you’ve just got to you kind of make sure that you don’t overstretch yourself as well, too early. But Financial Services is certainly the place where we’re, we’re obviously targeted first,
Michael Waitze 22:02
you know, when I was doing sales, was sales trading, but when I was doing sales at Goldman, you know, we would fly to our clients all over the world. So just like you’ve been doing for the last nine months or a year, right. And we always learned a lot from the other people that were all just sitting metaphorically in the lobby, right, because a lot of the travel happened at the same time. And you know, when we’re sitting in the lobby, if there were three other investment banks, or trading houses or capital markets, players there, you know, we could chit chat with them, as well and see what was changing from their perspective. And I’m curious if you’ve seen those same changes in the last eight or nine months of traveling when you go not just to sell, but just to listen, right? What’s changed? Do you think whether from an attitude standpoint, from a software uptake standpoint, I don’t want to say digital transformation, because it feels a bit hackneyed to me, but I’m just curious what what’s changed in your mind? In the last two years since we last spoke? Do you know what I mean, in the insurance and short tech space specifically, because a lot of stuff has happened.
John Brisco 23:02
So probably two or three major sort of changes I’ve seen, one has been that I think they’re ever going to give more of an Asia context lipstick that probably North America is an a similar type of thing. There was a, there was always a tendency in insurance, because they had large IT teams and and obviously, people in the same building, we will try and build everything ourselves or try to kind of develop everything with some some kind of just small add ons in places.
Michael Waitze 23:37
You must have heard a lot like, yeah, we understand that we know that we’ve got a team, we’re working on it kind of thing. Yeah, right. Go ahead.
John Brisco 23:43
But I think the reality being because of what happened during COVID, meet people perhaps realize that actually just having all your eggs in one basket type of game plan is maybe not the best way to kind of operate with that. But don’t get me wrong, a lot of carriers are still going to develop technology themselves. They will, they will still believe that there’s elements of technology, they have to develop themselves for competitive advantage. But I’ve certainly seen a more openness for people to kind of go there’s obviously there’s components of a tech stack when it makes sense to utilize a capability like a human has or whoever, and in order to kind of accelerate our evolution as well as actually solve some problems that we have today as well as we’re going to have in the future if we if we don’t so from so, I’ve seen a more willingness and regards to that kind of more thinking on a text app point of view. Interesting. I think secondly, because of obviously, the we have auto insurance has been traditionally distributed has obviously been heavily agency and bancassurance driven and the Asia market still will still continue to be there. But every carrier is probably fee Challenges in certain markets about how sales are going and how obviously, customer experience operates in a world where perhaps some people are a little bit more apprehensive about meeting people face to face, all the time. So that therefore drives a demand for people looking for more innovation, and more order to kind of optimize your way of how you develop customer relationships, but also how you service customer relationships as well. So that you, basically if you have those interactions, you’re able to close those interactions. Because otherwise, that the client may go cold, and therefore, that may impact the kind of whole sales process, I think there’s been a lot of thinking in the insurance world and, and Asia in that space, and therefore program or appetite for some more innovative solutions. And then the fourth aspect, which I think is, is quite emerging, and I know it’s not the most sexiest topic is The simple fact is that is some sizable regulatory changes coming particularly in accounting standards, IFRS, IFRS, IFRS, 17 kicks in at the end of this year, it does have an impact for every insurer around how they report numbers, as well as, obviously how they think about probably the optimization of capital and various other kind of financial requirements moving forward. So my guess and bet is that there’s going to be quite a big play about streamlining for efficiency, driving more optimization across your whole book, as well as your Operating Model moving forward. And thus, technology is going to be very important to that. Because the labor costs have been rising in every market so that they do the days of just hiring lots of people to solve problems is not going to be the way I think insurers do things. And I would, I would argue that banks and capital markets are much more advanced and insurers in that space. But I think the insurers are going to have to move towards that space. And I suspect there’ll be quite a hot trend and the rest of this year in 2020.
Michael Waitze 27:09
So you make a really good point, right? So the banks and the capital markets players are much more maybe a little bit ahead of the curve in that space. But then the regulatory environment for them is very different to right. In other words, the regulators, globally for financial services, companies at scale, leaving the insurance companies out, right trading companies, investment banking companies, research companies, they’ve kind of what’s the right word, they reverted to the mean, when it comes to regulations. I think if you go to Japan and talk to the FSA, it’s not that different than what the SEC has. And I think if you look at MiFID, in Europe, they’re trying to consolidate and less fragment these things. But insurance even in United States, 50 different states a lot of the same regulations, but still different, right? Yeah. So it’s a much harder thing to do. But I’m curious if you think, and there may not be an answer to this, actually. But I’m just curious if you think that even regionally, let’s talk about Asia, Southeast Asia, you know, toes, the Indonesian regulator work more closely with the Singaporean and the Malaysian and the Vietnamese regulator than to try to disintermediate some of these issues and consolidate at least the regulatory framework to make it easier for insurance companies to not just do that, but for the potential of open insurance and cross border insurance and all that kind of stuff. Because at a certain level, right, these insurance companies gonna have to make a decision. Now that the world is smaller, and other people have figured out how to do things remotely. The other thing it’s opened up is why aren’t we operating in this market? as well? And software does help enable that, but you don’t I mean, do you think that regulatory environment gets consolidated at some level?
John Brisco 28:43
But I do think that it’s quite challenging to do that. That the reality is that obviously, two big insurance markets out of Japan and and China are obviously Hong Kong and Singapore, they have obviously widely respected regulators and regulatory bodies. And I think a lot of Southeast Asia markets do look to them to kind of provide guidance around, we should be focusing on. But then I do feel for a lot of regulators in Southeast Asia, because obviously, a lot of insurance operations in many markets are still effectively not digitized, thus, paper driven, quite manual driven, therefore getting kind of transparency and clarity about like, how do you get kind of more holistic views of an open customer? How do you get kind of transparency across financial needs analysis in the life insurance space? How do you ensure that there’s kind of some form of corporate limits on coverage for claims, if certain incidents happen so that customers don’t get caught out in Southeast Asia? It’s it’s no easy task to kind of provide that transparency and clarity and information. And I do think that’s part of the only way that you’ll get more consistency cross border sort of alignment, if some of those information challenges as well as automation elements can be, can obviously be kind of overcome. So that’s no easy task. And I don’t see it being something that’s sold in the next 12 months or 24 months, unfortunately,
Michael Waitze 30:25
is this. And again, tell me what I’m misunderstanding here. But is this an opportunity also for coherent, and I’ll run you through what I’m thinking? If if regulations are just logic at some level, and if they’re stored in like an Excel spreadsheet, this logic around what the regulations are, what’s stopping them from using Spark creating the API connectivity to it, and then allowing every insurer to then connect? I’m seriously I thought a lot about this, to then connect to those regulations. So that that’s where the transparency comes from. And if that’s the case, as the regulations change, we talked about this earlier, all of the flow after the change happens automatically, because they’re built into that whole process where they’re API connected. So I don’t have to make a big announcement, I can tell people if I if I want, if I want to, I don’t have to, because it just happens digitally. You know what I mean? I’m sure it’s not going to happen in the next 12 months or 24 months. But that feels like a gigantic opportunity, because it is so complicated and so difficult. So not that many people can do it.
John Brisco 31:26
Yeah, look, we often have these discussions and give you around certain things, which we think could be additive to the whole insurance ecosystem that that I can disclose. And in the US that are some discussions going on with various regulatory bodies in the states around how do we make that kind of updates on workers compensation, like legislation be more automatically fed through to all insurers. So there’s the wit, the information that gets goes backwards and forwards between the regulator and the shooter is complying to the latest legislation, right? And spark enables that capability to happen. So it requires two things. Maybe one is obviously you would need the regulatory body to be kind of forward thinking and wanting to kind of obviously embrace a different way of doing things. And then on the other stage, you need all these shooters to be API connected in order to kind of obviously, see, and to enter message. But undoubtedly, that a platform like ours could be one of those key constituents to kind of really solving some of the complexities you outlined, then,
Michael Waitze 32:31
What does Africa look like to you? I’ll let you go in a second. But what does Africa look like to you? 51 countries, 1.4 billion people? I’m rounding a little bit right. But a massive opportunity. And if you look at what’s happening in the funding in the startup space, in the connectivity in the mobile penetration, like it’s moving, and it hasn’t moved in decades, right, but now it is moving. Do you see that as a big opportunity for coherence as well?
John Brisco 32:59
It’s an interesting dynamic, I think, the African market, because in certain ways, they’ve never actually got some more sophistication. Yeah. Yeah, they’ve learned a lot maybe from Latin America and Asia as to certain things that have worked and then basically kind of become quite, quite smart and how they deploy different solutions. So in different ways of, of obviously driving customer engagement within financial services. So from our point of view, I would we, we can have two classifications for our kind of wave have we have equal tomorrow, what is our, what we’d see is our enterprise b2b business, which is obviously the traditional way of only target Enterprises for your seal your own sales team or for your partnership, so you can introduce you and I think will always obviously can respond to opportunities across the globe, because then our platform is globally scalable. We don’t have to be in the market to solve the problem. But then the other motion, which we’re quite excited about technology market is called product growth, where essentially, anyone can go into your website, kind of start getting access to your platform, and then never has to talk or meet a career person in order to start utilizing your platform. So I think markets like Africa and Latin America, and even parts of Southeast Asia, that will be a replay for those types of markets. Because obviously, the size of the population, the vastness of the countries, means that people actually want to solve this problem rather than waiting for a response to hear an email or a clear inquiry, they can just go start playing with the platform themselves. And then from there, hopefully, we would see that kind of scale and growth coming from from that type of strategy. So we definitely are going to be adapting different tactics and different ways of obviously, making the platform as global unscalable as possible, but I have to admit, I do keep an eye on on what’s going on in Africa, I still have some extremely sort of interesting kind of funding announcements. You’ve obviously got a number of large insurers as well as banks starting to grow significantly in the region. And yes, some things kind of making some bets early on could play great big dividends moving forward.
Michael Waitze 35:23
I think so I think so far, a lot of really forward thinking and smart business. Look, I’ll let you go. I really appreciate your time today. John Brisco, the CEO of Coherent, that was awesome. Thank you.
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