Evolving Technology Trends in Mergers and Acquisitions

I'm Kisam Patel and you're listening to M and A Science, where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies, and what actually happened during M and A deals today. I'm here with Jill Harrison and Steve Seiler. Jill is the Vice President of Ventures at Silverline, a Salesforce Platinum partner that consults businesses and financial services on how to best utilize Salesforce for more effective processes. Jill has been with Silverline for over eight years and has played a critical role in developing the organization's marketing, financial and creative strategies. We're also here with Steve Seiler, who is the CTO of Stonebriar Commercial Finance, a large ticket commercial finance and leasing company. Steve was also previously Director of IT Solutions in William Blair's investment banking group.

How are you guys doing today?

Hey Kisan, thank you so much for having us on the podcast today. It's really great to be here. I'm super excited to talk.

Yeah, thanks for having us over, Kisan.

Appreciate it. Well, maybe we're going to start off with brief introductions. Jill, you want to go first?

My name is Jill Harrison and I am with the team at Silverline. We are a New York based technology consulting company and we focus primarily in the Salesforce ecosystem. My role at Silverline I've been doing work in the Salesforce space for the last nearly 15 years and my role at Silverline, while it started from a design standpoint and helping financial services firms really create technology roadmaps and see their technology projects through to execution, my role has shifted over the years into really looking at what is happening on the leading edge of innovation and how are firms really trying to create competitive edge through technology and productivity to drive big results for their firms. So that's what my kind of role is right now and I'm excited to chat about what we're seeing in the market.

My name is Steve Seiler. I'm CTO at Stonebriar. I met Jill something like five years ago and we started working together on investment banking and M and A projects. So we started having a thoughtful conversation around what people are using in the marketplace. What can we do to build something new and compelling. I've also been in a Salesforce type ecosystem for almost 15 years as well. I started out in insurance, then commercial finance and then investment banking and transitioned back to commercial finance with a little bit of flavor of pe. So a little salt and pepper on top of that.

A smorgasbord.

Oh, it's been a fun trip. So what we focus on is we're focused primarily on leveraging the limited headcount that we have and augmenting that with technological tools that allow us to get a lot more done with the smaller group. And we've been very successful since I joined to make them as efficient as possible while still maintaining their workflow and just increasing their leverage.

Great. Thanks for the intros and look forward to getting some perspective on our topics today. First question I have. What are some key tech trends you've seen related to M and A?

This is a good one. I think across the, across the country, all of the investment banks and private equity firms really on both sides of the deal fence, the first and foremost thing we're seeing relative to trends is really the obsession with data. Some of these firms in some cases are using up to 40 and 50 different sources of data to drive their operations. And this can be anything from new business development sources where they're looking at potential deals coming down the pipeline, or investment opportunities that they can participate in to really the streams of data that exist already within a firm for managing their operations, even things like email traffic and sentiment that comes through in those particular channels. And so these firms are really, really thinking about how to marry all of their data sources together to create one unified platform that can become the basis for a future scaled data intelligence center. I know a lot of venture capital firms are really focusing in on this right now too. So everybody's just obsessed with data, first and foremost.

Yeah. So take the example of a league table of publicly available market that you're tracking all the time, like, oh, this bank did this deal, that bank did that deal, and then using your own internal tracking of how many deals that you've gone through and then integrating them into your marketing for your pitches so you can make this marriage of data together to actually progress your progress and feed into that prospect pipeline.

And I think one of the interesting purviews of the firms that we work with at Silverline on the capital market side is that these firms are really actively investing in and transacting new data startups. So they're often at the forefront of what's possible with AI and natural language processing. And they're buying and selling these kinds of firms to big corporate enterprises like Salesforce or Google or Oracle or any of the big ones. But they're often further along in their deal processes than they are internally. Right. With their operations relative to data. So the mind share there is really focused on how do we as a firm become more agile and how do we understand the ROI of the different sources of data that we're investing in as a firm and show that value back to our bankers so they can understand when and where the most likely and most lucrative deals are going to pop based on whatever data sources that they're using? As an example, Salesforce is one of the most active corporate investors. Right. They just recently purchased tableau for almost $16 billion last week. They have tons of integration activity internally with all of these new acquisitions. I think at last count, I can't even remember the exact number. But they've invested in so many little data startups that do things like natural language processing for earnings transcripts. There's a really cool startup out of Switzerland called Squirrel, and a lot of firms are looking at these kinds of sources as ways to get an edge ahead of their competition. But in order to really integrate those data sources into their particular workflow, they've got to become way more nimble as organizations that are focused on technology and the experience of the bankers as opposed to traditional productivity and forcible deal flow.

That's where Jill and I disagree that she thinks that data is. Yes, data becomes like a very cornerstone component of the overall strategy. But I feel like workflow and experience and reducing the amount of friction that somebody needs to do the same amount of work is one of the primary things that's happening in tech right now too. So, like, it's like the user experience of an analyst versus a director, and you're at different levels, so your user experience is going to be different and the serving of that data is going to be different. So I feel like just being able to capitalize and document, all right, what are you doing? And does that still make sense? And how can I augment that with technology where you don't have to do this other thing that's just terrible to do. It takes you like four hours to do, compile something where you can have that data as a part of a strategy, but the. The workflow reduces the amount on top of it.

Yeah. And I think what Steve's getting to, and I think it's a healthy tension that we've developed over the last few years. What he's getting at and what we talk about a lot is in the past, IT technology services internally at a bank or a private equity firm or whatnot, are looked at very much as a cost center. And as such, a lot of these firms have not structured a true innovation or agility muscle internally. So that now the speed of innovation, the speed of being able to deliver apps into the hands of these bankers can increase so much. But a lot of these firms are not quite yet prepared to do that. And so that's another sort of secondary trend that I see a lot of right now is really, and I look at it very much as group therapy. Right. We have to bring people together to help them think about how do you set up and how do you structure the firm in a way that you can be much more agile, much more nimble.

I'm hearing the data aspect of it, which truly believe there's a lot more data out there and that needs to be utilized and it needs to be combined to do that. The workflow is something that we deal with day to day. I'm curious if we can try to.

Break this down a little bit in.

Terms of the landscape of the industry because we have investment banks that we all work with, we have private equity firms and we have corporates Majority and some other ones out there as well in terms of where they are in that cycle and I guess where you see the higher level adoption happening because it is definitely not in the bulge bracket banks.

From a people architecture standpoint, a lot of the bulge bracket banks quite honestly face so much more bureaucratic friction in their innovation processes because they just have a much bigger machine to try. And you know, I feel like you.

Throw bodies at a lot of things sometimes.

Sure.

Because they can.

Well, and whether it's bodies or it's just trying to compete, trying to stay ahead of what competition is doing, they just are less nimble. They just can't quite, you know, move as rapidly as the smaller firms that have much more visibility for individual contributors in the organization to drive the ball forward. And so I think, you know, the analogy I was using earlier about a lot of the innovation mentality being driven off of these kinds of internal working relationships between the business and it. I think that's where it starts. Right. It's helping these organizations, private equity firms, hedge funds, investment banks, change their mindset first about how IT or technologists or enterprise architects can really think differently about the relationship with the business and have a true partnership between the business and technology to understand not just what the functional requirements are of something that they're trying to roll out, whether it be a deal room or whether it be a new workflow management process. But what's the feedback loop between the two. How do you truly create a good working relationship? That's not one leveraging power or thou shalt do what I say, but let us bring technology and business to the same table to think creatively about things.

And I feel like people are willing to start down that process. Like I'm working with a PE company right now that wants to have this thought process around technology and be thoughtful of all right, this other company is using this application. Is there another use case within my portfolio that can leverage that as well and also have the subject matter expert be able to bring that up and the time to market becomes a lot less because you have somebody that's gone through it, experienced it before, and then be able to have, I think, what you're getting at.

And not to get too nerdy here for a second, but this is gonna be a conflicted analogy. Private equity firms understand, once they are educated, the value of API driven architecture, because they are de facto organizations that become API to a variety of financing options, of productivity options. They're trying to figure what is the shared service architecture for their entire portfolio.

How can they figure out be as efficient as possible, right?

So trying to take technology and interpret it for these audiences, because these are really smart people, they really can grasp these concepts very easily. But it starts with these relationships that set up the foundation for healthy working relationships and true innovation in a sense that I think we haven't seen yet. Firms that are small and hungry and growing have an opportunity to go take the lunch money of bigger firms if they can get a jump on a lot of these deals. In some cases, we've worked with middle market investment banks over a 10 year period that have grown 10x in headcount. You better believe that those bigger bulge bracket banks or the smaller end of that market sees that. They see the competition, they ask the question why more successful, why are they gaining market share on us? And there's a lot of movement between the firms because they start to see, well, if you can really nail operations, if you can really nail the workflow, you can gain the insights to reward the top performers and to incentivize everyone else to understand and harvest those sort of successful strategies.

So I want to know how are they actually developing this competitive edge to fuel the growth? Because my reality is 90 plus percent, maybe 95 plus percent are using Accel for everything, all workflow, everything. And we're starting to see that there's firms that are getting this idea that let's find a way to build a strategy around leveraging technology to future proof and position ourselves better. Who's actually doing that and what are the specific drivers of that competitive edge? What is it that they're doing that's actually Winning their pitches over other companies.

Almost every investment bank that I speak with, it's a little less true for private equity firms. But most investment banks are starting to question the nature of collaboration now that things like social media tools are so widely accepted. I know that's sort of a strange analogy, but in the past, investment bank bankers were just very, very protective of their contacts, protective of the relationships, protective of all of the things that make them good entrepreneurs, because you de facto have a whole set of entrepreneurs inside of an investment bank. But now that we have modern technical tools that allow us to understand the nature of and map out relationships, bankers.

Also giving them the comfort of security. I think the security coming along with it gives them a little bit more comfort to share that they can, but not too much. I'm just sharing enough so we get additional gains by just doing that and.

Even solving for really simple problems like who in my firm knows this person besides me so I can cover my bases before I go talk to them and understand whatever ideas have been popping that can create a huge competitive edge. That, in my mind, is a cultural shift first. And bankers have to start to understand that. And I think the newer, the younger generations of bankers get this because they understand networking in a really interesting way. Millennials. And then on the other side, you have management teams of these banks more focused than ever on true reporting. So if you can draw a line between the relationships that are injured, the way that you can mine your own network or mine the relationships in your firm, and then the outcomes that your product group or your industry group or your team gains, that speaks volumes to management. And that kind of creates this feedback loop in my mind of how do you manage a rapidly growing investment bank? And we've seen that time and time again.

In conjunction with her social media topic, investment banks are now also taking a look at their cohort level. So they've taken a look at a person that's now an MD that has been in the business 15 years, has always reached out to the same person that they were on a deal with at a private equity firm 15 years ago, and they were analysts at the same time, and they've now grown up to a higher level. So they're mapping those cohorts and there's an active joining of, all right, I'm going to actively reach out to this associate. I'm an associate. We're at the same level and we're going to see where this takes us from a career mapping perspective. So it's. The cultural phenomenon is really driving all.

Of it well, and just the volume of private equity firms as they've ballooned over the last several years, we have more and more PE firms, bigger and bigger dry powder bases from which to invest. There's a lot of imperative to go find the funding where it exists, do the deals and then expand and grow your network coverage. Because the firms have splintered off all over the place.

And it's less of a sales mentality, it's more of an advisory mentality too. Like, oh, you did me right in this deal three years ago. Do me right again, give me a solid.

One of the things that we do at Silverline is we have industry accelerators and specifically for investment banking and private equity, we have core implementations of Salesforce for those particular verticals. And an example of that is bankers in the past used to have assistance or analysts compile tear sheets for them. Right. So every time they would go to see a strategic client, show me all of the things that we've done for this person lately or their firm or for them at other firms when they were previously employed somewhere else. So that concept that Steve raised of show me what you've done for me and do me right. So with our accelerators on Salesforce, basically what we've done is create the right modeling, the right tool set to be able to, at the push of a button, literally, if you're sitting at a cocktail, cocktail party or at a dinner with somebody that you're curious what we've done with them lately, pull up that same tear sheet based on data. It's driven by data. It doesn't require a half a day for some analyst to go compile it. The expectation is I need more access, greater access to my firm's entire exposure for this one individual so that I can have a more informed conversation. And so those types of mobile tools, reporting tools, all of that helps with that agility question and then proves the value, shows the value back to the banker that's trying to figure out what is that next deal that they can.

Source and start reliance on Excel at the same time. Another piece based off of the exact same data. You can look at your existing process. So I have a tech company that has these attributes and these are my potential buyers. Oh, wait, we have had eight of the same type of deal come across our desk in the last couple years. What was our buyer list then? And can we pull those people forward? And as you make your way through that process, you can take a look at, hey, these people end up trading up and bidding higher or they always come in at 92% of whatever their initial bid was. So you can hone in on people's behavior over time or like for a tech company they, they trade up, but for an industrials company, they're really going to pay through the nose for it. So it depends, you decipher what people's appetite is for certain types of companies. So then you can, as an investment banking advisor, you're trying to maximize the value of your company that you are selling, which it ends up helping you be able to maximize that multiple and then feed that data into a pitch the next time to be like, hey look, we've done this before and we can do it again for you as you're trying to get additional prospects in the pipeline.

I think what Steve's getting at in a very real way is what I would consider kind of the third trend that we see a lot right now. And I don't know that anyone's doing a real bang up job of this yet, but what he's talking about is you're never gonna like wrest Excel from a banker's cold dead hands. I'm sorry, it's just never gonna happen. It is the security blanket, right?

I beg to differ. At my previous investment bank they were trying to do something with cubes, like standardized cubes to do analysis of companies. It was really cool.

Interesting. Well, good. I'm sure they still are using spreadsheets for something.

All the things.

All the things. But the problem with that is that spreadsheets are a flat representation of something. It's not truly a database, it's not married with lots and lots of other data that exists throughout the firm. In order to get to that holy grail of predictability, which is where AI, natural language processing, machine learning starts to come into play. You have to look at those processes, those workflows, like the deal marketing process, in tandem with a mountain of data that, that sits within the confines of the firm to try and draw or infer conclusions from it. And so you can't do that in a spreadsheet necessarily because we're talking about in some cases millions of points of data that ultimately should drive some sort of insight. So that is what some of these more nimble mid market firms are doing. And they're getting their reps in, right? They're understanding with each new cycle what insights they could infer from their data and the faster they can close that feedback loop to think about what tools the bankers can use at a glance to understand if their deal multiples are going to be Bigger or understand if their process is going to go faster because of X, Y or Z. That's what they're trying to get to is like taking that data, making it actionable and then making it predictable.

When will that perception hit the client in his decision on where to land their engagement with? Because I think that's when things are going to shift and people are really going to spin their heads.

I think the amount of attention that an internal person can put onto their clients becomes a little bit more of a touch point and they start to be able to have additional time to focus on additional bells and whistles. They have additional time to create something at least in the pitch environment that is data centric, like we have all of these metrics and that is our cutting edge because we can supply this information and we can lean on all of our information demonstrating it up front. It becomes a part of the pitch to sign up that client and make sure that they know, hey, you're not going to see it from day to day. But if you need a request on where we're at in the process with you and let me just click a button and be able to get that to you right away so you don't have to wait a day for an analyst to like get back into compiling all that information like it's there for you.

I think at a fundamental level a lot of financial services firms in general, they're not as fluent with what we in the tech industry kind of consider the day to day operations. What I mean by that is concepts like user experience, design, customer experience, employee experience, the actual design of day to day tool sets are commonplace in product management environments. And I think bankers are starting to understand that their product is the ability to serve the customer. So borrowing some of these concepts from tech shops, the Agile or lean innovation process, the customer experience, these kinds of concepts can be very advantageous for them to use as a lens to reframe the experience that they're offering to their customers.

We work with companies day to day that often are competing with other companies 100% Excel based. Let's teach you a few things about a project management methodology, what that tools looks like and we're seeing definitive results in terms of the time to take a deal, from signing engagement to market and from loi to close. But you don't how do you relay that to the prospective client that's evaluating our client to work with them? Because it's not an obvious thing but there's a huge dramatic difference between the Goldman's using Excel and the mid market bank that's loaded up on the latest and greatest both technology and practice.

Being able to in sort of a pitch process represent that potential buyers list. And the rationale for why you might show the, you know, their company to that set of buyers is often a very compelling point to engage. Showing that financial rationale based on hard data that your firm is capturing shows that you really are tracking all of the pieces internally that would give a potential client confidence to engage.

And you're at the same time you're showing your point of view. So your point of view is based off data, but also your experience and you have a little bit of gut checking around it as well. So if you also include people that you wouldn't recommend reaching out to, that becomes important too because you're offering both sides of the coin. Like I think you should go with us because we know the space well enough that we have all of this information at our fingertips. Like this pitch took us, you know, X amount of time less. And you don't say that. But like oftentimes you can spit out the entire boiler of what a pitch deck would be with a click of a button with modifications and customizations just for that client. Again, the contextual data around that client allows you to be able to customize that on the fly very quickly. And you can spend your time preparing in other ways that give you a little bit more of an edge versus spending all of your time working on the product of material.

So really demonstrate it upfront, early as.

Possible on both ends and then when.

And I have actually a question for you, Kissan. Oftentimes my impression is that you're absolutely right, that customers don't see a lot of that work. So it's sort of invisible to them insofar as what does the process look like, what are my bankers doing to help me with this transaction until they get to the diligence portion, right? And then they're very actively engaged. And in some cases it's a huge workload, a huge burden on a management team for a company that may have a lot of ongoing operational challenges. So I'm really curious in your, in your perspective on the role of that data as that activity spikes in the diligence process. And even anecdotally what you hear from customers, not just on the financial institutions, but on the corporate sides, about how technology helps their experience and helps them with peace of mind.

I would say the big thing purely on the data side and managing a process, particularly diligence, especially in a competitive environment, really making sure. There's no blind spots on bottlenecks. I think that's the biggest thing because it gets intense, especially if you're handling the banking situation, multiple bidder situation, auctions, and there's a lot to keep track of and things can easily get slipped through the cracks. So just to have this extra assurance that hey, we got all our boxes checked and so forth, but then you dive deeper and by actually having data on diligence process itself, right, it's not living in Excel, it's actually living in a project management tool where you can track every activity. You start noticing things, you start noticing buyers spending time in certain areas. And let's hypothetically say we have a buying group we're going to meet with and we notice they spend 80% of their time on these three legal issues. Well, next week we have a management presentation coming up so I can bring this up to my client ahead of time and well prepare them to answer those questions around that. Suppose those specific items that these attorneys are going to bring up. So that's one example that we've seen that's just here's data. People are just using Excel for it and they're not capturing or retaining or analyzing any of this stuff because they don't capture it to begin with. That's something that can be leveraged. Beyond that workflow, I think it ties back to that same theme because when you hire an outside advisor to help you sell your business or even buy your business for your company and your management team, it's a huge distraction that nobody realizes until they actually go through it. And the bank's job is to prevent the distraction. I mean, not prevent it, but alleviate as much as possible. And I think the challenge is if you don't have that workflow tailored for it, there's a big, big, there's. I mean, there's multiple things obviously, right? There's parts of the process when you're doing a lot of those management presentation and it's real people to people interaction and you just can't avoid that.

Well, and you don't want to get left at the altar either, right? Because it's scary.

There's also something more simple, like even the onboarding process, like the post mandate, like you've won the mandate. All right, let me get my working groups together, something like that. And being able to get all the information and have it in a repository so you can quickly access it and make sure that the people that are working together know who to contact to work together. Like that's like very simple. But like people stumble with that.

I think one of the. One I had a thought about the other side of the fence, right. You know, across the table, on the other side of the fence from the investment banks and the customer experience. Question about what's going to really turn the tide for private equity firms or institutional asset managers. I think the customer experience there is often very driven by regulatory change. Right. And so gdpr, GDPR or reporting, fiduciary reporting, like the DOL rule that came down a couple years ago ultimately didn't really come to fruition.

Isn't that coming out this summer too?

It got delayed.

Yeah, it got delayed. So there was a lot of resonance in the market around what's going to be the right experience to address these regulatory changes or considerations. And so a lot of the more forward thinking firms are really trying to look at what are just fundamental operational challenges that they have and nail those to the wall so they never have to think about them, so that they can be more nimble to respond to the regulatory considerations. Even simple things like creating a hands off but secure and compliant workflow for wire transfer requests so that you're double, triple verifying the bank accounts into which you're transferring massive volumes of money to actually do these trades. Thousands of these kinds of requests come through the lines of any sort of private equity firm every year. So how do you actually solve for that so that you can get on to the next things? And ultimately those sorts of simple requests are how your clients perceive you. If you can make it so easy that you don't have to jump through hoops, or you can defer the responsibility to your lawyer and have them be delegated sort of contact or arbiter of your investment. Those are the kinds of things that a lot of these firms are just quite frankly getting started with so that they don't have to worry about them. And that is the, you know, the simple solutions are often the most important ones to solve for. For clients.

I think the big thing I see in the industry there's just no practice of project management techniques is lacking dramatically.

Unless they have an internal training program that specifically focuses on that. And some people are doing it and others are not. And those are the ones that are not. You can tell that they've been struggling and it's the whole building the culture up from the top down and the bottom up at the same time. But if they're not having those training programs for their people, I mean that one, the paying for it comes from the top. And that means that they believe in their own business. It's kind of putting your money where your mouth is to start training your people. And it doesn't matter that your burnout rate is going to be so high with a low level analyst. If you give those people a chance, they'll probably stay longer than if, if you're, oh, you've given us service for two years. Thank you so much. Go to business school. We'll see you in three years. So a lot of the mentality around that's been changing too. Can we hang on to these good people that make a difference for my company and can they lean in on the best practices that we've set up while still being creative?

I think it's got to be culturally driven. I think you're right about that. If it's not driven culturally, you're not creating an environment for ideas to be heard and having that continuous improvement mindset. We talked about the roadmap of technology for them in the industry.

I think one of the other areas that we see a lot of thinking for technology roadmaps right now is a lot of these big banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, have a constellation of enterprise architectural systems that are aging fast. You know, people that are on legacy SAP or Oracle or, you know, Siebel systems, that there's a lot of cost wrapped up into upgrades and, you know, hardware maintenance and stuff like that. That is huge. Right. And so I think the roadmap for a lot of bigger banks, the more innovative and leading edge banks that I've been dealing with, is they're trying to answer the question of how can we be much more nimble in ripping and replacing systems. All of these banks are doing deals in these spaces with great results. So they know that there are new platforms that are coming and that they should be ready for them. But technologically speaking, they're very unprepared. So there's this idea of abstraction of the problem, right? If you have dozens of data systems that are feeding your business development pipeline or your operational pipeline, you have dozens of operational systems that are feeding your workforce and all of the staff internally. How do you take all of those systems and reduce or remove dependence on the entire infrastructure of your firm to one system? And what we're seeing, that's kind of exciting and yes, I'm a total nerd about this stuff, is, you know, Salesforce acquired Mulesoft last year and Mulesoft's core value proposition is API first. So organizations can think about abstracting the systems that they're used to dealing with into concepts. Like as an example, what is my API at a bank or a private equity firm for new business development? That API, that sort of central node of data transfer, could tap into dozens and dozens of systems and it doesn't make a difference if you rip and replace any of the systems below it. You're taking that data and feeding it through to a central sort of service bus, if you will, that can serve a business function well.

What's the outlook?

Fine. So this idea of taking, taking all these point to point integrations in a firm, abstracting them into functional areas within the firm and then pointing them to the experience layer for the bankers. Meaning I want to be able to subscribe to all of my alerts for all of my deals on one app. But that might come through 17 different systems. How do I really think, through that abstraction problem, that design problem, to deliver that perfect sort of application on my iPhone or my Android device that I can in one place as a banker, understand all the alerts that I should be made aware of for everything in my business without having to go to 25 different systems.

Can I pivot a little bit? I had a really good experience where we were looking through our business process to see what work streams we wanted to focus on to make us better. And it ended up being like this big kumbaya that you didn't expect bankers to have. And you're just like, you're people too. Awesome. And it was right around when Brexit was happening too. So the people that were over from London were like, I don't know what my countrymen are doing. This like vulnerability that was exposed to everybody in the room and it was all levels. So it was your partner all the way down to an admin, not even an analyst, like an admin assistant where like everybody was going to have a say in this initiative. It was like it was a three day off site where people were like optimistic about what could be done through technology and through culture and through workflow. So there were a like six different work streams. And I, as a part of being in IT with the business, I felt included and that they wanted everybody to work together to make themselves better. It sounds super cheesy, but it was a really good experience and it was crazy in its own right because people started opening up more after that and not just the people that were at the off site. It was infectious throughout the organization.

I think I can probably strike a Pollyanna tone like this also a little bit. I think one of the more encouraging examples that I've seen at investment bank is we did a lot of work with a bank that specializes in cross border transactions in Asia and the way they thought about collaboration similarly was very forward thinking because they had a real problem to try and communicate in lots of different languages with lots of different needs, translation needs, you know, concurrency and conversion leads, in some cases changing currency stability. So thinking about technology as a way to drive operations in 30 Asian countries was really cool because they were thinking about it culturally and collaboratively first in a very novel way. One of the craziest things though that I've ever been asked by a head of a fairly large investment bank was at the height of the Google Glass craze and basically he asked me if all of these things that we were building for Salesforce if we could basically create his own Terminator style like eye device where he's at a cocktail party and he can identify all of the different touch points with this person that he's looking at through facial recognition and understand what he's worth to the firm and all of these things. And this is the sort of danger of educating bank executives on what true user experience design can be like. So you can get some very creative and novel ideas from people. But I was encouraged. I was encouraged and very amused.

Thank you both for taking the time. Jill, Steve, I appreciate you coming down and hanging out.

Thank you Kisan.

It was really fun. Thank you for having us.

Great. Let's get some scotch out.

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