Tune in to this episode of Ask A CISO to hear:
- what he learned from founding and running a startup
- what he thinks the future of banking will be like
- if he was right on the money or totally wrong on some predictions he made in a blog post in 2019 about what cloud applications will be like in 2022
About The Guest: Ned Lowe
Ned Lowe is the Head of Engineering at Singlife with Aviva, where he oversees the direction and strategy for Singlife’s tech stack.
Prior to Singlife, Ned spent 12 years working in equity and fixed income trading technology at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
He left the Bank and set up his own SaaS startup, Argomi, after being bitten by the startup bug.
Ned then joined Amazon Web Services to help financial institutions with their digital transformation strategy.
Ned picked up coding at the age of 8 and had always envisioned himself being a chip designer.
On his days off, he can usually be found running up and down mountains, a mean feat given the absence of mountains in Singapore.
About The Host: Paul Hadjy
Paul Hadjy is co-founder and CEO of Horangi Cyber Security.
Paul leads a team of cybersecurity specialists who create software to solve challenging cybersecurity problems. Horangi brings world-class solutions to provide clients in the Asian market with the right, actionable data to make critical cybersecurity decisions.
Prior to Horangi, Paul worked at Palantir Technologies, where he was instrumental in expanding Palantir’s footprint in the Asia Pacific.
He worked across Singapore, Korea, and New Zealand to build Palantir's business in both the commercial and government space and grow its regional teams.
He has over a decade of experience and expertise in Anti-Money Laundering, Insider Threats, Cyber Security, Government, and Commercial Banking.
Transcript
Paul
Hello, everyone. Paul Hadjy, host of Ask A CISO. Just wanted to welcome our esteemed guest, Ned Lowe.
Ned is the Head of Engineering for Singlife with Aviva, where he oversees direction and strategy for Singlife's tech stack.
Prior to Singlife Ned spent 12 years working in equity and fixed income trading technology at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He left the bank and set up his own SaaS startup Argomi, after being bitten by the startup bug. Ned joined Amazon Web Services to help financial institutions with their digital transformation strategy.
Ned picked up coding at the age of eight and had always envisioned himself being a chip designer.
On his days off, he can usually be found running up and down mountains - a mean feet given the absence of mountains in Singapore.
Welcome, Ned.
Ned
It's great to be here and, yeah, it's very difficult to find mountains in Singapore. I don't think Bukit Timah counts but there you go.
Paul
Yeah, of course, I've seen Bukit Timah Hill is very much a hill and not much but yeah, how's things been? We haven't seen each other a month or two but I'm curious what's happening?
Ned
Wow, I'm sort of knee-deep in integration work between legacy Singlife and Aviva Singapore entity that was acquired. That's taken up most of my time these days. It's a lot of fun but it was a lot of work to do so I'm sure we'll get some of that as we talk.
Paul
Yeah, for sure, I can't, I mean, yeah, I have two very different companies sort of working together to solve a hard problem right and I think it is very interesting and look forward to talking about that but, kind of tell us how you ended up in Singapore. Obviously, you're not Singaporean and ...
Ned
Sure. So ...
Paul
you started it in Singlife as well
Ned
like I've been in Singapore off and on for a long time. I first moved here in 2006 but I've left, and come back and left, and come back and you know, now I'm pretty sure this is going to be home.
I moved to Asia in 2005 so I've been in the region for quite a while now.
Joining Singlife was just one of those coincidental experiences, I guess, really, where I met a couple of the Singlife people, Walter, in particular, the founder who sort of inspired me for this was the place I wanted to be and we had some conversations. It seemed like I could help. The mission was amazing, the vision was amazing, and I wanted to do more startup stuff. I was at AWS at the time.
Jumped in with both feet and here we are three years later.
Paul
Yeah, exciting stuff, and it's been amazing to see Singlife's growth too. I think, I still remember visiting, I think, Walter actually when I think even before you were there and, like, it was a small office and now today you guys see your sign outside of the building down there in Tanjong Pagar so pretty cool stuff!
Paul
So, yeah, speaking of Singlife, can you kind of tell our listeners about the company, what you do, and of course what differentiates Singlife from the competition?
Ned
Absolutely. So the answer to this always comes a little bit in two parts because of other competitors in the market?
Singlife as it was and Singlife as it is, and Singlife as it was a digital life insurer looking to unlock the potential money for everyone and was doing that by offering digital products to advisors and customers where they could have a buying experience online. We had a mobile app where they could interact with the policies. We had quite a unique proposition - the Singlife account which you can still sign up for, which is an everyday insurance policy where as you put money into the account, you earn a return on that money, but you can take it out at any point either through a funds transfer or a debit card, a Singlife debit card which when you tap and you pay for something you're actually doing a partial surrender of your policy, which to my knowledge is a unique proposition in the whole world, to my knowledge, I'd love someone to prove me wrong there.
Now, of course, we got to a certain size where you know, we had a customer base, we had different products, but we thought okay how do we turbocharge this, and that was when the Aviva Singapore conversation started.
So Aviva had a much larger customer base, many more products, many more advisors that they worked with, and, of course, a legacy in a history that goes back a long way.
So we thought okay wouldn't it be great to have that increased size, scale, and range of products, but inject some of Singlife's sort of digital approach to things, more modern technology, and bring out the best in both worlds, be better together. And so that's what we're doing right now.
You said my job ...
Paul
Nice.
Ned
specifically, so you know, I'm a techie, unashamedly techie.
As you say, I've been coding for a very long time. I love everything to do with tech and so I see my role as sort of being the sort of the overseer and the strategist was making sure that all of the different pieces are coming together so that we have the best tech platform to therefore service our customers in the best way.
Paul
Awesome, yeah, I'm sure that that's changed a bit since the merger as well so kind of like,
Ned
It's a much bigger team, yeah.
Paul
what are some of the kind of technical decisions that supported, like, things like Singlife's growth, like, even with the merger with Aviva, and, like, what are kind of the challenges of, like, integrating those two together, because imagine you've obviously this much older company or legacy Singlife built in the cloud? I'm curious to hear about that.
Ned
You know, something you just mentioned there is, I think, a large difference one's born in the cloud, digital native, and when you're born in the cloud, it isn't just that you've got a cool data center. It means that the entire approach to technology is different by the way that you experiment with things. We're a full-stack cloud user so it's not just spinning up an EC2 instance and using it for a virtual machine.
We have serverless wherever we can be taking advantage of modern approaches wherever possible. And obviously, Aviva comes from a very different place with a traditional data center et cetera.
So one of the things that we're actually doing right now is looking to see how we migrate all of that estate into the cloud and then started iterating on top of it, moving towards a more serverless approach et cetera et cetera.
But, yeah, there's been, you know, so many different decisions to be made and approaches to be taken because as we bring all this stuff together, you know, the legacy Aviva had, various connecting tissue back to the headquarters in London, so we've been removing that and then rebuilding the capability either from a Singlife or legacy Singlife piece or something brand new. So it's essentially a new company now. It's neither Singlife nor Aviva.
It's something new and something better and that's really quite exciting. I mean, really, and this is, you know, the most important piece of all, really, it's not the technology but the processes and the culture and the way of thinking and so a lot of the work that we've been doing has been around sort of changing the ways of working to be more agile to look more like a sort of a tech-enabled, tech-driven company.
Paul
Yeah, that sounds like a, not an easy task, but being part of one, but definitely an important one, and I agree, like, I mean, you know some of the thought process has to change around moving from an on-prem world to the cloud, like, it is a difficult one. There's like the training aspects which I think is huge 'cause like it's a lot easier to do stuff in the cloud but it's also a lot easier to make mistakes because it's easier to spin things up and down.
Yeah, so you know, one of the big challenges I think people underestimate when moving to the cloud is like the training sort of aspect of it and how much that
Ned
One hundred percent, and a word that I'd to use here and I stole it ...
Paul
will actually pay off as well over the time side yeah.
Ned
from someone. but it's cloud fluency and it's incredibly important through training, hands-on, whatever, to embed cloud fluency into the organization because AMI, VPC, EC2, S3S3, you know, there's just so many words that we throw around which if you have that background or that training, then you instantly know what the person's talking about, but if you don't, then you're like, what is this person on about? These VPCs and these, you know, whatever and so making sure we all have the same language I see as being a really important part of that.
One of the things we've done is set up an internal Cloud Center of Excellence to be that sort of beacon of training and best principles and reference architectures and all that kind of good stuff. Just to go back to one of the things you said and this really feeds in a little bit to Horangi WardenWarden actually, is one of the, you mentioned it being easy to do something wrong, or easier to do something wrong.
The kind of the flip side of that is that once you've got standardized infrastructure and standardized architectures across all companies that are using AWSAWS in this example, then it means having automated controls becomes a lot easier because someone only has to write it once and then you can apply it to everyone and I think that's an undervalued part of having a cloud architecture is the standardization element.
If you go to a traditional on-prem data center every single one looks a little bit different and trying to just pick up a set of rules and drop it in and expect it to work would be, you know, impossible.
Paul
Yeah, and like you know, pushing any patches or updates in a traditional data center is difficult because you got like different hardware different OS, like all that stuff
Ned
Absolutely, absolutely.
Paul
which with AWS you still have some of that but a lot of that is like removed and can be automated which I think is again, some of the power, cause like some of the worst times I remember was like sitting in the data center having to go around and like patch everything and it's just terrible because you like run into these weird versions of Linux that you like haven't seen in three or four years and the patch doesn't work and then you like figured out then you like if you're like me I was working for the government set of things I couldn't like google anything inside the data center. I actually had to leave to go do it and then like print out the directions and go back in and then it like wouldn't work and then you know it was terrible, but that, you know, has made me kind of like a big adopter of the cloud of course because I just saw how much easier some of the security things are to do in the cloud and how much better it can be if you do it the right way, though. I think that's the key point as you got to do it the right way.
So in Singlife, like what do you guys do around security and like obviously you kind of have some on-prem, you have cloud as well, you're transitioning, which is also a challenge, but curious to hear some of the things you use for security?
Ned
We have a little bit of many things as you can imagine, depending on the heritage of the system that sort of that we're talking about.
I think one of the most important pieces and what we've been setting up is around the transparency into what's going on, and so whether that's from setting up some kind of CSOC team with the relevant tools, whether it's around having a SIEM pulling in all of your log information and correlating it, whatever the piece of the architecture you're referring to is it's the same fundamental problem which is transparency and so, you know, we spend a lot of time over the last year building up a security function, giving it the tools to then feed into as best as possible a single pane of glass to then go off and react to things.
You know, I think we've done a decent job there actually. It's been quite an interesting experience for me personally to sort of see the experts at work putting that kind of thing together.
We've still got additional stuff we can do there's always more you can do but I think we're in a pretty good place.
Paul
Yeah, definitely, I mean it's quite cool to see that progress, and can imagine the challenges that you guys have, but yeah, ultimately that's all you can do and then iterate, and iterate, and iterate right? And this is very ... keep steaming ahead which is like all you can do, right?
Ned
much a Singlife legacy, Singlife mentality, you know, is it doesn't have to be perfect on day one, but some things around compliance et cetera do need to be perfect on day one, around data privacy et cetera, but in general, what's more important is the speed with which you iterate than the final solution, you know, you can always do better. The Singlife with the Aviva, say, sort of motto is "A Better Way" and you can always do better but the speed of that loop and how much you improve and get better is the important one, so every single time we're moving something out of the data center and putting it into the cloud, the world gets just that one little bit better, right, and we can just keep on going so it's, yeah, all about iteration.
Paul
Yeah, and then the snowball effect helps you because you know the more stuff you move in the cloud, people get better at doing it, subsequently can then iterate faster because it is in the cloud, and things get better even faster over time, right?
Yeah, so to change the subject a bit, away from Singlife and more to you.
You know, a couple of years ago before you joined Singlife, you kind of stepped out of your sort of career path in working for large orgs and became an entrepreneur. Can you kind of share your story a bit there and what you learned?
Ned
Sure, it was a while ago now, I guess, it must be six-plus years ago.
Yeah, time flies!
Seven years even, where I'd worked for one company for 12 years a big American investment bank, had a great experience there being exposed to great technologies, great people really enjoyed my time. But I kind of got to the end of my ...
I don't want to say the end of my rope because that sounds way too negative but the end of my journey, where prior to that, I'd always been thinking all right what's next, what's next? I looked to what my boss was doing and it was so exciting. I want to have more sphere of influence. I want to be a manager. I want to do this, I want to do that, and then it got to a point where I was kinda like I don't want my manager's job 'cause it just seems like really hard - HR, problem management, budgeting stuff, it just, you know, and it was like a real hit, a real punch to the face that that was the ... that was what came next, really.
You can perhaps vary a little bit but it's not going to be completely different, and you know by chance a friend of mine called me up and said hey you want to set something up and I saw that as the opportunity. So quit my job, which was hard you know after 12 years financially stable to go and do early-stage startups.
Was hard, and I learned a huge amount.
I think one of the things I learned the most that I didn't realize at the time, and you know, I look back at my own writing, I like to write and I publish blogs and whatever, and I realized there was a certain naivety to it. But jumping from a large company to an early-stage startup is hard because there's a whole bunch of practices and things that you just simply ... it's not that you're not good at it and you need to flex the muscle or grow a muscle. You just don't even know it exists.
You know, around procurement and legal stuff and, you know, working with partners where that, you know, if you come from a large company, your vendors and your partners are ... they want to work with you a lot. If you're a small company or smaller company you almost have to persuade people to work with you because they're making an investment in you as well. They don't want to waste all this time and then the startup goes out of business, so there's all of this stuff people talk about funding rounds, about, you know, pre-money post-money. I didn't know any of that stuff and sort of to get to the point is:
I wish that I had maybe had an interim role where I had been exposed to the startup world without necessarily being responsible for life and death of a company decisions and, you know, when people ask me about making that transition now, I often suggest if you can go and work in an AWS or maybe even a GRAB where you have exposure to this kind of stuff, you're going to learn a whole bunch of new concepts and ideas that you can then take off and implement, or a medium-sized startup, whatever it is, but early stages is really hard and, you know, when I was at AWS, every single day I was interacting with startups and larger companies whatever it might be, but learning all the time and then I take a lot of those principles and apply it to what I'm doing now.
Paul
Yeah, I definitely agree. I think, you know, having that sort of like fast-moving company experience and then like getting in touch a bit of like all those things you mentioned ...
Ned
Exactly. Yeah, well you know, kudos to you, man! Kudos to you so ...
Paul
is really useful and not having to like google everything which is, you know, what I had to do but
Ned
Well done.
Paul
Well, I've definitely made a ton of mistakes along the way but like yeah I mean it's, I mean I had some ideas from like Palantir. I got to watch it grow and I also work at GRAB, of course, and GRAB's already kind of mature when I was there but yeah I think it is important to kind of see that growth and see how companies mature 'cause ...
Ned
It's hard.
Paul
otherwise, you don't really understand it. Yeah, it's hard and ... plenty of uncomfortable and terrible situations and that you have to go part of that learning experience but, hey, at least you remember them! That's the good part.
Ned
Absolutely.
Paul
Yeah, so I think there's ... you kind of believe in making banking technology great again. So how far do you think we've come and like what so that was an article I wrote about making bank technology great again are some of the gaps that still exist?
Ned
And it was of course during the Trump era so it was a bit of tongue-in-cheek in the naming.
That approach that I was talking about was about how do you take some of the principles that I had learned in the startup world and then if I was to sort of go back to my previous self and ask for advice, what advice would I be taking and so it's almost a letter to myself or my previous self.
It's interesting that I think I wrote about four years ago, I don't think anything has really changed particularly, or at least in the world that I operate in. It's possible in Europe is a bit different because things like new banking is a little bit further along and so perhaps some of those lessons are feeding back into the traditional enterprise, but, yeah, the main sort of thrust of all of that was around making sure that ... and senior technologists were talking to the right kind of people.
You go and talk to a startup CTO and see what you can learn from them. You know be about being more agile, be more iterative in nature. I don't think it's changed that much. You know, with exceptions, and some of the bigger financial institutions are trying it. Singlife as it now is very much trying and, you know, I hope to be driving some of the ideas that I had previously into the organization.
But it's hard and it's a borderline philosophical question is, if you're a giant company, or not even a giant company, if you're a large company and you've got mainframes and you've got very traditional technology and you've got traditional tech management in place how do you actually change that is it even possible?
So yeah I find that a good sort of coffee or beer conversation to have with people because it ... I think it borders on philosophy: is it even possible?
Paul
Yeah, I agree with you. I mean at Palantir I spent a lot of time selling to banks, working with banks, and, yeah, I mean it's very hard. I mean they had already bought it and it would take like six months to get it, from the time they purchase. Palantir is not cheap by any means.
Of course, it has a huge impact on these companies but it takes a while to kind of get it through to the point where even anyone can use it on the user end side of things, right? Which is understandable because like the risk and the sort of like scrutiny that they're under from regulators and if you touch the US dollar you got the most painful regulator in the world looking after you.
Most banks have to touch the US dollar in some way, and they spit out big fines, so it's like it makes sense why they're a bit risk-averse, but it's unfortunate, right? Because I mean you know the resources they have a lot of the stuff they could do if they could move faster, at least in certain areas of their business, which I think some of them are starting to do a bit more recently, but it's still, I think, it's a long journey and like to your point like who knows whether ...
Ned
Yeah, hopefully.
Paul
they'll ever get there but ...
Ned
This is something that we're obviously working through at Singlife of the moment is when you have a starting point with a lot of legacy infrastructure and architecture, has such gravity right, it's not a simple thing but then when you've got the neo banks coming along and you've got the sort of the fintech enabled players who don't carry some of that baggage or that weight, you know are they going to be able to capitalize on that and become dominant players, I don't think there's a clear answer to that one.
We've had neo banks for a while now and yet most of the big banks are still doing just fine.
So is it just a function of time? There's also really good questions around what is the function of one of those larger banks. Is it to become sort of an embedded finance layer where you have sort of banking as a service from one of the big global banks with licenses everywhere. Vendors just plug into local players who then just treat it as like plugging in the electricity and you know you're seeing a few of the bigger banks try to do that now.
It's a very exciting time to be alive.
Paul
Yeah, I totally agree. I mean all kinds of exciting stuff going on in the world.
So you also wrote a blog post a bit about you know, I'll quote you here, "In 2022, the company of the future will be all in with the cloud providers such as AWS, with the provider handling all the hard computer science problems. Application developers will just be writing small units of business logic which plug into a serverless mesh and the business teams will be writing their own front ends."
So, curious to see that you made that in 2019, almost three years ago, so we're curious to see how much of that is true? I'd say Horangi is completely serverless, at least our Warden platform is. So part of that we're definitely living up to and I think it kind of aligns with, you know, a lot of our work, but of course, we're a ...
Ned
So I need to write a follow-up to that and ...
Paul
young company but, yeah, curious to hear your thoughts on your own prediction.
Ned
The one thing that jumps out of me more than anything else and this is perhaps you know good self-learning or something to reflect upon is that I wrote it, as you said, in early 2019 so three years ago, and I think I massively overestimated how much could be done in three years.
One of the sort of quotes that I like is we overestimate what can be done in the short term and underestimate what can be done in the long term and so clearly I'm not correct. Clearly, but I'd like to say that some of the principles I'm trying to get at have become quite well adopted. The low, no code point I think is probably the one that I'm most interested in is that I have this idea that the best way for mostly internal or B2B applications to be sort of the future of those roadmaps would be for the experts who understand the domain the best to be writing their own user interfaces through low no-code tools within sort of APIs for the functionality being provided by either external parties or the internal teams, then get presented and stitched together by the business user.
I think I was correct in that low no-code has become the buzzword over the last three or four years and that's certainly where a lot of people are taking things. What I was perhaps wrong about or premature about was would it be the techies using that low no-code environment or the business users, and my prediction was that it would be for business users but in practice, I haven't really seen that. It's still being the techies doing it so it'll be interesting for me first to observe at what point do techies sort of let go and let business people start defining their own interfaces. I haven't seen that.
The serverless bit I'd like to think again I was probably correct, just a little premature. The understanding of Lambda and AWS Lambda or Google Cloud functions or whatever it might be is much better now than it was. It's rare now to see people who have no knowledge of it, even if they haven't necessarily implemented it, but it's at least a good concept, and honestly, I still think that that's one of the biggest opportunities we have ahead of ourselves that any time that I can remove functionality and put it into a SaaS provider and then just plug it into me, assuming the provider passes due diligence and all that good stuff. I'd rather do that, but if I'm going to have to have something running within my own environment I'd rather not have a server, and the fewer number of servers I can have within my ecosystem the better, and I will continue to push that one heavily.
Paul
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean a lot of times we have customers that like say like oh you know, well we could build this, and it's like you could build anything, but like would you rather years spending time on building what your like core business focus is because that's what I want to do like and that's like what you're getting by buying a SaaS product. Ultimately if you're putting that money into R&D or ...
Ned
Absolutely.
Paul
something else, you're not putting it into your own product which is how you generate revenue, so that's a business choice but if ...
Ned
Absolutely.
Paul
I was you I would definitely go into what's going to generate revenue for my company not what something, someone else has already done, and he's continuing to ...
Ned
No, absolutely, and you know, you mentioned earlier about patch management in the
Paul
build on right which I don't think a lot of people consider, right, which I think is an important thing to consider.
Ned
data center, even patch management in the cloud, it's still patch management, and if I can avoid that or rather someone else has the responsibility for it then, of course, I would look at Log4JLog4J, right? That was a perfect example where every CISO and senior techie in the world spent nothing else for a week than addressing Log4J issues.
For the serverless stuff when it was running on the cloud providers they had it all patched up within 24 hours, so that's a huge difference and a very important difference that all of these little hidden costs and, as you say, there's also the ongoing improvements and almost crowdsourcing of ideas where if someone is an expert in a particular domain or particular function, they can continue to iterate and improve on it and then as a consumer of that you kind of get stuff for free, because you're collectively pooling the best ideas and then someone else is implementing it, so yeah, it's a bit of a no brainer to me actually.
But it's not a no brainer.
516
00:30:13,280 --> 00:30:18,320
[Paul]: Yeah, same, but when the conversation comes up enough to where I have written down an answer for I mentioned it to potential and customers, right? I mean, yeah, it's important sort of ejection that that does happen right?
So kind of like wrapping this up or we were just about 30 minutes fly. Finally, what kind of trends do you see on the horizon for Fintech and Insurtech, and what's the trajectory of it in your opinion? Lots of exciting things happening, crypto et cetera, so curious to hear
Ned
I don't see there being ... I could be wrong. I don't see there being your thoughts. a massive change in direction um I see it more being around consolidation's a wrong word.
At the moment, in too many places, crypto, wealth management, insurance, banking, we have a very siloed approach and a given customer might have four or five different apps and then you've got things like the personal finance managers which try and pull the data, but, you know, it's a good start, it's a good start, but I think we're going to see more and more blurring of the lines between these asset classes from a customer perspective, not necessarily a manufacturer or risk carriers' perspective.
So that as a customer I get a single holistic experience with you know whatever product I want all embedded into the same interface and potentially not even coming from the same risk carriers, right? One of the things that Singlife has, which is awesome, is that we have a whole bunch of licenses. We can produce know many many things, but, you know, let's just use it as the archetypal example. Crypto. We don't have any sort of crypto capability but if we wanted to plug that into an overall ecosystem that would be a possibility.
And so I see that becoming a much more common approach is to have a single pane of glass into everything. And then very closely related to that, I see retirement and savings being a trend and probably, hopefully, the word retirement actually gets dropped a little bit from marketing and from approaches right? We've all heard about the fire number - the Financially Independent Retire Early, so I think that that's a much better way of thinking about things because I'm 40 now and I still think it's going to be 100 years until I retire, right?
Retirement is not something that I'm thinking about in any way shape or form because whenever we think about retirement, we think about being 65 years old, going and sitting on the porch and, you know, watching your grandchildren, but that isn't what retirement means. It's just that we've overloaded the word so much that's what we think about. So if we talk about FIRE number as being something where the outcome is fixed but the date moves. The outcome is I no longer need to worry about having a job, that I could stop working at any time and I'd be fine.
Paul
Yeah.
Ned
Now, if that's your fixed outcome, you start making your decisions about how to bring the date at which that fixed outcome can happen earlier. So to give a very simple example if someone says to me, hey do you want to go on holiday to Thailand this weekend? I go, yeah, that's cool. I go off and I spend my money, I go to Thailand.
If in my app it could say by going to Thailand this weekend instead of saving the money in this product, the date that you can be financially independent just moved back four days, right, we gamify the crap out of it. Then I, oh, actually, do I need to go to Thailand? Maybe I should invest that money and making the axis that moves up and down a date instead of a numerical value, and gamifying it all, I think is how we're going to start thinking about things and then plugging in the products to support that, and all the Fintechs will be doing product comparison tools and planning tools and all that kind of good stuff to hit that outcome, and then the manufacturers will be creating the product to plug into both impacts to then give those user experiences. So that's where I think it's going.
Paul
Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense. I mean all those are problems that I always think about every day. I'm sure many people do as well and, yeah, I mean it's like it's on my mind all the time, so I imagine it is where there are other people also so it's a good problem to solve, and yeah I mean like being able to like measure and sort of understanding different potential outcomes as like running a company was very important in a company as well, right?
So I think it's quite interesting and I look forward to seeing the future of that. I mean it does only get easier because it's all data, it's somewhere and once it's integrated, of course, like you can start to make sort of potential predictions or understand potential outcomes which you know helps you make better decisions at the end of the day, which is why like as a business we invest in similar things to that, or the ability to do that with dashboards et cetera.
Cool, thanks so much, Ned, for coming on the podcast today. Lots of interesting ...
Ned
Thanks for having me, and thank you for listening to me and it has been
Paul
stuff to talk about which I'm sure will be useful for the listeners as always.
Ned
wonderful.
Paul
Appreciate the time.
