Interviews

Q&A with Andréa Jacquemin, founder and CEO of Beamy

Published

1 year ago

May 23, 2022

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Beamy is a fast-growing scale-up that focuses on pioneering a new approach to SaaS management for large companies. Founded in 2017, it has recently launched in the UK and in April it completed a €8 million Series A funding round.

Beamy recently held a successful Series A funding round to support international expansion and product development. Why is now the time to strike?

“We are convinced that SaaS issues are major issues for large companies, whether French or international. With this fundraising from major investors including Agaé Ventures and ISAI, both of whom are recognised for offering cutting edge expertise in the tech sector, we are setting out to conquer the international market.”

How quickly is SaaS adoption growing in enterprises?

“The adoption of SaaS platforms grew by 125 percent from 2020 to 2021. A reason for the influx of SaaS adoption is that the agile and hybrid nature of SaaS matches the hybrid style of work, which many companies adopted during the pandemic. Beyond the pandemic, the future forecasting of the industry is predicting huge growth, with the market value to reach $168.6 billon in 2024.”

“While digital transformation was accelerated by the pandemic, it has taken on a life of its own. There is now a catalogue of SaaS applications available to employees, with different uses and price points. In companies with more than 1,000 employees, there are on average several hundred different SaaS solutions in use, representing several million dollars in annual costs.”

How is the growth of SaaS shifting workplace technology strategies?

“The explosion of SaaS within companies has introduced a real organisational change: a true decentralisation of technology ownership and empowerment of business units, who choose and implement their solution themselves. This IT decentralisation has become inevitable and is forcing large organisations and CIOs to rethink their model to structure SaaS growth in a secure environment.

“The objective is not to block access to technology, but rather to enable the freedom of technology choice within a framework that offers more transparency and autonomy.”

Have you seen a link between the trends of IT decentralisation and increased hybrid working?

“It is well established that the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to rethink their workplace operations and accelerate their digital transformation. As a result, the number of tools on the market to serve the world of remote or hybrid working have also increased.”

“Hybrid working gives employees more autonomy, allowing them to choose their preferred SaaS applications for completing tasks. There is clear evidence that today’s workforce is demanding more control over how they accomplish tasks. Having access to a wide range of tools creates a decentralised model for IT systems, in which technology needs are self-defined by employees. The democratisation of this process, while advantageous for team productivity and innovation, can also pose several risks to the infrastructure of businesses.”

“While employees are bound in hybrid work settings, CIOs have little control over how these applications are onboarded and managed. In general, when we meet a CIO of a large company, they estimate that their organisation uses 30 to 40 SaaS tools. However, when we begin working together, our technology detects several hundred active SaaS solutions, often revealing more than 75% of shadow IT.”

Has the Great Resignation increased the risks presented by shadow IT?

“When an employee leaves, if the business does not know where data is being stored then any level of data loss is possible. SaaS applications have become easier to buy online through affordable subscriptions. Whether they know it or not, most companies are being digitalised from the bottom up. But this has also led to an explosion in cyber and compliance risks.”

“A high employee turnover, or using lots of freelance workers, can make the problem worse because each new employee will add in their own favourite apps for work. When an employee leaves, their old logins can be left unprotected and invisible to the IT team. That makes them the ideal target for hackers.”

What can organisations do to minimise these risks?

“Now that almost all jobs are digital, it’s vital that HR and IT work together on the onboarding and offboarding processes, not simply rely on technology. This needs to include close collaboration and a proper framework to check for potential governance or compliance issues. It also means old logins can be deleted, meaning fewer ‘back doors’ for hackers to exploit. This makes it easier to identify what apps have sensitive data in them, that need to be removed. Having a central platform to track the apps being used can help with this, but ultimately it needs to be underpinned by a strong company culture of collaboration and compliance awareness.”

What specific technologies does Beamy use in its platform to tackle these challenges?

“Beamy has developed powerful scoring algorithms capable of detecting all of the SaaS applications actually implemented in the company. Beamy then is able to follow the evolution of each application over time, provide employees with a catalogue of all applications implemented in the company, define an autonomy matrix according to the potential risks of future applications, and navigate an app store of more than 50,000 applications on the market.”

“This enterprise App Center enables business departments to choose their own technology by feeding them the right information for selection, security and implementation over the long term.”

“Beamy thus guarantees a global approach to SaaS governance necessary to support large companies in the long term to structure their IT decentralisation and establish synergy between all stakeholders: CEOs, CIOs, IT leaders, and business teams.”

What is your top piece of advice for CIOs facing shadow IT challenges?

“The top-down vision of IT is over. We are witnessing a true decentralisation of technological ownership and empowerment of business units, which are selecting and implementing their own solution. This is a story of balance – if we put too many constraints on employees’ ability to choose their applications and implement lengthy processes, they will still use the applications but won’t go through the proper channels with IT in the implementation.”

“Without a solid structure of decentralisation, the risks will be considerably increased and the budgets won’t be optimised. In any situation, you have to find the proper balance in terms of autonomy that works for your workforce, but keeping the status quo on this subject is the worst solution.”

Thanks for your time, Andréa.

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Finance Derivative Talks to Tianjin Port Development Holdings Limited

Published

5 months ago

January 3, 2023

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1. How do you look back on 2022, being one of the 10 best largest container ports in the world?
In 2021, the container throughput of Tianjin Port exceeded 20 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) and ranked eighth on the list of world largest ports in terms of total container handling capacity, and growing the fastest among the world’s top 10 ports. Tianjin Port will strive to achieve 25 million TEUs by 2025 and continue to open a new chapter in the story of prosperity of Tianjin Port’s world-class port.
The market environment in 2022 was more difficult than that in 2021. Other than the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and financial policies tightening in Europe and the United States, China’s economic growth was slower-than-expected due to the resurgence of the COVID 19 pandemic and related strict control measures. In this challenging market environment as at Q3 2022, Tianjin Port as a whole handled accumulatively cargo throughput of 363 million tonnes, 3.3% more year-on-year, and container throughput of 16.54 million TEUs, 4.7% more year-on-year, via enhancing efficiency and various flexible measures. Tianjin Port Co., Ltd., the major controlling subsidiary of Tianjin Port Development Holdings Limited (“Tianjin Port Development” or the “Company”) still managed to achieve profit growth of 11.9% in the first three quarters of 2022.
In mid-October 2021, Tianjin Port Group (the controlling shareholder of Tianjin Port Development, which holds 53.5% stake in the company) unveiled what it says is the world’s first zero carbon emissions smart terminal in Beigang area of Tianjin Port. This smart and ‘zero-carbon’ smart terminal can serve as an example of intelligent upgrading and low-carbon development of ports all over the world. As at Oct 13 2022, this zero-carbon smart terminal in Beijiang port area had handled 1 million TEUs since it started operation in October last year.

2. How are you able to manage and improve the sustainability strategies with the stakeholders? Tell us about your visions and key factors to success.
Tianjin Port Development has been investing resources in promoting its sustainable development and its sustainability strategies emphasize five principles, namely “Environmental Commitment”, “People Focus”, “Quality First”, “Customer Oriented” and “Community Care”, which are incorporated into its daily management and operations. The Company has kept strengthening communication and cooperation with various stakeholders so as to continuously improve sustainability management.
Building a smart port is a major undertaking of the Company. We aim high and strive to build a world-class smart port and a green port, to better serve the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region and construct the “Belt and Road” initiative.
We continue to propel port automation with advanced smart, automatic and communication technologies, aiming to improve service efficiency while reducing service costs and offering customers with better experience. The Company continues to make use of artificial intelligence algorithms and big data to develop new smart projects, implement innovative business operation and analytics systems to enhance operating intelligence and customer service efficiency. In addition, we keep hastening automatic transformation of traditional terminals, and designing our own fully-automated facilities and equipment.
The Company has dedicated much effort to implementing sustainable development concepts and paying more attention to topics such as green development, smart and safe production. All these efforts have laid a solid foundation for the Company’s success.

3. How did the market change post covid-19 and where do you see it going?
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, ports around the world, those in overseas countries in particular, have seen containers stacked up and even halt service. The pandemic has brought to the foreground the need to develop smart ports. In recent years, Tianjin Port Development has actively used innovative technologies to build smart ports. It currently owns more than a dozen world-first technologies that have helped it improve operational efficiency. For example, a single driver can take remote control of six automated facilities simultaneously. In the future, Tianjin Port Development will continue to pursue automation and intelligent reforms plus upgrade its facilities.
Furthermore, during the pandemic, sea freight was adversely affected by land transportation restrictions in mainland China. In light of that, Tianjin Port Development enhanced the function of its feeder network and optimized the linkage between main services and feeder services within the port in Tianjin-Hebei area, built a collaborative operation platform for feeder services covering the Bohai Rim, and promoted vigorous development of “daily shift” services. An alliance was forged and the “Maritime Expressway – FAST” service brand was created, enabling coordination and link up of all processes, from delivery from factories, loading and unloading at the ports and piers, sea transportation and on-shore storage and logistics to receipt of goods by end customers, thus forming a “door-to-door” standardized transportation system. We have been able to make better use of our marine channel advantage to improve overall freight efficiency and bring more business opportunities to Tianjin Port Development. At the same time, Tianjin Port Development is also starting to actively take part in multi-operational partnership covering road, rail and sea transportation, which will become a new business model serving the “Belt and Road Market”.

4. Do you see your company expanding its offerings in future? FY2023
In the future, Tianjin Port Development will hasten transforming its transportation mode. For inbound operations, under the “Maritime Expressway Express—FAST” service brand, it will speed up expanding coverage of its ports and land logistics network in the Tianjin-Hebei region. And, for supporting outbound logistics, it will extend the sea-rail shipping channel. Moreover, it will continue to upgrade automation of its piers, so as to achieve complete digital transformation. Furthermore, it will press on with using green energy, step up “zero-carbon port” construction, implement its “dual-carbon” goals, and take to greater depth the work of building an international shipping hub in northern China.

Interviews

Exclusive Interview With AsiaPay CEO -Joseph Chan

Published

5 months ago

January 3, 2023

admin

It’s a pleasure to have you. Tell me a bit about your journey and about heading AsiaPay.

As the founder and CEO of AsiaPay Group, Joseph started up the first high-quality third-party digital payment service and technology firm in 2000 in Hong Kong, spearheaded the company’s business strategies and product development together with his management team, and leads AsiaPay becoming one of the most successful world-class digital payment companies in Asia.
In regard to business growth and market recognition, Joseph presents his long-term vision which is to operate a successful and socially responsible company that continually provides individuals and corporate entities with the newest digital payment values, readily enhances one’s quality of life, and maximizes business opportunities, efficiency and productivity.

On that note of innovation, what are your views, on things like blockchain, Artificial intelligence, and robotics?

AsiaPay works closely with our partners in the AI, metaverse, crypto, and NFT-related businesses. With the capabilities of the web3 payment, we aim to strengthen the sales scene, use virtual social space as attraction, product display, and sales as a reality, and enhance the interest and purchase intention of potential buyers, coupled with cryptocurrency-led payment.

Decentralizing blockchain can guarantee the fidelity and security of transactions and digital payments. While combining digital record authenticity in blockchain technologies and the automation of artificial intelligence can enhance data security to prevent fraud in the fintech and digital commerce industries.

Along digital transformation, there has been successful applications of robotics in F&B n hotel industries in Asia and more digital payment solution adoption follows to provide more seamless and valued payment experience to customers.

AsiaPay continues to work closely with partners and startups in these technology areas and also web3 area like metaverse, crypto to well capitalise on these technologies to provide more advanced payment solution to address coming business and market needs

How do you manage the making in the area of diversity and inclusion in terms of gender and cultural background?

Joseph Chan

AsiaPay always aims to remain a balanced and fair working environment with diversity and inclusion over its 15 country operations in Asia. As we serve merchants covering wide range of industries and operating across borders with close interaction with our teams in Asia, we respect the unique background, needs, perspectives, and potential of all team members. We:

Identify diversity and inclusion as key strategic priorities
Recruit and hire openly across Asia
Establish snd enforce cross-country mentorship
Promote team work and foster relationship by overseas team training, yearly executive meeting…etc …
Acknowledge holidays of all cultures and celebrate
Be aware of any unconscious bias.
Ensure benefits and programs are inclusive

And, we set up a variety of staff performance and long-service awards to appreciate our team member’s contributions regardless of their genders, races, religion, nationalities, and sexual orientations. Every team member is equally involved in and supported in all areas of the workplace.

Even under this highly competitive Fintech market, we have enjoyed relatively high retention over the years.

AsiaPay continues its business expansion in Asia with 16 operation offices as of date. What are the strategies for the Indonesian market?

Indonesia is one of the key emerging markets in Asia, according to a YStats.com report points that Indonesia mostly used “online wallet” (69%) alternatively to traditional payments in 2020. “Online wallet” was commonly used as an alternative payment method after the onset of COVID-19;

BimoPay is a payment gateway platform service offered by AsiaPayto address the Indonesian digital payment needs, as Indonesia is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Our key strategies shall emcompass,

Sales strategies and programs targeting key merchant segments;
Bank and payment and channel partnership;
Digital marketing campaigns enhancing brand and service awareness;
Localised product and service innovation and development;

Do you see AsiaPay expanding its offering in the future? How do you see 2023 coming?

With digitalization and technological innovations taking over the economic sector of the world, AsiaPay will continually bring advanced, secured, integrated, and cost-effective digital payment processing solutions and services to banks and eBusiness globally.
We will continually embrace change and innovate capitalizing on the technological trends and strength especially addressing the coming evolution of digital commerce, smart retail, web 3.0 payment, payment data analytics, crypto/CBDC and blockchain technologies.

Apart from our existing 16-country operations in Asia, we will continue to expand our footprint in the world to expand our payment solution and service coverage, and further sca