Latest / UnDocked: The Maritime Transformation Show / RightShip, Safety Scores & the Future of AI in Maritime with Steen Lund
Transcript
- Nick Chubb: Hey everyone, you are about to listen to a fascinating conversation on Undocked Steen Lund, the CEO of Rightship. ⁓ we thought it was important to let you know that we recorded this ⁓ ⁓ conflict in the Middle East broke out. So we talk in a pretty wide range in discussion ⁓ seafarer welfare, about cruise safety, but we don't mention because it hadn't happened yet the conflict in the Middle East and the impact that would have on crewing. That said, it's still a fascinating discussion and actually I think has become even more relevant with the latest global events. So enjoy the discussion and I hope you find it valuable. This episode of Undocked is brought to you by the Digital Ships Summit. is entering a new digital phase. Cyber is rising. Fleets are more data than ever. ⁓ And technologies AI are moving from theory into day-to-day operations. For ship owners, maritime IT is no longer just a support function. It's becoming a strategic part of how companies manage risk, performance, and long-term competitiveness. everybody and welcome to another episode of Undocked Interviews series and a very special welcome Steen this morning. Hi Steen, how you doing? Steen Lund, RightShip: doing good. Thank you for having me. ⁓ Nick Chubb: That's exactly what the Digital Ship Summit is designed to explore. place this October, the Summit brings together senior ship owners, fleet managers, CIOs and CTOs to discuss the technologies shaping digital shipping, including AI and automation, connectivity cyber risk, ⁓ and future of maritime data infrastructure. If these are part of your fleet strategy, you can join the waiting list now at thedigitalship.com forward slash summit. ⁓ You'll be first to receive the agenda and hear when speakers are announced. Not at all, no, it's a pleasure. For anyone who doesn't know you, could you just perhaps give us a little bit of an idea of who you are and what you do at Rightship? Steen Lund, RightShip: Well, obviously, as you can see behind me, that's where I belong. That's where I spend most of my Mondays to Fridays. spent a lot of my career across the maritime industry. started back in 1987, was sort of my opening year that I found the pointy end of a ship and have then ⁓ throughout those decades touched anything from... learning what the industry is all about in general, ⁓ to the finer details of finance and marketing and sales and gravitated into operations, found a home there to a very large extent, initially built around container shipping in AP Mollermersk, but then moved into other aspects of the industry as well that taught me and keeps teaching me every day that this industry is. huge. It's multifaceted and there's always something to enjoy. Nick Chubb: I feel like we're going to get accused of only inviting ex-Mersc people onto the show, but there's definitely a pattern. think we've done six and I think we've had three ex-Mersc people. Raal: You Steen Lund, RightShip: We are hard to avoid, it seems. Nick Chubb: You said you discovered the pointy end of a ship. How did that actually happen? What was it that got you into the industry in the first place? Steen Lund, RightShip: So the real origin story happened when I was a young teenager and I had made my first bit of pocket money starting with picking strawberries of all things in the world and I lived very close to the ocean and I loved fishing. So I turned that into my own little boat when I was 15. And that has nothing to do really with growing into the maritime world but I am emotionally linked to the ocean. I love what it... Nick Chubb: ⁓ wow. Steen Lund, RightShip: does to me when I'm close to it, the calm it brings and all the joys we've also had as a family many years later than buying boats and sailing on them and fishing from them and ⁓ enjoying the calm of the ocean and the wild of the ocean as well. But what got me into shipping was curiosity. ⁓ So I'm a Danish national and there was this fairly large and ⁓ In the society I came out of, a mysterious company called AP Moller that I knew not that much about, who placed in an ad for trainees in the newspaper. And I thought, how cool would it be to just past the doors and see what actually happens inside that building? ⁓ I don't think I really had an illusion that I could fit into that world. ⁓ And I was there for 21 years and had a phenomenal time, particularly the learning opportunity was just amazing. So no, was really feeling far and distant from an opportunity that could come with working for a large company. And also this dream of trying something larger than the small community that I ⁓ was born into and grew up in and I had dreams of seeing what's out in the big world. It's wonderful how this particular maritime industry can fulfill those type of dreams. Nick Chubb: One thing I've noticed from interviewing quite a lot of ex-Mersk people is they're very good at exporting their Danes. So where did you end up? Steen Lund, RightShip: I guess the ending up is really where I am now in Singapore, which has been home for a total of 25 years for me now. I've been through many wonderful places. My first posting, once I was done with the education in AP Mollemursk, was two years in Pakistan. And as you can imagine, that was very different as a young man to get out to. Nick Chubb: Right. Right. Steen Lund, RightShip: phenomenal learning experience, I'll sum it up as I had a great time there. Then I went to Korea for two years. After that, I had two years in India. And then in 1994 was my first stint here in Singapore. I was here for a good handful of years, went to Hong Kong for five years, came back to Singapore again, went to... Nick Chubb: Wow. Steen Lund, RightShip: Shanghai for a handful of years and then came back to Singapore in 2013. So it's been east of Suez, could say, most of it, and then a long life spent on airplanes. Raal: Yeah. Yeah. Nick Chubb: You if look through your biography, it looks like you've been blending ⁓ shipping and tech all the way through. So how did you end up in a, ⁓ starting in the of world? ⁓ Steen Lund, RightShip: I've always not done so well being a maintainer. I like to learn and I like to experiment and I'm curious about building. So to me, it was just very natural to work in these various industries across the maritime supply chain that increasingly I felt over the years that we were given the possibility of understanding the business better and better through the use of technology. Nick Chubb: Right. Steen Lund, RightShip: And I believe the sort of the tipping point for me was getting into Radio Holland that, of course, to a large extent is touching a lot of the technology that's on board the vessels and installing it and servicing it. ⁓ And that made me understand that there is a lot to be curious about that can ⁓ help anyone in the maritime industry. And it got me across the Singapore Shipping Association that I was invited into to join. ⁓ And for some years I was chairing the technical committee in there after I had moved on to ⁓ classification societies and their world. And ⁓ the shipping association was a really good vehicle to bring many small and mid-size enterprises in the maritime industry together. And my experience there was many of them were struggling with the capacity to really capitalize on technology, which is sort of very understanding. If you think of this standard, we all know that your average ship owner owns five ships, then it's quite natural that that size of company can't have the same capacity as a very large ship owner. So we structured within that Singapore Shipping Association a new committee that was born to help bring focus on to what technology can do. And I ended up chairing that. And what a wonderful learning experience that was because that was sort of when startup and scale up companies started to really come to life and needed to seek out obviously large corporates that they could. ⁓ explore and experiment with and ultimately where their products and services could find a home. And that's what the role of the SSA was for some time. And I had this phenomenal vantage point that I could insert myself in some of these discussions and learn about the weird and wonderful world of technology that would like to service the maritime industry. ⁓ So that was a training ground in many ways and it almost felt unfair that this was an unpaid consultancy that I ended up receiving and I could grow my appreciation for all the things that at times really small companies could bring with them and infuse into these larger corporates. Nick Chubb: You Raal: Hahaha. It seems to me that you are kind of almost uniquely placed for the position at Rightship as to what rightship is, but I'm also conscious that it may not, well, was either that they've looking for someone with this incredible kind of diverse profile or your profile has actually shaped the direction of rightship. So that may be kind of a difficult question to answer, but maybe we start by kind of framing about rightship for the viewers here. So understand, know, where is rightship today? And then maybe we can get into the evolution. Steen Lund, RightShip: Great question. I almost feel like if I had five colleagues of mine instead of you listening to me, then they could talk a little bit about what a misfit I can be at times within Rideship and because of not probably what a fit it feels like for me because it's really a wonderful playground to be in as much as we on one hand, we turn 25 this year. So there's a solid running concern with Nick Chubb: Yeah Steen Lund, RightShip: about a thousand subscribing customers that have recurring engagements with Rightship year in and year out whom we learn a tremendous amount from as they travel through their roles and responsibilities in the maritime industry. But then on the other side of Rightship is this playground where we ⁓ try to curate some of the ideas we have, but far more importantly, where we are out there constantly. engaging that proverbial voice of either the existing or hopefully the would-be customer to understand what do we do that doesn't quite work the way that creates top-end value for a customer or what ideas, more importantly, do customers have that we could help them accelerate into solutions, whether that's then a data exchange or ultimately a product. ⁓ So it makes for a phenomenal place to be to both ⁓ find comfort in what works and what has been proven to work over many years that of course we always tinker with and try to improve on. But importantly that ⁓ how blessed are we? How blessed are we that it feels like every week we wake up to a new level of refinement of technology some real breakthroughs that we have found make real ⁓ meaningful change ⁓ for us within RightShip So that's sort of a quick characterization of who we are today. ⁓ In terms of my fit into ⁓ I'm searching here as you can probably sense. ⁓ Perhaps if I tell a little story, if we go five and a half years back that summer when I sat with the then Rideship Board members, it took a while for us to understand each other. I needed to understand what the company was all about. And of course, the shareholders needed to figure out who that bloke was on the other end of what then was as we are coming together here, a virtual series of meetings. We were in COVID days. ⁓ And what stood out to me was that here was a group of shareholders who had an immense focus on purpose, were really preoccupied with the plight of the seafarers, were concerned about how the industry was losing lives ⁓ and having significant accidents and incidents that that they certainly thought were preventable, ⁓ were really preoccupied with all the complexities of decarbonization and also, let's face it, the significant amount of premature deaths that occur as a result of the emissions that we have across industries and... and in this case, course, across the maritime supply chain. And the more we had these conversations, the more I just thought, dear me, this is a complete distillation of my 30 some odd years of the road that I have traveled through the supply chain. So I got convinced pretty quickly that these were solid people to work together with and the mission they were on was one that I just had to be part of. And here we are five years later. And one, I've shared this story with others and I like to tell it because it really talks to how rightship shareholders looked at themselves and still do today. The then chair, he said, and I quote him then, we're looking for a CEO because we are tired of taking dividends. And I hadn't heard that line before. And what it meant was essentially We believe we can do more than what we doing today. We believe we can have more relevance. And it was back to the purpose again that there was a fairly narrow sliver of services, if I may, that were executed in the dry bulk industry. And shareholders would like to see, we be more relevant to more subsets of that industry we are serving and have conversations about? safety and sustainability and cruel welfare and other things elsewhere. And I've now been with the company for a little more than five years and I must say shareholders have stayed very, very true to that and have facilitated a significant growth through those years Raal: quite often in a situation. I know Nick will be as well where you're kind of asked to kind of draw out a map of stakeholders in the industry and you've got, know, you've got your ⁓ your sort of classification societies over here and you've got your your ⁓ your ⁓ your seafarer welfare kind of organisations over here and your technology providers over here and stuff So when you think about yourselves and think about right shift, where do you put yourselves mentally? Where do you see yourselves? Steen Lund, RightShip: ⁓ I don't. I think it's really lovely that you have that perception of us. ⁓ And I think there's a strength to allowing some organic capabilities to grow while maintaining what our customers need from us. The value creation that they pay us for is one we take seriously. Raal: You Steen Lund, RightShip: But why lock ourselves completely into a box and characterize ourselves so that we can't get out of it? I think that has been our strength in recent years that we have allowed curiosity to take us into spaces that perhaps in the past weren't natural for us. have allowed curiosity to take us into spaces that perhaps in the past weren't natural for us. have no illusion that we must necessarily be the answer to ⁓ all truths ⁓ in the maritime But if we can sort of hit something that smells of transparency and trust and scaled intelligence ⁓ a supply chain, then I think we would have done pretty well. we can hit something that smells of transparency and trust and scaled intelligence across a maritime supply chain, I think we would have done pretty well. Nick Chubb: you you You described Rightship when you joined as having a slither of services, I think was the word you used. my perception of Rightship ⁓ back five, years is ⁓ very much of it not being a technology company, but it being a company. ⁓ Whereas if I look at Rightship today, I would say I put it firmly in the category of being a technology company. I'd be interested to know ⁓ did you find when you arrived at Rightship? And the topic of the show ⁓ transformation. So ⁓ have you gone on the journey to bring Rightship to where it is today? ⁓ Steen Lund, RightShip: love your observations and I share them. I had spent my 21 years with MERSC, I had spent some years with, as you mentioned, executive, I had been seven with class societies ⁓ and ⁓ All this was really ⁓ favoring the universe of the ship owner, the ship operator, the ship manager, and that's what I brought into to Rightship as my anchor point. ⁓ I had colleagues in ⁓ that part of the industry when I started talking about joining Rideship who went, now that's interesting. ⁓ Do they really understand us, the steel owner and operator, or are they more for the charterer and the cargo owner and transparency towards them? And I think it was a fair question. ⁓ And when I joined, I made it a mission, of course, as anyone would do to try to really understand where Where is the strength of this company and where can we do better? Where can we help more? And we concluded very quickly within Rightship that we needed to be more and have more relevance for the ship owner and the ship manager. And went on a very, very deliberate mission to transform the company to seek to understand that customer base and to remove some of the friction that inherently is built into ⁓ operating a safety score as we do, having a mechanism of inspecting vessels and the outcome of that inspection impacting the safety score, ⁓ scoring the ship management company and other instruments that all together at times if you have an unfavorable outcome of one of those events then of course that can create friction. but to also have honesty about that, have transparency about it, have explainability about it, so that it was clear that we were helping also display in a fair and equitable manner all the good that is being done across the industry, so that those who had reached the pinnacle of safety performance, for instance, had a home to take that in and share that with. a port, a terminal, a charter, a potential customer of theirs. And it's been really gratifying to see that we have, during that period, about tripled the number of ship owners and ship managers that today are our subscribing customers. So that's probably the single most significant transformation we've been party to. Raal: And, did you have a very clear vision sort of quite early on of what you wanted to do with the, with the platform or did that kind of, was that more organic in sort of just meeting the customer needs as you saw it go along? I'd be really interested to know. Steen Lund, RightShip: So I had one very clear vision from the outset, and that was that Rideship was not exactly as you said, a technology company. We sat quite squarely in what I would define as ⁓ a services company, ⁓ executing and having the deep heritage in that services structure, inspections and vetting. That's how we saw ourselves. And it was manifested also in Rightship Nord owning its technology and product capabilities that set its arms length at a third party vendor in Malta called Fink. And that was mission number one, really to understand how does that work and would we have more... ability to have oversight and control of our destiny if that were to sit in Rightship. And obviously we made the choice to acquire Think and bring all the good people from Think into Rightship and where they have been since now almost three and a half years. So that was a very, very deliberate and necessary move. And it's been wonderful, I should also say, because That then brought the technologists and the product builders into set shoulder to shoulder, importantly with our commercial people that had the touch points and still have, of course, with the markets and could infuse the voice of the customer over onto this is what we'd like to see you build. And similarly, ⁓ be shoulder to shoulder with the... ⁓ the inspection superintendent, with the vetting superintendent, with what we like to think of as operations and ensure that we through that also focused on how should the products look from a design point of view when they're being consumed out into the market. Then the next steps after we normalized technology use within Rideship was of course that we We then started seeing more and more useful technology being born by the global tech markets. we had our moments of curiosity to ensure that we kept learning from within the organization and we could start to infuse some of those techniques and technologies into Rideship. fast forward till today, we are now sitting here having... a series of agentic AI solutions embedded in our products, sitting at the front end with our customers, being monetized and creating value for our customers and being really useful. Raal: I'd just like to dig into that point a little bit there because I think you said that you don't think of yourself, or you didn't think of yourselves as a technology company. And yet when I look at the products that you've developed, particularly the digital products you develop, they have all the hallmarks of kind of fairly expert level digital product understanding in the way that they've kind of the whole piece in terms of the way that the product is designed, the go to market, the business models attached to it and everything. Did you bring that? expertise in because ⁓ intentionally or is that something that kind of that evolved? The reason I say it is because it's an area where a lot of maritime companies are not great at. So I'm just curious to know If that was something you bring expertise in or is that something you found your way in? Steen Lund, RightShip: journey was the word you used and that's exactly what it is. ⁓ The company has existed for 20 more years than I have been in it ⁓ a lot of seeds were sown ⁓ on but of course the tech acceleration has been chiefly ⁓ the last three, four years I would say. So in that sense the journey has been short but very, very focused. It really started around us ⁓ trying to become better users of the technology that was available to us. But at the same time, of course, we don't exist as a company in a vacuum. We exist in constant dialogue also with our shareholders. it became quite evident that we needed a language ⁓ between the then three, ⁓ the appointees. ⁓ from their corporates as they are. And these are three very large corporates in Cargill and BHP and Rio Tinto, of course, that have their focus areas and that have their heritage with Rideship. And we needed to develop a language that was useful for those of us in Rideship having ambition to execute Rideship at a greater scale, to share an understanding of how important technology was to become. So what we did was we had really good conversations with shareholders and agreed to bring on non-executive directors. And one of them very deliberately came with a technology background. Back then she was with Google Cloud and today she is with a very large cybersecurity firm, but is still on our board. And we set up again very deliberately equal to the the talent committee and the audit and risk committee, set up a digital transformation and cybersecurity ⁓ committee in the board and made this individual chair of that. And it elevated instantaneously then the conversation about technology and it bridged that language gap that probably sat back then between ⁓ directors on the board and us at Rideship. And very quickly, we managed to understand the importance of the use of technology across building products. And this came about a year after we had brought Think into the realm. So here we had then a leadership team that was also, if you like, the old leadership team was learning from the new kids on the block on the leadership team with technology backgrounds, our then CPO and CDO. what that could bring us. And the acceleration started of fusing the then stronger services company over towards a product company that used technology to build those products. And now we're on this journey where majority of what we do sits in a SaaS model structure and there's more to be had in that journey for sure. Nick Chubb: Can I ask about two other angles to that? I could totally see how bringing that expertise onto the board would help to elevate the thinking at the leadership level. there's two other stakeholders that you've got to drive that change through with. One is internally in the organization. And I can imagine that has its challenges. And the other is actually with customers. And actually taking customers from a service model to a SaaS model, I think, interesting ⁓ and I imagine comes with some challenges. So yeah, I'd love to hear your perspective on how you drove it through internally and then with the customers as well. Steen Lund, RightShip: Yeah. great that you learn a lot out of discourse as long as you keep it ⁓ creative and constructive. And obviously within a company that ⁓ relies very on ⁓ maritime competence ⁓ a number ⁓ the good that we have around the world that are ⁓ running the and bolts of what we truly deliver towards our customers ⁓ If they don't have a native tech background, it's our obligation to fuse that operational strength and understanding of the maritime industry with how technology can be useful there. And that's, I think it's fair to say that that should be a constantly evolving journey. We can't just take for granted that people go, great technology is the best I've ever. thought of, there is naturally some hesitance, there is naturally these questions around what is my value then if technology has such a great value and we are very deliberate about ensuring that there is value in everything that everyone brings to the table. I'll summarize it and I'm sure we can talk more in depth about AI beyond the concept. But to us, it's been really important that when we use AI to enhance or build stronger products, that we hold on to the notion that the products that come out of this and how we work is a support of the human. It doesn't replace the human. And it's equally important that the people we have within the organization are part of training the AI. So we don't just rely magically on some technology that comes and tells us how beautiful the world is, and with the risk that we then end up with some outcomes that aren't tried and tested sufficiently. So that's really an important part of ⁓ how we try to build a new heritage, which is one where, ⁓ if I should simplify it, essentially man meets machine and they become... friends and they co-author the future. In terms of the customers, of course, if we just leave technology to be interpreted without explained, then we introduce another risk into the marketplace. And that would be one ranging all the way from fear and cynicism to potentially great acceptance. And again, we need to... appreciate that our customer base ⁓ ranges from a very small ship owner that might have one ship that he transacts information through right ship with, ⁓ through to very, very large and complex ports and terminals or very large charters or very large third-party ship managers with many hundreds of ships that they are responsible for. And obviously, we need to take time to have conversations about where technology can be of reciprocal value and not just thunder ahead and work like as if we're in a lab where we don't explain ourselves. And perhaps I can give an example of what I think is very tangible way of working towards improvements. Today we inspect current year about six and a half thousand vessels. So that means ⁓ individuals in overalls and safety boots and hard hats who go on board a ship spends typically between 11 and 14 hours there and inspects the ship together with the crew based on the right ship RISQ inspection standard. a very transparent instrument. But it is, if you like, it's the way it was done five years and 10 years and 20 years ago. It is a human who interacts with another human around the operation that takes place on the vessel and then makes some observations about the state of affairs relative to a standard. What we working on now together with a number of ⁓ partner customers is to determine How could we transport some of those physical verifications into a digital realm? Is it possible to lift some data off the ship and replace the five or 10 or 20 minutes that a inspector spends inspecting that particular ⁓ process or that particular hardware and instead get a digital insight that is ⁓ as good or better? that could be higher frequency, that could be faster, and that could potentially be shared where today it's maybe less easy and less elegant to share with others in the industry. And in doing that, of course, technology needs to be in play. So we trying here to drive value to the ship management company. Importantly, we are trying to drive value to the individual crew on board the vessel. by not seeing us for potentially 14 hours, but substantially less when we get to the end of this program we are running through. And that, I think, we shouldn't underestimate or underplay for that matter. The lack of rest, the lack of regeneration, the lack of possibility to get to shore and potentially literally take the shoes off and walk on grass. There's a lot of seafarers who don't have that possibility and it impacts them greatly. If we can facilitate as one company that spends 6,500 times 11 to 14 hours on board demanding their time, if we can reduce that by some hours, we'd be very, very proud of that. ⁓ And perhaps we could also invite others that oftentimes have quite overlapping activities to right ship going on board vessels harvesting insights. Perhaps they could find answers to that through our inspection and we could find digital means of sharing those outcomes. So that's a project we feel very, very strongly about and where we have chosen to go the partnership route. We obviously can't just... barge in and set up structures where we take over data. We need to do this in strong collaboration with the vessel, with the crew, with the manager. Raal: You mentioned RASQ there and that has been a bit of a game changer, I think. And I'll give you an anecdotal story in my time when I was at Ocean Technologies Group. There were customers who, a big part of that was the digital learning tools and that kind of thing. And a lot of customers came to the table as a result of the pain point described of suddenly having... to deal with this ⁓ new inspection kind of standards that you guys put in place. And so from my point of view, looking at it, we were very keen and happy with that because it was raising in my view standards. And I think that one of the things that I've seen in my 20 years is that everything used to be driven by regulation. But if you really look about the drive for quality now, it's coming from the charters really through people like Okim, through... people like yourselves, So I'm really interested to know how you see yourselves as a standard setter ⁓ ⁓ whether you agree that that is really where quality is being driven now rather than from regulation. Steen Lund, RightShip: I think regulation is very, very useful and at times it's underplayed. At times the industry could move towards a higher involvement of ⁓ the outcome of safety if there were higher standards. I think what we have seen play out in front of us in recent years around lack of teeth in standards around emissions is a really good example that if that could be tightened up and at a global level unified then we could move a lot faster towards solving one of the most complex conundrums of moving towards cleaner fuels. But let's press pause on that for a while and come back to your question was really about inspections and RISQ. I consider the physical inspection not particularly dissimilar to a financial audit of any company. And of course, one can then choose when the auditor delivers the final finding and you close out your audit report, you can choose to go, wow, that was, I didn't know that. My corporate structure did not allow me these insights and now I have them so I have the opportunity to improve. And you can embrace the auditor as a consultant who brings with you some insights that you didn't manage to obtain yourself. Again, this is a very significant part of... our ethos when we inspect a vessel that the definition of the RISQ standard is twofold. There is an element in there that leans on regulation and there's an element where we bring the observations from the thousands of thousands and thousands of inspections we do and share those and they are obviously best practices. ⁓ The reaction to it is different depending on your position in the industry. Some ⁓ go bare minimum and struggle ⁓ with ⁓ negative outcomes, as in a significant number of findings or some ⁓ very high risk findings. It's very normal to its part of the course really that we receive emails or phone calls after an inspection and ⁓ need to talk through whether that outcome was really necessary as it was framed up in the report. ⁓ And we take seriously to talk through this and explain why it's important to look at the areas that were ⁓ below a defined standard. And similarly, there are companies that call us out to inspect all the vessels in their fleet, regardless of age and standing, because they believe that ⁓ they will position them. position themselves better in their marketplace towards their charters if they learn from what their consultant who comes on board and inspects together with them leaves them with. So I think it's a matter of operating philosophy. You will see this across any industry that the perception of who you work with can be different. Raal: there's like a facto new minimum standard if you want to win certain business now in the industry. that's just ⁓ my perception of it. And I just wondered if you ⁓ agree with that. And that's something that's in mind when you're building out the tools you're building out, to kind of give more transparency, to allow people to really see who is operating at that level. Steen Lund, RightShip: So we're a standard setter across many activities. The RISQ inspection standard is one. Our vetting standard is another. ⁓ The dry BMS standard that defines how good looks ⁓ in a ship management company and particularly around the safety management system is a third co-creation with Intercargo, of course. The cruel welfare self-assessment again, an industry co-creation is another again, where we are close to a thousand DOCs that over time have done self-assessment. So we are talking more than 600,000 seafarers who indirectly are impacted by how their ship management companies view those standards. in many ways, our purpose is strongly connected to those standards and we continue to work with the industry to determine are there other areas where a standard could be a really useful tool. Because obviously we take no joy in if we stay with the inspections in going on board a vessel and finding 60 or 70 or 80 findings. That's not a happy moment, but it's a factual moment. Inspectors are trained, they are accredited, they are continuously audited to inspect relative to the standard. They're not instructed to find a minimum number of findings or anything like that. Everybody's equal and everybody gets an inspection relative to the standard. So if the inspector walks off the ship with no findings, he's been on board a phenomenal ship. And if he walks away with a lot of findings, Our thinking is at least we have then left that manager and that vessel with the opportunity to have sharp insights into which ones were the most significant and high risk findings and which were lowest. And they have the ability to then go to work at a level of priority of addressing those. So the world of standards, we'd love to continue to impact. This is who we are. We are a standard setter. We are standard bearer. And all these standards are always created together with partners in the industry. Our customers are always across what we do in the standards. RISQ is a great example. And that's a product of of our ship owning, ship management, and charter and ports and terminal customers dialoguing with us. I think we are standing down around 30 focus areas, 30 questions that jointly was determined didn't really create ⁓ the value desired. And some of these are replaced with other areas in the industry that we are evolving into that would require some focus. So that should constantly be where we see we can add value, not for the sake obviously of finding faults, but we're here to help raise. the bar in the industry and help our customers operate safer, more sustainably. Nick Chubb: our ⁓ jointly ⁓ some research into ⁓ whether those owners who go well over and above the standard are rewarded for it financially in the market. ⁓ And the is, sadly, what we found is that they aren't. ⁓ And so conclusion I took from that research, really, was that the ⁓ answer is that the standards have to be continuously raised and kind of know continuously ratcheted up so that you take people on a journey to continuously improve things because without those standards you end up not being able to find a way to kind of kind of move the floor and those who do invest end up end up effectively investing out of their own pocket so I think that's super important. Steen Lund, RightShip: I can only agree, ⁓ Again, we to, this is another way of creating dialogue in the industry and creating transparency. What's the state of affairs and what can we do differently and better than what we've done in the past? I don't believe that we have many players in the maritime industry who don't want to do better. And we can quickly home in on some are not proving that. we're talking abandonment of seafarers, if we are talking about some parts of the great fleet that There's a lot of ill out there, but there's a significant part of the maritime supply chain that very clearly is focusing on what they can do to do better from a safety and sustainability and crew welfare point of view and link that very, very intelligently to how they can attract and retain the best people for them to. ⁓ have the best possible standing in the maritime industry and to give people a meaningful place to work. Raal: I'd like to kind of pull on one point there, Nick, on the report that you mentioned, because I think it's really interesting, because on the one hand, you sort of said about whether those charters are rewarding those companies. But one of the things that was interesting that I saw in the report was, from a seafarer welfare point of view, they didn't feel like they really had ⁓ an ability to kind of really see what that looks like. And I think that's kind of something you and I have talked about, Nick, on the show before. is this idea that at the moment there's lots of little touch points here and there where we can kind of get a sense of how people treat their crews. But of course everyone's got on the masthead, you if you go to any conference you're going to hear all the seafarers are the most important thing that you get there. You can imagine for a chartero is not particularly embedded in the industry maybe that they may struggle to see, well, how am I going to know? And that seems to be an area that you're sort of... I see you kind of moving more and more into with the welfare self assessment and then with some of the things the way the platform's developing. Is that some, is that a correct observation that you are seeing that as an area that needs more transparency, more standardization? Steen Lund, RightShip: without a doubt. And you're spot on that there are many, many companies that are doing really well in this space. And again, if one believes in standard setting and... defined transparency, then I think we have a role to play. So it goes back to my opening statement that the more we can make available in a singular view, the easier we will make it for everyone to benchmark themselves and to get an insight into what good looks like. So ultimately where we have productized a safety score, have productized an outcome of an inspection, have productized a GHG rating, we have productized many different insights, we want to productize a real scoring mechanism of the welfare of the seafarers. And we want to do it in a way where it sits front and center on the Rightship platform, and it becomes embedded in the VET. So again, if charters, as is the case today, have about 40,000 times a year that they come to Rightship and present a vessel and want to have a data-driven insight, quick answer to how does that vessel meet with my risk or sustainability requirements. I really want us to get to a point where we insert with clarity the definition of what crew welfare looks like. And I could imagine that there should be some level of optionality around that. Not optionality about performance, but charter A may have a slightly different. policy requirement than charter a B. And if we could work sort of off of what I imagine would be a level of menu structure that if you want to dish number 17 and 29 on the menu, and those are the ones that in your company define what you really feel strongly for in in crew welfare, then you can pick that in an automated manner. And if you want others from the menu, then you can do that. But that there will be some some minimum requirements in order to consume that meal, so to say. ⁓ That takes up a lot of thinking space ⁓ in Rightship today. We're super passionate about it. ⁓ why is that? It is very, very clear that there's a strong correlation. It's been proven through really good ⁓ that the way a seafarer is ⁓ the way the seafarer rests, ⁓ the way the seafarer is treated through and through in his workplace has a direct correlation with accidents and incidents in the industry. Proven without a shadow of doubt. So if we can use some of those academic models that have proven this and lean on them and determine How do we then work backwards into defining what good should look like and then home in on those areas? But it's difficult, right? I touched on rest and if you look at a topic like work rest hours, that's a big one. It's a big box to open and then take action on. But we can pretend like as if it's no big deal or we can jointly determine what's needed to really address that. And then we get back Nick to your report. It requires that the industry comes together around it and perhaps asks the question, will I pay a little bit more if I get a ⁓ outcome that I really can understand how the seafarer rests? It's not easy. It's ambitious, but we want to go there. Nick Chubb: Can I make an ask, Steen? I'm very much putting you on the spot here, but there is currently, as I see it, no mechanism for an individual seafarer to look at the quality of the ship they might be joining. Steen Lund, RightShip: of course. Nick Chubb: And by the time you're on the ship, it's too late. I would for there to be some kind of standard in the industry or some kind of platform where an individual before they a ship can just go and have a very quick look and say, ⁓ there red flags here? ⁓ And maybe should refuse this vessel. ⁓ Steen Lund, RightShip: I love the thought and as you can imagine, it's not foreign to us. It sits as part of what we're looking at. Again, it's in the category of, wow, really difficult. And one of the primary aspects is the management company is Wright Ships subscribing and paying customer and the seafarer belongs to the ship manager. So we have to find if that's the space we go into, we have to find a really elegant way to potentially co-create those insights and perhaps share some of the data that goes into that, which could again be really valuable to the management company. So ⁓ in short, there's a lot to do to get to a Nirvana moment within ⁓ Crew Welfare. We have the ambition, it sits on our strategic roadmap. We're really working on it now. ⁓ One the really gratifying lead-ins is we a little more than a year ago a zero-harm ⁓ innovation program where we brought in or opened the platform to bring in and showcase ⁓ at times ⁓ smaller budding, but increasingly over time also very corporates. that are, in our view, doing the right thing within the industry. And within that realm sits quite a number. think we have 11 companies that fall in the category of ⁓ servicing the crew or the management companies and the crew. ⁓ So think ⁓ crew welfare ⁓ companies that have a specific mission about ⁓ wearables and tracking on the vessel. or social engagements while on the ship and mental health engagements and other very defined areas. And of course we are we are dabbling in defining how some of those insights could constitute a definition of better treatment of the seafarers and hence lead to cruel welfare. So there are many partnerships that will hopefully lead us to it, ⁓ not to forget some of the many larger pro bono partners we have across the industry that we're working with. Nick Chubb: Listen. Raal: Since Nick has opened the ask category, one other thing and it's not mine, but I can't quote the person whose comment this was because it was in a closed door meeting where was all Chatham House rules and stuff, but they made it a very interesting point and it's always stuck in my mind and it's that you have companies, the chartering vessels that will rule out companies on the grounds of emissions. You know, which is not, I'm not saying that's a bad thing at all. That's a good thing that they are raising that quality. But you don't hear so much things around like people looking at that and saying, well, what's the incident, you know, what's the harm that's befallen seafarers with that? And I don't think that's because they're bad people. I think it's just not on their radar. It's not something that most of the general public, the consumers that are ultimately driving the supply chain are even aware of. So I think that you are in a unique position. as far as I'm concerned to kind of bridge that gap and to start to advocate for those things at that sort of level as well. So that's my ask. Please carry on doing that kind of advocacy work. Steen Lund, RightShip: You know, I'm sure I of became quite stern looking in my face beyond what I normally naturally am. And the reason here is what you said really reminded me that we do factually have a factor that's about five times higher when it comes to suicides in the shipping. industry than we do at, if one could say, land-based industries. And I think it's also important to call out that this is an area, not just suicides, but significant incidents and fatalities that certainly do preoccupy charters, as well as obviously the ship owners and ship managers on whose assets this takes place. So it's not It's not new to go into the space of crew welfare from that angle. An incident that we categorize as a category A incident, the most significant and highest risk type incident that includes a fatality is absolutely taken seriously across the supply chain. And this is why we have built it in in our safety score of both the vessel and the DOC to an extent where that vessel will need significant additional oversight after. a fatality event and automatically that would then trigger that a charterer would have dialogue and inquire significantly or perhaps the ship might even go off higher. There's some strong instruments there where these things are being looked at appropriately. Raal: Glad to hear. Nick Chubb: Steen, you've mentioned partnerships sort of all the way through this and I can see actually if I go on your profile on Thetius, it's just a list of endless list of partnerships with other tech companies, with other stakeholders in the supply chain, but there's one partnership we've not talked about yet and that's Pemira. And I think what's interesting about that particular deal is you could easily make the assumption that you've come in transformed right ship from a service company to a tech company and that's job done but clearly with that investment made that's not the case there's clearly more you want to do so what was the reasoning first of all for wanting to go out and take on minority investment and then what would you feel that Permira as a partner will bring over the next few years? Steen Lund, RightShip: that's obviously a shareholders ⁓ ⁓ And ⁓ one, you imagine, I have been ⁓ very much part of and colleagues in the leadership team, but ultimately ⁓ bringing in and doing a capital restructuring is a shareholders ⁓ event ⁓ where we see this ⁓ really, December ⁓ 22nd. 2025 was not just a day where we started to prepare for Christmas. That was the day Premiere became the fourth shareholder and a lot of things ⁓ came together. It was the result of more than a year's ⁓ hard work to get there. And what we wanted to manifest through that was the conversation about transformation and the conversation about growth. We could continue to grow Rideship with the three founding shareholders who obviously have been incredibly loyal as shareholders to the company. Or we could recognize that as technology becomes a far more significant success criteria, we could turn to an investor that had a ⁓ habit of investing in the technology world. And Primera is one such very square. ⁓ tech-focused investor. And hence, that was the route that we took. Secondly, we wanted to ensure that we would have a nimble and dynamic partner with ⁓ habits and proven capabilities around ⁓ &A execution that Rideship could lean on because the capital that was raised, I should stress with clarity that this wasn't the three founding shareholders selling out of It was new shares being issued and hence, Rideship's balance sheet being loaded up, if you like, with what Pemira invested. And the primary part of that investment will be to channel towards an externalization of our growth where we, up until now, have essentially built everything that has led to where we are today and where we in future will have a mix of continuing to be a product builder. but also to look at the landscape of really well-functioning companies that could coexist together with Rideship. So we are in the process now of standing up more product and tech squads and primarily self-fund that out of the Rideship profits and the cash that we free up from the operation. But we now have, if you like, a war chest that can also be put to use towards and acceleration via an ⁓ &A execution. Raal: And am I right in thinking as well that I see you're setting up one of those hubs, product hubs in London? Steen Lund, RightShip: That was very much part of that journey also. So we've had our primary product hub here in Singapore. And as we were growing product and technology, we probably felt we had maxed out a little bit in terms of total talent availability and we wanted to be more diverse in our talent origin. We wanted to respect the fact that many of our customers sit in a European, Middle Eastern and American ⁓ marketplace as well. So bringing ⁓ the original founder of Think, who then became our CPO, Marlon Gregg, bringing him and his family to London ⁓ was a very deliberate element to then... starting to scale product and tech from there. Raal: So ⁓ I guess the big question. ⁓ You've got so many different things in play. We talked about lots of different elements here. What's next? What's next for right shift? Steen Lund, RightShip: I think would be to say that ⁓ we know a lot us who work within Rideship and a number of our early adopter partners ⁓ that we are sandboxing and experimenting this know a fair bit about. ⁓ And that's essentially the rollout of ⁓ exciting products ⁓ that will be useful to ⁓ the the marketplace and the customers that we'll be engaging with there, and particularly the use of AI across those products to make them deeper and really strongly functional. We are way beyond just being enamored and excited with what technology can do for us. And we have a number of proven functional products that are out there in the marketplace and have been there for. for more than a year now that give us a lot of appetite that this is the area we need to double down on and do more about. So again, it goes full circle to your question about London and a product tech hub. ⁓ We need more ⁓ technology focus within Rightship, which means we need more talent that can help us in that space. And part of it will be deployed towards products that have significant elements of AI across them. Raal: Great. Well, mean, certainly wish you all the best with that and with all the other great contributions that you're making. As I said, I'm very appreciative of the work that you guys do. I think you've got a great team and it's really been exciting watching it develop. Steen Lund, RightShip: You've been too kind. First of all, you've been very kind with your time and that you sought me out because you wanted this conversation. I've obviously looked through many of the interviews you've done so far and there have been some both fun and very learning conversations in there. And I hope small smidgen of what we have talked about today will resonate with some of your viewers and listeners. So thanks a lot for ⁓ on Rightship really... enjoyed this time together with you. Raal: Thanks very much, Dean. Nick Chubb: I think it will. Thank you, Stane. Really appreciate it. It was really good fun. Raal: Cheers. Steen Lund, RightShip: Thanks both of you, really appreciate it too.