Latest / Leaders In Payments / Modern Payments Infrastructure For Banks with Vijay Oddiraju, CEO & Co-Founder of Volante | Episode 518

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Modern Payments Infrastructure For Banks with Vijay Oddiraju, CEO & Co-Founder of Volante | Episode 518 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast, where we talk to sea level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: 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_01: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Leaders in Payments Podcast.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Greg Myers, and today's special guest is Vijay Anuraju, the CEO and co-founder of Vellante Technologies.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, Vijay, first I want to say, welcome back to the show.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: You are on episode 98 in June of 2021.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a lot of catching up to do.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: But first, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's a pleasure to be here.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: And nice to be here a second time.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, absolutely.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Before we dive into your career and the company, can you give us a quick snapshot of your personal background, maybe where you grew up, where you call home today, a few things like that?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up in India.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: I was born in India, I grew up in India.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: After my engineering here, which is an undergraduation, I moved to US.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_02: I did my master's in computer science and then joined Oracle because my thesis was in relational databases.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I used to work in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley basically.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_02: I worked there for several years in various capacities or various roles.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: Bay Area has this entrepreneurial bug that beats most of the people who live there and work there.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: So that I was also a victim of that and then started this company in 2001.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I lived in the US for almost close to 30 years.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: And then came back to India for good now.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: But I still spend a whole lot of time in the US.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: Every quarter I'm there for a month or so.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: The reason why I'm back is parents and they were getting old, so wanted to be with them.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's the only reason why I'm back here.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I know last time we talked, you had talked about your passion for space and you were looking to hit your ride to space with Elon or Jeff Bezos.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if that's happened, but you still passionate about the space industry?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_02: 100% actually.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to do that, hopefully sooner than later, because as you grow older it becomes a lot more difficult.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: I'm hoping that one day I should be able to do it.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: If I can fly along with them, that's great.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: If not, at least if they make it commercially viable, I would love to do that too.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: So sooner the better.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: I keep saying this.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: The human race do not kill ourselves.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think there is a much bigger opportunity for us to go and explore other galaxies and the whole universe, you know.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: There is a huge opportunity out there.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: And who knows?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: There could be life elsewhere and we can explore all that.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, we need to settle things here and decide that we are not going to kill each other first.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's someone in another galaxy doing a payments podcast.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows, right?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe I can license our technology there.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: Who knows?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's talk a little bit about Volante.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: So tell us why you started the company.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's as I said, that entrepreneur bug, right?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: In Liberia, everybody wants to start something on their own after a certain experience.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because you see the success.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, you you also hear a lot of stories where companies didn't take off and there is a lot of risk and all that.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: But what happens is when you come from a very confident background, you would like to take that risk and want to do something on your own and create value.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, not just for yourself, but to the community you're serving and all that.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: So definitely learned a lot from Larry Ellison, who is the CEO at that point of Oracle.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: He's very, very inspirational.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: And even today he's so active and he's not the CEO, but he's a chief technology officer.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: He drives the entire vision for the company there.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we learned a lot, similar to him, lots of other leaders out there in the Bay Area.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: Each one of them is amazing, right?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: From San Michel Scott McNeely to the North Coast La to so many other leaders there.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: When you look at them, you feel like you want to do something very big.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: That gave us, meaning me and my co-founders, courage to do something on our own.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: And what we we felt is, especially as an immigrant, what I was thinking is very simple.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: I came to the US with two suitcases and a few dollars with a loan actually from India.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: So what would happen if we fail?
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_02: I was talking to my wife at that point, and they said, look, when I came to this country, I didn't have any experience.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: Now I have experience.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: And when we start something, and if it doesn't work, at least I can go back to a job because I have the experience.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: Before that, I didn't even have that experience.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: So we have that courage to do something on our own, because we never know how startups are going to pan out, whether you have brilliant ideas, but customers want to accept those ideas, and maybe you're too far ahead than the market needs are.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: There's a zillion different things.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: But to answer your question, it was just a passion to create some value and make a name for ourselves, more than just making money, get an exit and things like that.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: That was not in our mindset.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: We said, let's create something very big.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: And we did a lot of good research actually on IBM, IBM, GE, Rockton Gamble, Boeing, and Whatnot, HP, all those companies we have done, and what we felt is it's not one service or one product they sell that made them big.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: It's a culture of those organizations which made them very big and last longer.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: So we started thinking in those lines, saying, how do we make it big?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: How do we last longer or built to last?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: For those we need to build some DNA for the company, apart from market research, product, fundraising, all those kinds of things.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: Culture of the company is very important for us.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: So we did that.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm proud to say that we the foundation that we laid uh really helped us helped us out until today, and I'm sure it will help us out going forward.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the main characteristics of that DNA is trust with whoever we do business with or whoever we interact with, whether it's employees, customers, partners.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: Now we have shareholders until 2020.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't raise money, but once we raise money, now shareholders, everybody, I think the trust is a backbone for what we are trying to do and where we are today and where we'll be in the future as well.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_02: I think that is the cornerstone for our company.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, tell us exactly what Volante does.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: Conceptually, again, we'll come into a lot more things on what areas we are focusing on.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_02: But conceptually, the genesis of Volante when we did the market research was there is a need for a lot more automation.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: That is the genesis for Volante, actually.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: So when we were coming from data background from Oracle, we focused on the data because every financial institution, when they want to interact within an institution or outside the institution, everything is data exchange.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that through a medium called format exchanges, basically either whether Swift format, ISO formats, or fixed format or FPML format, you name there so many formats.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: So when we did the market research, we found that a lot of activities that they were trying to do, interactions and building a community, there is a huge amount of labor-intensive activities.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: And we said, okay, there is an opportunity for us to automate.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: And then that automation became the genesis.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: And then we did very well in the data integration, mapping, validations, and we have more than 100 formats that we support for the financial institutions.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: Very good customer base, right from exchanges to buy side firms to sell side farms.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: We have built very good customer base there.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: And eventually, when we were looking at where our product is being used mostly, we found out that it's in and around payments.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: That was around 2010 time frame.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then we started enhancing those payment capabilities.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: By 2014 or so, one of the banks, Bank of New York, they came to us, whoever is an existing customer, as they said, the trust and relationship and the quality of the products that we provided to them, timely delivery and all that.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: They really liked working with us.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: They said, look, you're doing so much in payment.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: Can you help us with the solution that we are looking for to build a TCH real-time payments?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: We, as like any other entrepreneur, we were drooling for that kind of opportunity.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: And when it came through, we jumped on it, took it, and then we made them go live very quickly in a record time, and we made them to perform the first US real-time transaction in the history of US.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: That led to, and again, they have been very supportive in terms of marketing and PR.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: That led to a lot of other customers.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: So what you asked about what is our focus, now the majority of our focus, like almost 75 to 80% of our customers are meaning revenue-wise, that's payments is our focus.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: We still have our data integration platform, which is the low-code platform, which is called Designer.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: That's still 20-25% revenues we still have, and we are still actively selling that as well.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: But the more the revenue-wise, the payments is giving us a lot more.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then on top of it, I would say that whole designer concept which we had with the automation, the low code and all that, that has been carrying forward in every product that we release, including payments products which we have.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: So what we do is always see where there is opportunity for us to automate so that customers could spend less time and then it adds value to them to bring in new products to the market faster and help them generate revenue and all that.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, what do you think is the biggest challenge that your company is solving for your customers right now?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: Again, very good question.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: Payments is not new, right?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: Banks have to have payments.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Payments has been there for a very long time.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: And there have been vendors who have been providing those payment solutions.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: So the challenge we are dressing is multiple of them, but I'll tell you where the inflection point has come now.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: Most of these vendors have been there in the market for 20, 25 years or 30 years.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: Again, they have done a wonderful job in providing solutions at that time frame.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: But as years passed now, example, like last year, there was a deadline for ISO 20 or 22 upgrade.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: Every bank has put a lot of focus on that.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_02: And some of them did complete revamp of their systems, or most of them have done patchwork.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_02: But in that process, they have realized how difficult it is to deal with the legacy systems they've been dealing with.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because they are constrained to make new changes or new things, add new things.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_02: Especially when things are moving so fast in the financial industry, especially in the payments world, there are real-time payments everywhere.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: Regulations are changing every time.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: And then you have new initiatives like stablecoin.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: Any of those things, if you go back and say, can this legacy platform support that without much constraints?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_02: How quickly can we do the how expensive it's going to be, or can they be resilient still and all that?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: So if you look at all those, customers have realized that modernization of payments is not an option now, it's a must.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: So the challenge that we are addressing is the legacy constraints that they have having that we need to remove from and then give them a modern platform with which they can do a lot more, not just for today, but even for tomorrow, if new things come up, whether it's in domain or in technology, for example, how do you get artificial intelligence into this?
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: How much changes do you need to do this?
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: Can this platform support those things?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: These are all the fundamental things that again we are fortunate because we just came into this in 2014, as I said.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: And by then the cloud has come into picture, and then microservices where you can add services as and when you want, and you don't have to use all the services that we are providing.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: You can pick and choose.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: It became a lot more modular and pick and choose, and even on the cloud, say for example, we have multi-cloud support.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: Most of the times, a lot of vendors may say that as well.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: But what we have done is we have made it very resilient.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: So if a customer is hosting a payment solution on one cloud for a vendor, and for some reason or the other, if that cloud goes down, we can have a system that could pick up entire payments orchestration from a different cloud provider seamlessly.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: So this multi-cloud support for disaster recoveries and things like that, along with the microservices where you have mix and match and pick the services you want, the flat flexibility.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: And the whole stack, how we have built it, is also a huge difference that adds tremendous value to the customer.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: We have a payments platform, which is architecture, the orchestration layer and all that.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: On top of it, we have all these connectivity rails called whether it's Sepa Rails, whether it's DD, or whether it's any one of those real-time rails.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: But we have divided that into four categories, and then we said these are the common denominator for all these four categories, and we have made that.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then we said it will be more country specific, and then it will be bank-specific.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: So it is like a stack which we have built.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: So it's a lot more easier for customers to say, okay, the challenges I've been addressing or very elegantly addressed here, which adds a lot of value, especially go to the market timing-wise.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's a challenge.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: So maintenance, resilience, performance, and quick to the market.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: These are the challenges which they have been facing, having legacy platforms which we said we can help them out to move away from that.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's talk about the future a little bit.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, where do you see the biggest growth opportunity for Vellante?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: Very interesting question.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of times we keep thinking, what is that modern that's coming up?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: How can we help the customers?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: And we keep doing a lot of research and all that.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: But interestingly, if you look at in the US market, we notice that there is a huge opportunity that's opening up or already opened up, if I look at the pipeline and the deals we are signing, replacement for legacy ACH format.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_02: Because these systems have been there for 30 years or so.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: ACH opportunity is really huge.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's one example.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: But more and more we talk to the customers, they're not looking for one rail, say, oh, I want RTP, I want ACH.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: They want to have a platform which can support multiple rails.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: For example, stablecoin.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: When you have stablecoin, it cannot be a standalone rail or standalone facility.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: It has to interact with your wires or ACH or lots of other things within the system.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just going to be one system.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_02: So more and more, what we are realizing is customers are looking for a multi-rail platform, again, which is ideally crowd agnostic.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: Again, the flexibility which I was talking about earlier about the pick and choose the services they would like to have.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: And then the opportunity is when I talk to CIOs or including the heads of transaction banks, they all say this at least two things that come out.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: One is they say whenever they select a vendor, the risk of implementation.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: If something is working fine and they choose for modernization, all the constraints they have, they have to be modernized by platforms.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: But when they come to that, they want to make sure that how is the risk mitigated and how much of dependence they have in the vendor?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: Do they have to depend for everything on the vendor, or can we be independent or self-sufficient?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's one aspect of it.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: The second is does the vendor have a global reach?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: Meaning, are they just doing only one region or one country?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: Can this vendor help us out to go and do business in other countries?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: Can we get, for example, European customers, they want to do business in the US?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: When they choose a vendor, they want to have those capabilities.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: So these are the two things which I would say are definitely they are looking at and the way which is giving us a lot of opportunities.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: So multi-rail and specific example I gave was the ACH.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: We see multi-rail platform opportunities are very huge within that ACH and stable coins and all that are coming into the picture.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: But huge pipeline for ACH replacements.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what does success look like specifically for Vellante over the next say three to five years?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: We are at a stage where we are very modern within the payments domain and from the vendor community point of view.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_02: And at the same time, because of the rich tier one customers across the globe, they are our customers, which has put us in a proven category saying that we are modern and we are very well proven.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: And if you look at that combination, there are very few or none in this category saying they are modern and unproven.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: And everybody's trying to be modern now, but they have not been able to prove themselves yet.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: We are one of them.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: Or at least I would say we are the one actually, not one of them.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: We are the only one we are there to take credit on that one.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: So what does success mean, you know, for us?
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, more than anything else, customer satisfaction is the most important thing.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: And building the trust or winning their trust is absolute number one for us.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: That kind of leads to what is the market share that we can capture.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Ideally, we want to be having the maximum market share.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_02: That tells us that we are very successful.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: That market share not just in one region, but we want to have a maximum market share everywhere in the world.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: So three years from now, I want volunteers to be having huge growth in terms of market share.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: And similarly, customers should never feel that they are stuck with the older technology or a framework.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: We want to modernize that.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we'll be missing in a lot of innovation.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: Just innovation has been our culture for a very long time.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: We'll continue to do that and keep the platform modern.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: As we capture bigger and bigger market share, we don't want to lose on that innovative culture that we have.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: Continue to do that so that we are helping our customers.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: Not think about getting stuck in older generation legacy platforms.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: So we want to be more modern, but at the same time, keep proving to the customers that this is the right choice they made.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think that gives us a lot more satisfaction, along with which will end up in getting bigger market share.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: I hope that answers your question.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, that's a great answer.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you kind of step back maybe at the 50,000-foot level, what are some of the biggest trends that you think are reshaping the payments industry today?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: I would say, again, as much as we are not ready, we meaning as an industry, it's still at an infancy stage.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: I would say AI would be one of them, artificial intelligence would be one of them.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: And as I said earlier, payments banks are forced to make a modernization of the payments infrastructure now.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Especially with the global economies and speed at which you want to do business globally.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_02: Banks have to support their corporate customers in a much better fashion to add new business partners and all that.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: It cannot be weeks and months anymore, it has to be in days or hours.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_02: So that speed at which anybody is doing the business to add new products, I think that's another major thing.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's about stablecoin or cryptocurrencies, as we all know, it's not going to be answered to every one of them, but it will have its own market share, and banks would love to support those customers who would like to have that facilities.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: So that's also shaking up now.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then through AI, a lot of intelligence has to be built into the systems, which if you think about operations, for example, payments, not 100% of them have straight through processing.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: They don't go directly.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: There will be some exception handling.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: And to an extent of 30% of them are being repaired by the operations teams who are experienced and who spend good amount of time correcting those exceptions.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Starting from there, the AI could play a huge role.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then from then onwards to monitoring of the systems, to preventing and predicting, and if those two cannot be done, then correcting them.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at those aspects, having a vigilance using AI, that's the reason why we call our AI product as Wall 360i.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: We are looking at all the payment systems from 360 degrees angle.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: Put an eye on those and say where all the integers can be used so that it can anticipate or it can predict and help the operations and the management teams.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: So this could be going wrong, and do you need to correct this or do you want to alert them?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: So there's so much good things that are happening with AI, which will become a de facto standard within the payments industry.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: We are much ahead in that, I would say.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: We have created a lot of good products, agentic framework.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then, as I said earlier, the self-service model for the customers, because customers would love to have some control over what they are trying to do.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: They don't want to go back to the vendor for every small thing.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: And when vendors give you a statement of work with hundreds of thousands of dollars and time and effort and all that, they would like to do on their own.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: So we have very good evolution of what we have done from our designer product to studio.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_02: We have a studio for payments, and that studio concept is also extended to AI Agentic Framework Studio, where they can pick and choose that agents.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: And then those agents, we give them the base model, and then those agents learn on your data and their private data, and they are private agents for you.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I think those kind of things will be a lot more as we go forward, where you have a lot more agents which are very specific to those banks.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: And how you mix and match those things with other agents within the bank environment would become a lot more popular.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's our belief, and that's what we are betting on.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: And we want to play a huge role in that.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a couple of final questions before we wrap up.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a little more about you and your career.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So if you could go back and give yourself advice at the start of your career, what would that advice be?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: I would not say one is right and one is wrong.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's personal decisions, actually, personal choices.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: So some individuals would like to grow up on the corporate ladder, be very effective and do a lot of great stuff for those companies that are working.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's their choice, and that's very important.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: The second thing is if they choose to do something on their own, again, they're also their choice whether they want to keep it as a lifestyle company or they want to make it big or they want to make it really big, like what we're thinking, and dominate the market.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: So there's nothing right or wrong about these things.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's just personal choices, first of all.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: So the advice I would give is for anybody, do what you love.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_02: The job becomes much easier.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: It'll not become a job, it'll become very easy for you to do anything that you like.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: Because as I'm sure all of us are very mature, when we do things that we love, it's not a strain or stress on you.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: It becomes very easy.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: So the first job may not be able to give you that direction, but within the second or third job, you should be able to do that, saying what I like, because after you graduate, you don't know what to do.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_02: Or you'll just get into some theoretical concepts and say, This is what I want to do.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_02: When I go there, I feel that, oh man, that's not my job, actually.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: I don't like this.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: But that should not be the case every time or for the entire life.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: Within one or two cycles of that, you should be able to find out where your sweet spot is, what you enjoy most, and how you can contribute more.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_02: Once you do that, stick to that and just keep learning, do the same thing, which makes you happy and which doesn't make you stress.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's important.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: The second part or the other side of the story is which I'm sure every entrepreneur or most of the entrepreneurs would say this is even though it's very difficult and challenging, have some work-life balance.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: That's very critical.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: Because time passes so fast, by the time you realize your children are already gone out and they're doing all things on their own.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: So it's important to keep an eye on those and give some importance.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: I used to feel like quality of friend is more important.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't like to correct myself.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's quality with quantity also, the time you need to spend with them.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's important on the family side.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_02: Don't ignore that, is what I would advise.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_02: Because you need to continue your passion, but not at the cost of anything else.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's incredible advice.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I appreciate you sharing that.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: One final question.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you could kind of step back, summarize this episode, what's the one thing that you would want the listeners to kind of take away from this discussion and what you've talked about today?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: What would be that one thing you'd like for them to take away from this episode?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to make this as a sales pitch.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: But at the same time, I want to tell either customers or audience, you need to find a partner, meaning a vendor, who can really be a true partner for you, meaning who can stand with you for a very long time, who cares about you.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_02: Because there is no rosy path in any project.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: There will be ups and downs.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_02: So you need to have a vendor or a partner who can hold your hand in ups and downs and reach the goal and be a partner even after that.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's the most important thing, which I would urge every audience here, every one of them, to keep an eye or ear or a thought about.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's one aspect of the selection process, I would say, which is very key.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: The second is always about does this vendor have proven modern architectures and do they invest in these things?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: Is it the only focus they have, or is it the vendor has five, six other product lines which they are more focused on, not on payments, you know, especially when it comes to payments.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_02: That focused approach of solving the problems for the customers or helping them out, not just for today, but years, decade or two, I think that's another important decision that they need to make in the selection process.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_02: Saying they may not have all the functionality today we they need, but this platform has the ability to do everything that we will need now and also in the future is a very critical point they need to look into.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: So whoever it is, whether it's volunteer or whoever the vendor is, I think I would say ideally it should be volunteer, but I would urge all the market or industry to look at these two aspects.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: One is whether the company or the vendor is investing in latest and modern technologies to help them out.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: And the other thing is can they be really a strategic partner in the long run who doesn't leave them high and dry?
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Vijay, I think that's a great way to wrap up the show.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much for being here.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was great to catch up with you.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being on the show today.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: Really appreciate the opportunity as well.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: And to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: And until the next story.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments Podcast.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpayments.com, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.