The Connector Podcast - APIX

Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.

Welcome to another episode of the Connector Podcast. And today I'm with Shuraaf, Shuraaf all the way from Singapore working for a company called Apix. Saurav, can you explain to us what you guys do and for whom you're doing this?

Absolutely. Thank you, Koen, for having me on the podcast, and thank you everyone for listening in. My name is Saurav. I lead commercial and business operations, sales, and partnerships for a company called APEX. We are an online platform based out of Singapore, and we help financial institutions, fintechs, educational institutions, which includes the students studying there around the world, to discover emerging solutions and to innovate very quickly, very efficiently, and in a cost-effective manner.

Mm-hmm.

So our customers tend to be large banks, large insurers. They also tend to be large regulators and multilateral agencies. And what they do is they come on our platform, Koen, to host hackathons or to expose their datasets, their technologies on our proprietary digital sandbox, which is then used by startups and fintechs to build applications, to experiment, to collaborate, and to Ultimately showcase themselves in a positive light.

So in essence, you would say it's all about collaboration. Is that right?

Absolutely, Koen. Collaboration is at the heart of what we do. We have an ecosystem today that has more than 1,800 startups and fintechs.

Wow.

In over 90 countries.

That's amazing.

Yeah, absolutely. It's taken us five years, four and a half years to get here, Koen. So we're very proud of the community that we've created. So more than 1,800 fintechs and startups, thousands of developers and students. And of course, our main customers, our main clients are the largest banks and the largest regulators around the world. We have over 100 of them today who are using our services to collaborate and innovate with these fintechs and with these universities and students.

To me, it sounds like APEX has really completely changed the collaboration between financial institutions and fintech. Could you explain how it came about and potentially also what has been the first success that was booked by APEX?

That's a great question, Koen. And look, I don't want to necessarily say we've revolutionized something, but yes, to put it rather humbly, we have seen some success. The platform, Koen, was set up in 2017 by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, which is both the central bank and the regulator in Singapore, and the World Bank. These institutions came together to create a platform. What they wanted to do was create an industry sandbox, right? A sandbox, which is essentially a safe area for people to experiment, for people to test, for people to build new things without the risk of breaking anything. So, you know, Singapore has always been quite progressive in terms of driving innovation, in terms of promoting younger fintechs and startups to build solutions here. And that's where this platform came from. It was used by hundreds or thousands of fintechs to showcase their solutions, to build their solutions, and to work closely with financial institutions here in Singapore. Now, over the last 4 years, 5 years though, we've moved beyond the national borders of Singapore. To our listeners, you may or may not be aware, but Singapore is in Southeast Asia. And Singapore is seen as a little bit of a trailblazer, a little bit of a leading indicator of how innovation, how financial services, how the industry as such moves in this part of the world. So over the last 4 years, Koen, as APEX grew, as the collaboration and the innovation on this platform grew, we slowly expanded our scope to Southeast Asia, working with some of the largest banks and some of the most exciting fintechs in this part of the world. Subsequently to that, we grew and we are now present in India. And very happy to state that we've got some of our first customers who have signed up and are using our product all the way from Europe to the Middle East to Africa and North America as well.

What an amazing journey, Shiref. And for a financial institution, because you mentioned that financial institutions are using you, What could be the main benefits they get from using your platform?

That's a very pertinent question, Koen, and absolutely, innovation, very honestly, can tend to be a bit fuzzy, can tend to be a bit woolly sometimes. It's very important for us to explain to our customers what is it that you can do, what happens when you innovate quickly, what happens when you innovate cheaply, what happens when you innovate at scale globally. In our experience, Koen, 4 key benefits that we have seen our customers gain or obtain when they use our platform. The first is when they host hackathons or innovation challenges on our platforms, which is one of our main products, it helps them find vendors, it helps them find solution providers.

Okay.

To some really difficult business and technical challenges they might be facing.

Right? So—

Clear. Imagine you're a bank who are struggling to come up with a really top-of-the-line compliant anti-money laundering service provider, right? You can come on our platform, you can host this as a challenge, and AML providers from all over the world can showcase their solutions to you. And you can then figure out if which one is relevant, which one works for your business, right? As an example, NPCI, which is the world's largest payments processor today in India, runs the UPI network, wanted to find a biometric and security authentication partner for every payments transaction.

Mm-hmm.

They ran a global hack platform and they found vendors who could do this authentication So, so that's really number one, which is solving difficult, challenging problems and really going to the work and saying, who can solve this for me? Right. The second area, Koen, which customers and financial institutions use us for is to find talent. Now, today, very honestly, if you're looking to hire developers, it's hard to find high-quality talent and to do that in an effective manner, right? You may spend a lot of time interviewing people, you may spend a lot of time doing other stuff. So what we've done very successfully for the likes of Goldman Sachs is help them find top-quality technology talent, developers, designers.

Interesting.

And, and yeah, hire them very quickly in weeks as opposed to months.

Nice, because they actually can do something practical, right? They can prove, they can show that they're good developers, and I think they got a sort of exposure together. Perfect fit like this. Interesting. Cool.

The third area, Koen, is that what we try and do with some of our largest institutions is to drive a fundamental cultural shift. Within the organization. What we found is that even if top management wants to innovate, even if shareholders, regulators want to innovate, if the organization, if every employee in the organization isn't bought into it, innovation is never successful. So what we try and do with our innovation challenges, our hackathons, our sandbox product, which are the 3 main products, is we host internal challenges, we host internal programs for the likes of Prudential, which is one of the largest insurers across Asia, to build this internal culture of innovation. So think about it as senior management, middle management empowers individual employees to come up with ideas to improve their business, to improve their lives, to improve their customers' lives. And we've seen that dramatically increase the chances of success of any innovative thinking and any innovative idea. And then finally, Koen, the 4th and the final way in which we find financial institutions benefiting from our products and APEX as a platform more broadly is that they use our platform to signal to the market that they are truly innovative. They are truly differentiated from a competitive perspective, from a customer service and a delivery perspective, because when they are hosting these global innovation challenges and hackathons, what they're really saying is that, look, we are spending our money, time, resources doing this. And the market picks up on it. So what we found, Koen, is our customers, when they come to us, when they host successful innovation challenges, hackathons, and use our sandbox, their NPS scores, their visibility, their, you know, customer satisfaction results, their shareholder perception all go up as a result. Clear.

Interesting. So these are— this is nice to share with the audience because these are 4 domains in which you foster this collaboration, what you said in the beginning. And, you know, when times when you're having fun, time goes fast. So we were already heading towards the end of our podcast recording here. But I wanted to ask you maybe to give you 3 best practices, very short, powerful best practices that we as companies can actually use to start these innovative challenges. So where do we start?

That's a great question, Koen. I'll tell you 3 ways in which you can start. And obviously, the end answer is to contact me.

Obviously.

Obviously. So jokes aside, Koen, 3 very short and impactful ways in which companies and your listeners can innovate. Number 1, start small. Do not try to change the world on day 1. Do not try to change your organization on day 1. Think of something small, do something in a pilot stage, and, you know, the success will lead to more success. Number 1.

Good.

Number 2 is do not try and find a neutral external environment which is safe and yet secure to do this experimentation in. Because you are doing something new, chances are something may fail, something may collapse, and you don't want it to impact your business on a day-to-day basis. Find a safe environment which is external or different from yours, which looks like yours, feels like yours, but it's not really yours, because then that will give you the comfort of truly taking risks.

That's a nice one, right?

And the third one is, and I cannot stress this enough, be inclusive, right? We found that if you're doing something in a digital, online, and a global manner, the quality of ideas that you get will be very, very different from if you're doing it within your organization or within your country or within your state or whatever the case may be. So use a global platform, have a global outlook, and be inclusive in including different points of perspective, different people, different backgrounds, etc., etc.

Well, you almost inspire me, Sourav, because I've got my innovative bugs inside of me or like tickling me to get started. So let me come to that $1 million question. How can people actually reach you then?

Absolutely. So, dear listeners, if you are interested in collaborating to innovate, whether it's via a hackathon, whether it's via an innovation challenge, whether it's using other tools like digital sandboxes and so on, we are here to help. Visit us at apexplatform.com. You can also look me up. My name is Sourav, sourav.g@apexplatform.com. Happy to help you and have the discussions that you need to start your innovation journey.

Thank you so much, Sourav, for having you in our podcast. And thank you also to the listeners. And please stay tuned for more information about innovation happening in our industry. Thank you so much.

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