Latest / Leaders In Payments / Andrew Bud, Founder & CEO at iProov | Episode 353

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Andrew Bud, Founder & CEO at iProov | Episode 353 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Greg Myers: Hello everyone.
• 0:19
  Greg Myers: This is Greg Myers, the host of the Leaders in Payments podcast, and today's special guest is Andrew Budd, the founder and CEO of iProof.
• 0:27
  Greg Myers: So, andrew, thank you so much for being on the show today.
• 0:29
  Andrew Bud: Thank you very much for inviting me, Greg.
• 0:31
  Greg Myers: Absolutely.
• 0:32
  Greg Myers: So let's dive right in, If you don't mind.
• 0:33
  Greg Myers: Tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
• 0:45
  Andrew Bud: I was born and brought up here in London.
• 0:46
  Andrew Bud: In fact, if you want to know exactly where I was born, go and watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part One, right at the beginning, when Hermione wipes the memory of her parents and then walks sadly out of the house.
• 0:55
  Andrew Bud: That is the house in which I was born and in fact my father was inside that house when it was filmed.
• 1:02
  Andrew Bud: So I'm a Londoner.
• 1:04
  Andrew Bud: Greg, you have to distinguish between someone who's English and someone who's from London.
• 1:08
  Andrew Bud: Remember that London has a population that is larger than Sweden and covers an area larger than Luxembourg.
• 1:14
  Andrew Bud: At the time of Brexit, people said maybe London should break off and rejoin the European Union all by itself.
• 1:19
  Andrew Bud: I'm a Londoner.
• 1:21
  Andrew Bud: I was born here, I was brought up here, I went to school and then I went to University of Cambridge, which is a quite well-known university in the Fenlands of East England, and after that I joined a technology consultancy at the forefront of a range of technologies, again in Cambridge.
• 1:37
  Andrew Bud: By chance, I found myself as part of the Cambridge technology phenomenon.
• 1:40
  Andrew Bud: After a few years I went to live in Italy.
• 1:43
  Andrew Bud: So I spent nearly 10 years in Italy, where I married and had two of our four children.
• 1:48
  Andrew Bud: I came back 25 years ago and I've lived in a suburb of London ever since then called Finchley, principally famous because in the film the Adventures of Narnia, one of the characters says something like this can't be happening to us.
• 2:01
  Andrew Bud: One of the characters says something like this can't be happening to us Nothing ever happens to us.
• 2:06
  Greg Myers: We're from Finchley.
• 2:08
  Andrew Bud: Nice, nice.
• 2:09
  Andrew Bud: But just to reassure our audience, in my last passport I had 72 CBP immigration stamps for SFO.
• 2:16
  Andrew Bud: So I have spent a very large and very gratifying amount of my working life working in the United States with my American colleagues.
• 2:25
  Greg Myers: Okay, great Well, let's talk about the company.
• 2:27
  Greg Myers: Tell our audience what iProof does.
• 2:35
  Andrew Bud: So we've been around for 12 years and for all of that time we have focused upon the biometric verification of people's identity when they're remote.
• 2:41
  Andrew Bud: So what we're doing is we're ensuring that, when a person who is perhaps on their couch at home in an untrusted environment, with an untrusted device on an untrusted network, not surveyed by anybody, when they present themselves as the owner of an identity, that we ensure that they're the right person but, more importantly, that they're a real person and that they're present right now.
• 3:04
  Andrew Bud: So our job is today often described as assuring liveness, making sure that we're looking at a real person present right now on any device, irrespective of the handset, technology or platform, in any circumstance.
• 3:20
  Andrew Bud: For any kind of a person, whatever their social status or wealth, for any kind of a person, whatever their social status or wealth, their ability to afford costly or not so costly devices, whatever their age, gender or ethnicity, we want to make sure that they are able to access that most precious of assets trust in order to get on with their lives, to keep them protected and to keep the organization that they're dealing with protected as well.
• 3:45
  Greg Myers: Okay, and what are the use cases?
• 3:47
  Greg Myers: What are they authenticating for typically?
• 3:50
  Andrew Bud: So there are two big moments when people have to assert their identity as a real life human being.
• 3:57
  Andrew Bud: One is when they are enrolling, In other words, when they're setting up an account, when you're creating an account for yourself first time, whether it's a bank account or a social media account or a crypto account, or a tax account with the government, or a digital identity itself with a government, or a health account with a health provider anytime you want to create the ability to do things in future.
• 4:21
  Andrew Bud: Normally, that requires you to present some biographics about yourself, typically with a photo ID, and then you have to assure the organization that you as a person are the person depicted in that photo ID, and that's the moment that we protect.
• 4:36
  Andrew Bud: So one key use case is enrollment.
• 4:38
  Andrew Bud: The second is repeat authentication.
• 4:41
  Andrew Bud: There are countless times when people are coming back to do something, when they have to prove that they are the person that they should have been to do that.
• 4:49
  Andrew Bud: Now there are many cases where it doesn't matter too much, but there are some cases where it really really, really, really matters that this account doesn't get taken over by somebody else.
• 4:58
  Andrew Bud: So we typically work in those higher risk, higher value moments which might be, for example, when you're resetting your password or authorizing a very high value transaction or changing your personal details, setting up a new payee then the ability to ensure that you look like what you're supposed to look like and that when you do that you're real, that becomes really critical.
• 5:21
  Andrew Bud: There's a new sector emerging now also when you do a video conference and people trust you because you look like who you're supposed to look like and in the modern world of deepfakes you can't rely on that anymore.
• 5:33
  Andrew Bud: So there's a new world in which you have to ensure that the person is a real person present right now when they look like the person you want to have the conversation with, but they might not be.
• 5:44
  Greg Myers: And you mentioned a few industries or verticals there.
• 5:46
  Greg Myers: You mentioned government, financial institutions, healthcare.
• 5:50
  Greg Myers: I assume those are maybe your top three primary industries you work in.
• 5:55
  Andrew Bud: Absolutely Customers.
• 5:56
  Andrew Bud: They're organizations that don't want to get it wrong.
• 6:00
  Andrew Bud: So it's not just a question of compliance, of showing the regulator that they've made all the right moves, in other words, performative security.
• 6:08
  Andrew Bud: Our customers are typically organizations for whom they cannot afford to get it wrong and therefore the level of security and the level of usability and accessibility really does matter.
• 6:18
  Andrew Bud: So governments obviously fall into that case, because inclusion is terribly important.
• 6:23
  Andrew Bud: They can't ever offer solutions that are only accessible to some segment of the public.
• 6:28
  Andrew Bud: And also, when things go wrong, it's not just a question of financial loss.
• 6:31
  Andrew Bud: There can be national security implications, there can be huge political impacts.
• 6:36
  Andrew Bud: So we work with several branches of the US government.
• 6:39
  Andrew Bud: So we work with the Department of Homeland Security Through a partner, idme, we secure the IRS.
• 6:45
  Andrew Bud: And we work with several branches of the United Kingdom government.
• 6:48
  Andrew Bud: So with the Home Office for a variety of visa applications.
• 6:53
  Andrew Bud: We work with a branch of the Prime Minister's office, the Cabinet Office, to create a means of single login, a little bit like logingov for the UK, and also for access to the National Health Service's online app, the Australian government's national digital identity we secure the Singapore government's whole national digital identity program, which is amongst the most advanced in the world, but we also work for many financial institutions worldwide UBS, for example, ing, bradesco in Brazil, standard Bank and Absa in South Africa most of the Norwegian banking system.
• 7:28
  Andrew Bud: So a wide range of financial institutions and also a wide range of a new emerging kind of organization called the trust service provider people who issue and manage electronic signatures and electronic identities themselves electronic identities themselves.
• 7:46
  Andrew Bud: One customer that we're particularly proud of and has become much more visible now, is the Estonian digital ID and signature system, which, as you can imagine, is right on the very forefront of cybersecurity today.
• 7:54
  Andrew Bud: Those are some of our customers.
• 7:56
  Andrew Bud: They're growing all the time.
• 7:57
  Greg Myers: Okay, and from what you just described, obviously you're a global company, so it doesn't matter where the company is based.
• 8:04
  Greg Myers: You can work with them Absolutely.
• 8:06
  Andrew Bud: Although we're based in the United Kingdom, for many years we actually had no British customers at all.
• 8:10
  Andrew Bud: So I think amongst our very first customers were US organizations.
• 8:14
  Andrew Bud: We take an extremely global view.
• 8:16
  Andrew Bud: So every continent we have customers, because we're solving a problem which is universal and I have experience of working in global businesses In the UK.
• 8:26
  Andrew Bud: We happen to be in a fortunate position from a time zone point of view and we happen to have a very good legal system here and we're within the GDPR area.
• 8:34
  Andrew Bud: So when we're processing personal data, we enjoy a very high level of trust that we're not going to play fast and loose with any of the personal data of our enterprise customers or their customers, because we're in the strictest data privacy and data protection environment in the world.
• 8:49
  Andrew Bud: So being based in the UK together has some advantages.
• 8:53
  Andrew Bud: Here in London we're surrounded by, we're within easy reach of, some of the top computer science faculties in the world, so we have a very, very deep and rich talent pool from which to draw to do the very, very difficult science and technology that we have to do in order to complete our task.
• 9:10
  Andrew Bud: So it's a great place to be, but for us, the world is our oyster.
• 9:14
  Greg Myers: Right, right.
• 9:15
  Greg Myers: So you mentioned deep fakes and just as I was researching this and thinking about AI, because I'm kind of following AI real closely and all the things that are going on, I guess first question how has that impacted you?
• 9:28
  Greg Myers: Obviously, the whole deepfake thing and the AI has just matured and just the level of improvement of the technology just is incredibly fast.
• 9:38
  Greg Myers: So how do you deal with that?
• 9:40
  Greg Myers: How do you manage that?
• 9:41
  Greg Myers: How do you just, I guess, from two perspectives one internally with your own technology and two with your customers.
• 9:47
  Andrew Bud: So the first thing I should say is we built this company over the last dozen years effectively to combat the AI threat.
• 9:55
  Andrew Bud: A lot of businesses kind of go oh, ai, it's a shiny thing, let's claim that we deal with AI.
• 10:01
  Andrew Bud: Let's claim that we deal with deepfakes.
• 10:02
  Andrew Bud: Because of some history in this business, we kind of come from that from the word go.
• 10:07
  Andrew Bud: We've been an AI business for a very long time.
• 10:11
  Andrew Bud: We were the first company in the world to offer an AI that is, deep learning-based face-matching service online at the beginning of 2016.
• 10:20
  Andrew Bud: So we weren't just ready for the AI threat, that was what we were built to deal with.
• 10:25
  Andrew Bud: So the AI and the application of AI in our sector, which is the creation of deepfakes, has actually driven our business tremendously, because we're probably the only company in the world that is today capable genuinely of resiliently blocking deepfakes when used for identity verification.
• 10:45
  Andrew Bud: Blocking, detecting, I should say Some companies try and sometimes fail to block them.
• 10:50
  Andrew Bud: We detect them and there's a big difference.
• 10:52
  Andrew Bud: How do we do that?
• 10:53
  Andrew Bud: There are really two answers One is through some technology and the other is through some business system.
• 10:58
  Andrew Bud: The first thing I want to say is you're not going to be able to detect deepfakes.
• 11:03
  Andrew Bud: The quality of deepfakes is getting so good that within a year or two, it will be impossible to detect an arbitrary deepfake.
• 11:11
  Andrew Bud: We don't believe that that is a durable model.
• 11:13
  Andrew Bud: So, in order to detect when somebody is trying to use deepfake technology to spoof an identity session, what we do is we challenge the situation by physically introducing an unpredictable element in to confuse the deepfakers, and we do that by illuminating the user's face from the screen of their own device with a rapidly changing and unpredictable sequence of colors.
• 11:38
  Andrew Bud: We get the user's device to flash a rapid sequence of colors on the screen and, while their face is illuminated by that color, we stream the video of their face back to our servers where we analyze the reflection of that unpredictable, externally introduced screen illumination from their face, the way that that light reflects off their face and interacts with the ambient illumination that tells us that we're looking at a live skin-covered 3D human face-shaped object, and the sequence of colors, which is different each time and doesn't repeat in the life of the person, that tells us that we're looking at a live video that was created at that moment and not pre-prepared or pre-cooked.
• 12:19
  Andrew Bud: It's a very strange and unusual challenge that we have set the attackers and because we have billions more data points than they do, our ability to detect when the forgers, when the AI forgers, make the tiniest of mistakes in producing forgers and they do tens of thousands of times a month our data advantage gives us a more subtle appreciation of the difference between real and fake than the attackers ever can, and we're learning all the time.
• 12:50
  Andrew Bud: So every time they attack us, we learn more about them than they do from us.
• 12:53
  Andrew Bud: And that's the other half of what makes us very special.
• 12:57
  Andrew Bud: We're not just a piece of technology, it's not a disk.
• 12:59
  Andrew Bud: We provide a service because behind that flashing technology, what we call the flash mark, is what we call our iProof Security Operations Center, in which we are collating every transaction that takes place worldwide, millions a day.
• 13:13
  Andrew Bud: We're triaging down to detect those that show signals of fraud.
• 13:18
  Andrew Bud: Then we analyze those fraudulent attacks to learn, to watch and learn what the attackers are doing.
• 13:25
  Andrew Bud: And if what they're doing is new and unexpected, we study that, we replicate it and we train our systems to defend against it.
• 13:31
  Andrew Bud: So we're continuously watching and learning from the attackers so that we use that informational advantage in order to become a continually evolving solution.
• 13:44
  Andrew Bud: And so what people often ask us you know, how do you stay ahead of the rapidly changing capabilities of AI?
• 13:49
  Andrew Bud: And the answer is by learning from it, by watching it, studying it and evolving.
• 13:53
  Andrew Bud: We do sometimes 100 changes to our system in a month to keep up with what's going on, to our system in a month to keep up with what's going on.
• 14:04
  Andrew Bud: And only by these two methods of physically introducing an unpredictable and disruptive element into the scene itself can we perturb the AI attackers, and then by studying and watching and learning and evolving can we stay ahead of them.
• 14:18
  Andrew Bud: It's a strange thing, greg, because many of your listeners in the payments industry will have fraud detection systems.
• 14:24
  Andrew Bud: They will be combating fraud and they will be doing exactly what I've just described They'll be watching and studying and evolving.
• 14:29
  Andrew Bud: That's kind of the way that you do fraud.
• 14:31
  Andrew Bud: Well, we're in the business of preventing biometric fraud and you won't believe this.
• 14:35
  Andrew Bud: We are the only company in the world that does that.
• 14:39
  Andrew Bud: Now, the reason can be it's very difficult to do it in biometric.
• 14:42
  Andrew Bud: It's legally very complicated, it's technologically extremely demanding, it's expensive to do.
• 14:47
  Andrew Bud: You require tremendously skilled people to do it.
• 14:50
  Andrew Bud: So it's hard work, but in our view, that doesn't justify not doing it, and that's one reason why the most demanding customers, like governments and senior financial institutions, rely upon us.
• 15:03
  Greg Myers: Okay, and so you talked about fraud, and typically within fraud, there's a it's not a yes-no, it's typically a likelihood of fraud, and each individual company, in some cases, can set those parameters.
• 15:16
  Greg Myers: Do you work the same way or do you say yes or no?
• 15:19
  Greg Myers: It is or isn't.
• 15:20
  Andrew Bud: So in terms of what we give our customers back, it's a yes no.
• 15:23
  Andrew Bud: We can give them a limited number of settings to set their risk appetite, but it's very important we only give yes no, because the moment you give out scores, you immediately enable an attacker to start engaging in a hill climbing exercise.
• 15:39
  Andrew Bud: At the moment there are scores, an attacker can start engaging in a hill climbing exercise.
• 15:42
  Andrew Bud: At the moment there are scores, An attacker can start to explore the performance of your machine learning system, and it enormously accelerates and facilitates any attacker's attempt to break the system.
• 15:52
  Andrew Bud: So, although we do give our customers a set of optional risk appetites that they can choose, all we give them is a yes-no.
• 15:59
  Andrew Bud: In our systems, of course, there's a curve, and one of the things that makes us special is that over 10 years we have been able to shape that curve to such an extent that we no longer have to talk about the trade-off between security and usability.
• 16:13
  Andrew Bud: It's very common in our industry.
• 16:15
  Andrew Bud: You say, well, you have to trade off usability and accessibility.
• 16:17
  Andrew Bud: If you want security, you have to torture the customer, and if you want to give the customer, if you want to get good conversion rates, then your security is going to get compromised and we go no sorry, that's not acceptable.
• 16:28
  Andrew Bud: I came from the world of mobile payments mobile content payments particularly where every single click that you ask the user to do would reduce your conversion rate by 25%.
• 16:37
  Andrew Bud: So our system has to be zero effort.
• 16:40
  Andrew Bud: It has to be totally accessible.
• 16:42
  Andrew Bud: So there's an accessibility standard called WCAG 2.2 with two levels A, which is what most people do, and AA, which is so good that governments require.
• 16:50
  Andrew Bud: We're the only biometric people who reach AA standards.
• 16:53
  Andrew Bud: Super accessible, super usable, we consider.
• 16:57
  Andrew Bud: Most people in the biometrics industry think that a sort of an 80, 85% success rate is acceptable.
• 17:02
  Andrew Bud: We go, are you crazy?
• 17:04
  Andrew Bud: Anything less than 95% is defective and typically we're up at the 98, 99% success rate for good people.
• 17:11
  Andrew Bud: And yet, at the same time, our discrimination is so good that you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that people successfully, accidentally, managed to get past us, and that's over hundreds of millions of transactions.
• 17:23
  Andrew Bud: So we've managed, by tuning and training and learning and time, to get to the point at which that performance curve that effectively you alluded to enables us to deliver both outstandingly good performance and outstandingly good security.
• 17:39
  Greg Myers: Okay, okay.
• 17:40
  Greg Myers: Well, you've talked a lot about, I think, what makes the company special, but maybe give us maybe the top one or two reasons you feel like you're differentiated from your competitors out there.
• 17:51
  Andrew Bud: So we are, firstly, incredibly focused.
• 17:53
  Andrew Bud: There were a lot of companies out there who do identity verification a bit of documents, a bit of information, a bit of data lookup, some biometrics, a bit of liveness.
• 18:02
  Andrew Bud: They've got a team of people doing liveness, greg.
• 18:06
  Andrew Bud: I have 200 people in this firm and all they do is liveness, and I don't do that because I enjoy payroll.
• 18:12
  Andrew Bud: To do this properly requires focus and it requires resource.
• 18:17
  Andrew Bud: So what differentiates us?
• 18:19
  Andrew Bud: Our focus and our dedication to exactly ensuring that we can deliver both performance and accessibility and security, and to do so with a business system that continuously evolves.
• 18:33
  Andrew Bud: And that business system, by the way, it's been independently certified by independent auditors within the in Europe.
• 18:39
  Andrew Bud: We have a system called the electronic identity system, called EIDAS, and in order to reach the highest levels of EIDAS, known as qualified signatures and EID level of assurance high, you have to be certified, and it's not just the technology, it's the business system that I talked about that has to be certified.
• 18:57
  Andrew Bud: So they come and do an audit on us once a year and we're the only biometrics company in the world whose business system, as well as its technology, has been certified to a level of assurance high and to so-called qualified assurance.
• 19:10
  Andrew Bud: The technology itself has excellent performance.
• 19:12
  Andrew Bud: We're the only company in the world that has been certified to the FIDO standard for biometric verification.
• 19:17
  Andrew Bud: So we're unusual in the proven, independently certified quality, together with the proven performance that millions and millions of citizens worldwide, in all parts of the country, whether in South Africa, in the favelas of Sao Paulo, when the townships of South Africa and the shopping malls of Singapore, on the buses in London, have been proven to operate reliably over all these years.
• 19:41
  Greg Myers: Okay, Well, where do you see the payments industry headed?
• 19:44
  Greg Myers: And you can certainly answer that within the context of your business.
• 19:48
  Greg Myers: But where do you see the future?
• 19:49
  Greg Myers: Maybe in the next three to five years?
• 19:52
  Andrew Bud: So there's some very interesting things happening in payments.
• 19:55
  Andrew Bud: One of the clear movements is there is a movement happening in crypto.
• 19:58
  Andrew Bud: I mean, crypto has been a bit of a wild west, but what we're starting to see now is the normalization of crypto and therefore something of a wider use.
• 20:06
  Andrew Bud: But it also means that payments based on crypto are going to have to be secured in a much more shall we say, a much more mature sort of way.
• 20:12
  Andrew Bud: So KYC and AML, which are critical in all forms of payment, are going to really really matter in crypto because crypto can be so dramatically misused.
• 20:21
  Andrew Bud: So whereas previously KYC and AML in crypto was kind of a bit of a performative tick boxing, now it's becoming extremely serious.
• 20:29
  Andrew Bud: Account takeover.
• 20:30
  Andrew Bud: In banking, account takeover can cost the customer and typically, once they reimburse the bank, a few thousand dollars and there's probably a good prospect of getting that money back if it's notified quickly.
• 20:41
  Andrew Bud: In crypto, when the money's gone, it's gone and the amounts of money that the people can lose are enormous.
• 20:47
  Andrew Bud: So authentication to prevent account takeover are going to become incredibly important.
• 20:53
  Andrew Bud: As crypto assumes a greater importance, I think we're going to see an evolution in the ways in which high-value payments are authenticated.
• 21:02
  Andrew Bud: You know, today there's still a lot of use of SMS OTP.
• 21:06
  Andrew Bud: I founded in one of the previous companies I founded.
• 21:09
  Andrew Bud: I founded a business that became the world's largest provider of SMS services, so I know quite a lot about SMS, its strengths and its weaknesses, and SMS OTP is really not fit for purpose as an authentication mechanism.
• 21:21
  Andrew Bud: So we're going to see an evolution towards new methods of authentication to secure high-value payments, both upon ownership of the device and upon biometrics, the combination of the two of them.
• 21:33
  Andrew Bud: And I think the other thing is we're going to see a dramatically increasing reliance upon personal digital identity.
• 21:40
  Andrew Bud: One of the biggest problems in the payments world today is push payment fraud.
• 21:44
  Andrew Bud: I hear all over the place this is one of the number one problems that banks in many parts of the world are suffering A lot of.
• 21:49
  Andrew Bud: That is because people are wiring money to people who claim to be A and are actually B, and that's even more critical, obviously, in things like Zelle in person-to-person payments.
• 21:59
  Andrew Bud: So it's going to become important that people, before they send money to a recipient, know genuinely who the recipient is.
• 22:06
  Andrew Bud: So I think we're going to start to see that the availability of ubiquitous digital identity is going to make it easier for people to request just as a matter of routine and the courtesy confirmation of identity of the recipient themselves, and that's apart from the name of the bank account, which is something that's now coming in, certainly in the United Kingdom.
• 22:25
  Andrew Bud: But you're going to be able to assure that when you send money to James Bond 007, the recipient actually is somebody called James Bond 007.
• 22:33
  Andrew Bud: And that also means that if that person then makes off with your money, you have some degree of knowledge about other aspects of their identity, maybe directly or through an escrow, so that you can actually hold them to account.
• 22:47
  Andrew Bud: The problem today is that a lot of these payments are too difficult to hold to account.
• 22:52
  Andrew Bud: For three years, I was on the board of the independent regulator in the United Kingdom for telecoms company-based payments, and the motto there was always follow the money.
• 23:03
  Andrew Bud: You can hold people to account if you can follow the money.
• 23:05
  Andrew Bud: Having a cryptographically solid basis for the identity of the recipient is a great way to follow the money.
• 23:13
  Greg Myers: Right, all right.
• 23:14
  Greg Myers: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you.
• 23:17
  Greg Myers: So maybe walk us through your professional journey, maybe from graduating university till starting the company great technological revolutions.
• 23:39
  Andrew Bud: I'm an engineer by background.
• 23:39
  Andrew Bud: I'd go to parties in my youth in certain places and people say, what do you do?
• 23:41
  Andrew Bud: And I go, I'm an engineer.
• 23:42
  Andrew Bud: And they'd sort of say, oh, a technologist.
• 23:44
  Andrew Bud: And people say, what kind of lawyer is that?
• 23:45
  Andrew Bud: In my earliest period, actually, I started off working for the Nuclear Fusion Research Laboratory of the United Kingdom, which was incredibly exciting.
• 23:55
  Andrew Bud: Nuclear fusion in 1980 was going to change the world.
• 23:58
  Andrew Bud: It was clear.
• 23:59
  Andrew Bud: It just wasn't going to do so in my working lifetime so unfortunately I didn't have the patience to do it.
• 24:03
  Andrew Bud: Now it's becoming a hugely exciting thing.
• 24:06
  Andrew Bud: During the 1980s I worked for a technology consultancy called PA Technology, now part of PA Consulting, and I got involved in the transition of the product and engineering industry from mechanical technology to microprocessor technology.
• 24:24
  Andrew Bud: So what we saw in a period of five to seven years was the complete transformation both of products and of the machinery used to make those products from being mechanically controlled to being controlled by microprocessors.
• 24:35
  Andrew Bud: It was dramatic, rapid, exciting, incredible things happened in a very short time.
• 24:40
  Andrew Bud: It was an industrial transformation.
• 24:42
  Andrew Bud: I was lucky enough to be in the middle of that.
• 24:44
  Andrew Bud: Towards the end of the 1980s I got involved in a project of which I knew absolutely nothing and turned out to be for the world's first consumer digital wireless telephone.
• 24:53
  Andrew Bud: In fact, if I was speaking to you from home now rather than from my office, I would now theatrically reach behind me and show it to you, and I'd even make a phone call on it, except that I dropped it on the floor and it broke.
• 25:05
  Andrew Bud: So that got me into mobile communications.
• 25:09
  Andrew Bud: And then I went to work in Italy and I spent quite a lot of the 1990s working for an Italian company called Olivetti, which once upon a time was sort of like it was the size and shape of Hewlett-Packard, it was the world's second largest computer company and my job was to help them get into mobile communications.
• 25:24
  Andrew Bud: And I was quite successful at doing that, to the extent that what is now Vodafone Italia was the firm that I was the original technical founder of.
• 25:33
  Andrew Bud: We also launched Europe's first wireless LANs.
• 25:37
  Andrew Bud: Great technology, stupendous performance.
• 25:39
  Andrew Bud: Shame about the timing Seven years before there was a demand for it Not a great look.
• 25:44
  Andrew Bud: Then I did some work in marketing in the area of emerging internet technology and in 2000, I perceived that SMS, that is, text messaging, was going to be the next great way that companies, enterprises would communicate with their consumers.
• 25:57
  Andrew Bud: It was a tremendous time because everybody else thought the mobile internet was going to be the thing, which was, again, great idea.
• 26:03
  Andrew Bud: Shame about the timing.
• 26:04
  Andrew Bud: So all the capital and all the skills were off chasing butterflies.
• 26:08
  Andrew Bud: So, with no capital, I could start a business which was called Mblox, which went on to become the world's largest provider of text messaging and by 2007, was also the world's largest processor of mobile payments.
• 26:20
  Andrew Bud: We were clearing and settling about $500 million a year, mostly from ringtones, ringtones.
• 26:26
  Andrew Bud: How big can ringtones be, greg?
• 26:27
  Andrew Bud: Let me tell you that at its peak, the ringtone industry was substantially larger than the entire world's recorded music industry.
• 26:35
  Andrew Bud: That's how big it was.
• 26:37
  Andrew Bud: But then, in 2008, we were very successful in some areas, but not very successful in some of the other areas where all the fraud was taking place.
• 26:44
  Andrew Bud: Our systems were naive and in 2008, the bad guys found out about this and in the course of only a few months, millions of people had money stolen from them through our payment network and as the boss I got called up on television British television, greg, mr Budd, the role of you and your company in this scandal?
• 27:00
  Andrew Bud: Were you complicit or just recklessly incompetent?
• 27:03
  Andrew Bud: It was shameful and I vowed it would never happen again, and how to stop it happening again in a world of mobile apps and mobile internet.
• 27:13
  Andrew Bud: When it finally arrived, became a problem which I was told was insoluble.
• 27:16
  Andrew Bud: I'm an engineer.
• 27:17
  Andrew Bud: I don't like insoluble problems, so I had to invent a way of solving it, and that's where iProof came from.
• 27:24
  Greg Myers: Okay, wow, fascinating background and can truly understand why you are where you are now.
• 27:28
  Greg Myers: So let's talk about some things you're passionate about.
• 27:31
  Greg Myers: So maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
• 27:35
  Andrew Bud: So, as I said to you, I had the great fortune to be involved in the dawn of the digital mobile phone revolution and we had this definite sense that we were going to change the world, that in a world in which we gave the ability to make and receive phone calls to a high proportion of the population affordably, that would change the world.
• 27:56
  Andrew Bud: And you know what it did change the world.
• 27:57
  Andrew Bud: It changed the world radically.
• 27:58
  Andrew Bud: Today, I have the same feeling about digital identity that if we can give the gift of trust to people when they interact online, that will change everything in the world.
• 28:09
  Andrew Bud: So I'm now passionate about the transformative power of digital identity to make the lives of billions of people worldwide much better.
• 28:17
  Andrew Bud: Personally, look, there are sea people and there are mountain people, and I'm a mountain person.
• 28:22
  Andrew Bud: So all my life I've loved hiking up mountains not rock climbing, but hiking up mountains.
• 28:27
  Andrew Bud: To be amongst the sights and sounds and, above all, smells of the high mountains, together with my family, because that's incredibly important is my passion.
• 28:37
  Andrew Bud: It's one of the great ways of grounding oneself in a complicated world.
• 28:42
  Andrew Bud: There's a solidity and a permanence about these mountains.
• 28:47
  Andrew Bud: It's a metaphor for me of business you walk up the mountain, you can see the top.
• 28:51
  Andrew Bud: If you try rushing there, you'll tire yourself out.
• 28:54
  Andrew Bud: If you get discouraged, you'll never get there.
• 28:56
  Andrew Bud: So you just keep on trudging up and making the effort and telling stories along the way.
• 29:02
  Andrew Bud: Our four children have grown up associating the mountains with stories.
• 29:07
  Andrew Bud: I used to tell them to them.
• 29:08
  Andrew Bud: Now they tell them to me.
• 29:10
  Andrew Bud: Over the years it appears that the mountains have got rather steeper, so a bit more effort to get up, but somehow our children who are in their 20s and 30s don't seem to have noticed.
• 29:19
  Andrew Bud: That.
• 29:19
  Andrew Bud: Isn't that funny?
• 29:20
  Andrew Bud: That is funny.
• 29:22
  Greg Myers: Well, andrew, if someone comes to you and says, hey, I want to get into this payments industry fintech, call it what you want and they're maybe coming right out of school, or maybe they're changing careers and they want to build a career in this space, what would you tell them they need to do to be successful?
• 29:40
  Andrew Bud: Experiment with different aspects of it.
• 29:42
  Andrew Bud: The payments industry is really, really, really fascinating.
• 29:44
  Andrew Bud: There are lots of different elements of it.
• 29:46
  Andrew Bud: Look, I got to where I am today by putting myself effectively through an apprenticeship.
• 29:50
  Andrew Bud: I did some technology, I did some engineering, some software work, I did some product design, I did project management, I did marketing, I did sales, I did some finance, I did some general management To become a CEO.
• 30:02
  Andrew Bud: I regarded it as an apprenticeship In the payments industry.
• 30:05
  Andrew Bud: There are lots of elements to the payments industry and one of them is going to be a passion.
• 30:10
  Andrew Bud: There is the technology platforming.
• 30:12
  Andrew Bud: There are the incredibly complex and subtle commercial models that underlie it.
• 30:16
  Andrew Bud: There are the tremendously sophisticated now AI-powered fraud detection and response systems.
• 30:22
  Andrew Bud: There were all the compliance issues, which I'm sorry, but I find really interesting the compliance and legal aspects and the multi-jurisdictional aspect of it, absolutely fascinating.
• 30:31
  Andrew Bud: There were the commercial and relationship issues between the payments industry and different other parts of the financial services commercial and relationship issues between the payments industry and different other parts of the financial services ecosystem.
• 30:39
  Andrew Bud: Every one of those is fascinating in itself.
• 30:41
  Andrew Bud: I would suggest somebody coming into this put themselves, try and engage with different aspects of the industry.
• 30:48
  Andrew Bud: At the very worst it'll give you a tremendous grounding to be a CEO one day, but at the very best you'll find one part of it that absolutely fires you and gives you a passion.
• 30:57
  Andrew Bud: And when I went to the palace to get my CBE, princess Anne asked me about why I did this I'm sorry, I'm not.
• 31:04
  Andrew Bud: She might have asked me about why it is and I could only say you have to do what you do for passion.
• 31:10
  Andrew Bud: You have to do.
• 31:11
  Andrew Bud: You can't do what you do at least not in my world.
• 31:14
  Andrew Bud: You can't do what you're doing just for money.
• 31:16
  Andrew Bud: Money is really important and lots of it is even more important.
• 31:19
  Andrew Bud: But you've got to have a sense of what you're doing has to motivate you.
• 31:23
  Andrew Bud: It has to interest you.
• 31:24
  Andrew Bud: When I founded iProof, I said to my young collaborator who's our chief innovation officer now.
• 31:29
  Andrew Bud: I said we're fortunate because we found something that is so important, so valuable and so interesting that it's going to get us out of bed for the next 10 years.
• 31:40
  Andrew Bud: And he went 10 years.
• 31:41
  Andrew Bud: That was 12 years ago, greg, and we're still doing it.
• 31:43
  Greg Myers: And you're still doing it today.
• 31:44
  Greg Myers: That's definitely passion, for sure, so I think that's great advice.
• 31:48
  Greg Myers: Well, andrew, we've talked a lot about you and the company and the industry as a whole.
• 31:52
  Greg Myers: Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show?
• 31:55
  Andrew Bud: When I worked at Olivetti, olivetti wasn't just a company, it was an institution in Italy, and people who had worked there 40 years previously bragged about working there.
• 32:07
  Andrew Bud: To their grandchildren, and I often say to our new recruits, I say one of my ambitions is that one day, in the similar vein, you will brag about having worked at iProof for the things that we did, for the things that we accomplished and for the changes that we wrought.
• 32:23
  Greg Myers: Well, I think that's a great way to end the show.
• 32:25
  Greg Myers: So, andrew, thank you so much for being on today.
• 32:27
  Greg Myers: I really appreciate it.
• 32:28
  Greg Myers: I know your time is incredibly valuable, so thank you so much for being here today.
• 32:32
  Andrew Bud: Thank you very much for inviting me, Greg.
• 32:34
  Greg Myers: And to all you listeners out there.
• 32:35
  Greg Myers: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 32:50
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