Latest / Ben Taylor Podcast / Fintech Simplifying Superyacht Financial Management | Mark Perry from Centtrip
Transcript
- Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Ben Taylor podcast, the home of marine industry insights. This episode is brought to you by Super Yacht Services Guide, a worldwide trusted directory of yachting services. Today we're going to talk about Centrip. I'm here with Mark Perry, as director of yachting there. Great to see you. Lovely to see you. So let's have some context first. What is Centriple about? What do you guys do? So Centrip is a financial technology firm. the 2 ,300 vessels kind of globally. Yeah, as I said, we've been in the industry 13 years now. The financial technology space is obviously growing each year and new developments and everything. So it's great that, you know, vessels can be more easily serviced. Okay, and in terms of what the technology does, can you try and describe it from a kind of a helping a crew and helping a vessel operationally what is it actually doing and why is it so useful so the plan is obviously to make life for the crew a lot more simple you know a captain should focus on being a captain of a vessel and not necessarily on financial reporting or you know tracking receipts yeah you know downloading downloading data exactly you know the captain needs to manage the boat and the crew need to make sure the guests are having the best experience or you know the owner's on board, that everything's going according to plan. So our job is just to ensure that the vessel doesn't go over budget, that everything's reconciled in a very easy way. Yeah, and I feel like this can get pretty stressful pretty quickly, because if, say, crew have their crew card, you need some kind of operational expenditure and they can't pay for it, that's like, in my head at least that's the biggest pain point where you're like well you've you've got the stresses of owner demands and guest demands and then you're not able to actually use resources and use finance that's like that yeah yeah especially during you know peak charter season where it's just non -stop where vessels have got back -to -back charters for example you know you've got you've got crew on board for one week and you've got a provision for the the guests coming on board the second week for example So that's where we kind of, you know, we set up multiple APA accounts that just enable the crew to spend accordingly, not go over budget, and make sure the right APA is spent on the right guests. So who do you end up working with it? Is it a central agency? Is it directly with the vessel, a bit of both? I would say both. You know, we're very lucky with our clients. We've got quite a broad reach of clients from central agents, management firms and family offices directly. so it's a wide part of The main advantage is our experience. As I said, you know, for years of working in the industry, we understand the ownership structures. We understand the money flows associated to the industry. You know, we have, I think, just over £2 worth of transactions coming across our books every year. High Street banks don't understand the yachting industry, perhaps, that well, given that they've got a wide variety of clients that they work with, whereas for Cenship, our focus is on the yachting sector. Yeah. So that's where the understanding comes from. And from a banking perspective, yachting is so unique because I'm trying to think of a list of kind of complications. You've got huge expenditure. Yeah. You've got multi, like anywhere in the world, basically. You've got different nationalities. You've got a lot of people involved. You've got ownership structures, it's just, for a bank, it's like, right, okay, we need to know this, this and this, and this, and they're like, it's complicated on every level. From a KYC point of view, you know, KYC is getting more advanced, more information is needed. And I think that's kind of where one of our USPs is, where given the understanding of the asset and the ownership structure that sits above it, You know, RFIs, you know, we have banking partners that we have to use. You know, RFIs come through quite a lot, as they would for any financial institution. So I think with a company like Centrip, you know, we can answer those RFIs on behalf of the client. Again, making sure that the captain spends most of their time driving a boat, not having to deal with banking inquiries along those lines. Okay, and yachts do different things. Some are owned and private, some are chartered. What are some of the complications for a yacht under charter when it comes to everything finance? I think the complications just comes to, it can be obviously a number of things. You know, in the season when the vessel is chartered, you know, they can have back -to -back charters for six, seven, eight weeks. Yeah. You know, each time you've got hundreds of thousands of pounds sometimes, or euro is coming onto an account. Everything has to be allocated. Every euro has to, you know, demonstrate where it's been spent. And so with us, obviously the spend management is where we focus, but equally to then API to various, you know, yacht -based accountancy software providers also makes things key because then the crew are spending, they'll take a picture of the receipt and everything goes through into the accountancy software. So then the crew aren't having to download reports, then re -upload them. It's a time. You know, time is precious during the charter season. And so that's something where we focus on assisting the crew to make sure that they aren't downloading reports, that everything just seamlessly goes through into the accountancy software that they choose to work with. Yeah, so it's actually from a cruise perspective it's almost entirely automated exactly the compliance kind of stress has reduced because if you're not compliant you can just be stopped from leaving dock you can't operate things like that like all those kind of risks are reduced and manage through something like this exactly yeah what kind of what kind of I'm trying to get to a case study So, okay, all this is done. I'm trying to get an understanding of how it's done or kind of situations that arise where it's just kind of without century if it would have been really quite difficult to do with but because you guys were there, you were on hand, you could kind of help out and... I think, I mean, it goes back to the day where vessels used to manage just cash, for example. But that was chaos. And just having to hold on to the you know the whole time and they have like safe some board and yeah yeah you know you'd have a book of receipts and at the end of the month you would then go through it and make sure everything adds up whereas you know the world of fintech is developing so much more where so powerful yeah but also you know with the likes of other big fintech companies coming into it that people are using for their own personal accounts everyone's aware of what's out there and what's possible And so that's our job is to keep up with the trends and to make sure the platform behaves in a way that is suitable to the crew. So we have a user experience, a member of staff who's there speaking to captain, speaking to crew, understanding what they want with the platform and building it accordingly so that it's better suited to them. Understanding the pain points of the crew is vital for us to be a partner with them. Yeah, is the reality of that every yacht is different with Central and said yes we love the platform let's go what does that process look like how do they go from wherever they are into here's your crew cards here's how it's all going to work here's the dashboard so we would send a link an onboarding link to our onboarding platform yeah where the the manager the central agent the owner's rep whoever applies for the account will apply for the account there yeah 48 hours usually to get an account open obviously any other additional information that we asked for. and an office in Fort Lauderdale. So Europe has obviously been a focus for us for a long time. And we've recently expanded our team in the US as well to grow up to print out there. I suppose typically quite a lot of boats spend European summer in the European summer and then winter the Caribbean. So does that mean you can support the both? Exactly, through multi -currency. Our cards can have euros, dollars and sterling and obviously a vessel can use the cards for euro transactions in the European summer and then have a dollar card for the US transactions in the Caribbean so you don't need to change financial partner everything works the same or the accountancy codes remain the same and it just makes life for the crew simple perfect thank you for coming on the podcast ma pleasure I've always I always like episodes episodes where I learned something. But finance is something that kind of gets me thinking about how the whole world works, to be honest, from mainstream banks to niche use cases like this, creating companies like. Yeah, it's an exciting part of the industry to work. Yeah, yeah. All right, thank you, Mark. Pleasure. Everybody, if you enjoy content like this, make sure you're falling here to see plenty more of it. All being well, we'll see you again next time. Bye for now.