Better Business Technology

Securely app can help solve tradie payment delay problems

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

ONE OF THE BIG ISSUES for tradies and sub-contractors now is they are not being paid. They finish a job and the client is unwilling to pay, or they want to negotiate it down, telling them they don’t have the money and suggesting it be paid off in small instalments.

Andy Squires, CEO of Securely, has developed an app that will address that problem and create a win-win for tradies, sub-contractors and their clients.

Securely records and guides the process. A tradie comes to a client and they agree on a price. The tradie then uploads their photo and a word description of the quote into the app, and for the client.

The client then gets a message on their email asking them if they accept the job and, once the client accepts the job, funds are deposited. The tradie then gets notification that the job has been accepted. Once the job is completed, the tradie puts that information back into the app. When the customer sees that and they’re happy with the job, they release the funds directly to the tradie. 

Useful for building tradies and beyond

Mr Squires said the app had attracted the attention not only of building tradies. Cleaners, landscapers and interior designers are also interested in it because they have got the same process problem.

“We’ve had a few business areas contacting us and saying can we use it for our business.” Mr Squires told Talking Business.

He said the problem had been getting worse since COVID.

“Everybody has been spending more time at home so there’s a lot of DIY stuff going on and we’re hearing a lot more situations where customers are getting ripped off by people posing as tradies, coming around, having a look at a job, being paid a deposit and then vanishing,” Mr Squires said.

This application allows people to see that they could get work done on a safe platform which would make Securely a win-win for tradies and customers.

“The tradie knows the money is there and available once he’s completed the job and the customer knows they don’t have to release the funds until once the work has been completed,” Mr Squires said.

Payment disputes ‘common’

Mr Squires said disputes about payments were now coming through “thick and fast” around Australia.

Securely is Queensland-based but is operating now right around Australia. The app has been developed and tested over several years so that it can be used successfully by tradies and customers.

Mr Squires said the Securely app was also partly created by an international app developer and an ex-IBM project management specialist, with assistance from a banker

He said Securely is now talking to a range of other organisations that are interested in using the app.

These include Mitre10, Queensland Buildign and Construction Commission (QBCC), Carsales, trade organisations and TAFE Colleges.

He said Securely was looking to push out into other areas of business along with their networks. There is also scope for Securely to move into New Zealand.

“We’ve even had inquiries from Singapore as well from someone over there who has seen it and is very interested because they see it’s a massive problem internationally,” Mr Squires said.

While a lot of work needed to be done about the standards and legalities involved, a global expansion of Securely was “definitely on the cards” according to Mr Squires.

www.securely-app.com

www.leongettler.com

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business6-interview-with-andy-squires-from-securely

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ATO extends cyber security contract with Australian secure internet gateway Macquarie Govt

MACQUARIE Government, part of Macquarie Telecom Group (ASX: MAQ), has renewed and extended its agreement with the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to provide a range of vital data and cyber security services.

The ATO has opted to continue to leverage services including Macquarie’s Secure Internet Gateway (SIG), 24x7x365 Security Operations Centre (SOC), sovereign data centre, hyper-converged infrastructure, and cloud services.

According to Macquarie Government managing director Aidan Tudehope, these services support the secure management of the connection between the ATO’s IT environment and the internet while protecting the financial, personal and other sensitive data of Australian organisations and citizens. 

Since the initial agreement was signed in 2019, Macquarie has facilitated the migration of SIG services as well as supported the ATO’s IT and security teams in relation to SIG services. This support includes monitoring digital events on the ATO’s SIG and triage of targeted attacks by Macquarie’s SOC. 

For the ATO, Macquarie’s SOC provides a full inspection of internet traffic flows, content, and images to meet ATO policies, the Government’s Protective Security Policy Framework (PSPF) and Information Security Manual (ISM) controls.

In December, Macquarie Government, Australia’s government cyber security specialist, also became the first company in Australia to have both its cloud and data centre services ‘certified strategic’ by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA).

Macquarie Government provides SIG and other cyber security services to about 42 percent of Federal Government staff, based on headcount.

“We’re proud to play a key role in keeping one of Australia’s most fundamental government agencies secure, at a time when Australians are looking for greater assurance their critical government data and the institutions that store and protect it are fully secure,” Mr Tudehope said.

In growing its government cyber security capabilities, Macquarie Government has continued to invest in its infrastructure and service capabilities, including a significant focus on recruitment, according to Mr Tudehope.

The company now has more than 220 security cleared engineers servicing its clients. TMr Tudehope said they were driving service innovation through the provision of virtual services gateways, enhanced cyber security tools and secure access service edge (SASE) security frameworks.

Macquarie Government has also significantly expanded its sovereign data centre campus in Canberra, opening the $17 million Intellicentre 5 data centre in 2021.

www.macquariegovernment.com

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Cyber security requires ‘eternal vigilance’ says Tudehope

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

BUSINESSES and government agencies are now taking cyber security more seriously. The big change has been since the Federal government brought in minimum standards.

David Tudehope, the founder and CEO of Macquarie Telecom, compared it with fire insurance.

“There was a period when there were no standards on what was acceptable by way of fire prevention and fire response and it was very difficult for businesses to know how to protect their buildings,” Mr Tudehope told Talking Business.

“And 100 years ago, they brought in minimum standards for buildings and I think in terms of fire protection and sprinkler systems and water houses and fire hydrants, and the things we take for granted weren’t part of that,” he said. 

“It’s similar to cyber security. When you have minimum standards, it does prevent and reduce the impact.

“There is a value, in having minimum standards for cyber security in critical industries of course, the ones that are most important to the economy and also in other sectors as well.”

GOVERNMENT MUST HELP

Mr Tudehope said these type of preparations require government involvement.

“It’s not about red tape. It’s about protecting the economy, individuals and businesses’ data,” he said.

Mr Tudehope said compromised information can be restored by storing the information and data in a separate place from the primary, in a cloud that’s separate from the primacy cloud, and in a separate location.

He said combatting cyber threats requires good preparation, talented people and eternal vigilance.

He compared it with the way some people treat “a mousetrap to get rid of mice, instead of being vigilant”.

“The issue is, you need to constantly tune your placement of the mouse-traps, the cheese you use, you have to take away the dead mice,” Mr Tudehope said. “No healthy mouse is going to walk into the same trap with dead mice sitting in it.

“That eternal vigilance, as the Americans would say, the block and tackling, is key to success, rather than the initial purchase and initial deployment which is where the money and the energy goes,”

“It means constantly doing the things you did initially over and over again. Putting in fresh cheese, taking out the old cheese, moving the mouse-trap to a different location. These are the things that are key and what that translates to, back in the world of cyber security, is the criticality of security operations.

“Assuming you buy a quality industrial strength firewall and other kinds of cyber security software, and you install it correctly, the action is at the ongoing management of the security operations.”

NEED CYBER SECURITY ON STAFF

Mr Tudehope said this kind of cyber vigilance required having cyber security on staff.

“The problem now is that there is a shortage of this sort of expertise as these experts were always looking out for career paths and challenges,” Mr Tudehope said. “It is very difficult to retain this sort of expertise on staff. With more companies investing in cyber security teams, only a modest number of people are entering the industry.”

Training people into doing this sort of work takes time, he said.

“The key in the absence of that is for people to work out for their business what their priorities are, whether they can do it themselves, or whether they should use a managed security provider,” Mr Tudehope said.

“It is also very important to vet the people you have working for your business to make sure they are who you think they are.”

www.maxquarietelecom.com

www.leongettler.com

 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business39-interview-with-david-tudehope-from-macqua

 

 

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Profectus counts all the sneaky extra charges that ruin your EBIT

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

FINANCIAL EROSION is the EBIT killer – that is, a business’s earnings before interest and taxes. It occurs when businesses such as retailers get overcharged, even slightly, by suppliers along the supply and value chain.

While small, these minor overcharges snowball and can become a huge issue. Financial erosion can also come in the form of rebates not claimed by retailers or small oversights with compliance of contracts.

Enter the Profectus Group, which helps companies with compliance and recovery issues. To wit, in 2021 Profectus helped recover nearly $29 million in unclaimed revenue or supplier overcharges for its clients across nearly 6,500 claims. 

Focus on the ‘true’ earnings

According to Profectus CEO Chris Hutchins, that is just the tip of the iceberg. 

He said financial erosion occurs when companies, like retailers and manufacturers, do great procurement deals and lose the value of those deals through inadequate compliance and controls.

“So you can imagine a small amount of a price being wrong over a lot of invoices. It adds up to a lot, or perhaps the client is being charged for too many units of something, or a surcharge,” Mr Hutchins told Talking Business.

“So the value being designed is not the value being realised.”

He said inflation, an issue facing businesses all over the world, was making it worse. While businesses can’t control inflation, he said they can control deals and make sure they are not leaking EBIT.

Profectus, which has been in business for 21 years, helps clients automate compliance and recovery in the financial control space. It does this with a combination of software: audit software, contract compliance software, and rebate deal management software.

“Through these technologies, we are able to help clients really get to the devil of the detail,” Mr Hutchins said. “If you think about really big end businesses, even small businesses for that matter, it’s just not possible to be across every single transaction in your company, so that’s what we do. We come in and help automate that.”

He said businesses try to keep track of these transactions using Microsoft Excel. However, he said the problem was that Excel is completely manual and relies on humans to update the data and put in the calculations.

“Which means there is a risk of human error.”

Big names save big money

Prospectus has prominent clients across Australia and New Zealand including household names such as OfficeWorks, David Jones, Chemist Warehouse, BHP, Fonterra, Super Cheap Auto and it also works with some of the big banks. 

While Profectus has a business focusing on Australia and New Zealand, it plans to take its offering globally and help businesses around the world.

Mr Hutchins said there was a lot of potential demand for Profectus’s services from the mining sector with commodity prices being so volatile and the shift towards electrification.

Another sector is manufacturing, with its cost inputs rising.

Then there is retail, which is ideally placed, because of the high frequency of transactions, and the construction industry, with complex rules around labour costs.

www.profectusgroup.com

www.leongettler.com   

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business43-interview-with-chris-hutchins-from-profec

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Smart Communications to keep focus on people

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business

A NEW PLATFORM aims to give super funds, banks and insurance companies the kind of customer engagement people expect from Amazon.

James Brown, CEO of Smart Communications – a leading technology company that helps businesses engage in more meaningful customer conversations and which works with top Australian government agencies and highly regulated companies like banks, insurance companies and super funds – said this was now the big trend. Smart Communications works with the nine largest banks in Australia, four top insurers and 50 government agencies.

“If you look at all these regulated industries, they need be operating from a customer experience point of view at the same level as the very best digital brands that are out there,” Mr Brown told Talking Business. 

“Their competition is not the next bank or the next insurer. Their competition is Amazon, Dominos, Deliveroo, whatever it is that provides a great customer experience. That is the benchmark now.

“Many citizens and consumers don’t compare their bank or government agency to another bank or government agency. They compare it with Amazon or whatever the best digital experience they’re getting across the spectrum of engagement that they have.”

COLLECTING DATA AND CONVERSATIONS

To achieve this Smart Communications has developed a platform which collects data and conversations. It creates highly personalised two way conversations. It is on a massive scale.

Mr Brown cites one case of an Australian insurer. The firm has provided more than 400 million communications for them.

Smart Communications works with major regulated companies across Australia and around the world, and government agencies, to transform the customer experience with more analysis and control of conversations. The company works with superannuation providers, insurance companies and banks

“Where we work really effectively is that really deep intersection of customer and citizen engagement and regulatory complexity,” Mr Brown said.

“We manage to create great customer experience for complex, highly regulated environments.

“And one of the things we’re seeing with banks and insurance companies is that the legacy landscape in those industries is often very complex.”

The system also uses a lot of artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure the communications are appropriate and in context. The customers will also use artificial intelligence for their analytics.

SHIFT TOWARDS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

Mr Brown said companies in regulated industries since COVID have been looking to create deep and meaningful customer experiences, turning them from one way interactions to two way conversations.

He said in Australia in recent years, there had also been a rapid adoption of cloud technology in these sectors which had facilitated the adoption of the company’s platform.

The company is about turning one way communication into “genuine two way conversations,” he said.

“The richer and more detailed they get, the better.

“We are very focused on building out this conversation cloud that allows organisations to really look at the conversation as an enterprise-wide challenge and deal with it with enterprise wide solutions,” Mr Brown said.

“If you look across all the major industries and government bodies that we work with, it’s a complete transformation of that forms process, with really rich omni-channel two-way communications.

“We believe the conversation is the best way to deliver customer experience.”

www.smartcommunications.com

www.leongettler.com 

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business27-interview-with-james-brown-from-smart-com

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Unused office parking is a great parking solution

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business

ALL OVER THE WORLD, office parking is a problem. Regardless of whether you’re in London or Brisbane, this is where ParkOffice is valuable.

ParkOffice uses a COVID-19 focused solution allowing employers to track which staff members require parking at the office on a given day. An algorithm then allocates available parking to those who are most vulnerable or whose need is greatest.

By leveraging the ParkOffice solution, companies are able to increase parking availability by up to 40 percent. ParkOffice is a leading parking management software solution for smart offices that optimizes employee parking by assigning and releasing parking spaces as required, reducing administrative costs, and adding value to real estate. 

Company co-founder and CEO Garret Flower said sharing spots now, post-COVID, is the most efficient thing for companies to do.

“It you look at the big office buildings and residential buildings, there is so much wasted space on a daily basis, so what we have is lots of companies and people who have apartments that may not need the full use of the parking space any more on a four-week basis,” Mr Flower told Talking Business.

“So what we do is allow companies and employees to release the spot when it’s not being used and it goes out into a pool. Other people can then use that spot on the day that they need it, making it a lot more convenient, more efficient and just helping people to find space when they actually need it.”

ParkOffice was developed as a website and app, ParkOffice.io. Users download the app and use ParkOffice, when their company is registered, to start sharing parking space.

Mr Flower said what they discovered was that big companies didn’t want to rent out space to anyone. They want to trust the people that are getting the space.

So the ParkOffice business started sharing the spots with companies and employees in the same building. Once the trust was established, they started sharing the spots with companies and employees in the building next door, or in the buildings surrounding that building.

“That’s where we built what we call the trust pipeline,” he said. “We found it’s very successful. It’s generally in areas where parking is in demand.” 

NOW IN 20 COUNTRIES

Mr Flower said ParkOffice was now located in 20 different countries – places that he had never been near – and selling the software to companies with languages he doesn’t speak. Apart from New Zealand and Australia, ParkOffice can be found in Luxembourg, Belgium, and Denmark. He is also looking to expand into Canada.

This is important because, across these 20 countries, people were choosing to spend less time in the office. On days when people go to the office, they are overwhelmingly driving to work, he said. The other days, they are using their cars to head off to different places.

That requires an extra layer of flexible management for companies and residential landlords. ParkOffice provides that layer through its software.

“What’s fascinating about software is that it can really help scale and solve global problems,” Mr Flower said. “Parking is a global pain in the arse. We’ve come up with a solution to solve one segment of the market that we feel is enormous. It’s one that has an enormous real estate footprint.

“If you were to take the roof off buildings in Australia and New Zealand, you would see more parking spaces in residential and office buildings than all the on-street parking combined. So that’s an enormous amount of space that’s probably lying idle.”

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business23-interview-with-garret-flower-from-parkoff

Customer data platforms give big picture insights

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

COMPANIES EVERYWHERE have to deal with tons of data on different platforms, from customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to customer data platforms (CDP) to customer loyalty programs, point of sales systems, and all their marketing tools. The problem is how do they integrate it?

Enter the customer data platform, or CDP. It aggregates all the data and uses artificial intelligence to make the data more meaningful for companies.

It’s an important tool in a digitised market where customer-centricity gives business a competitive edge.

Tom Treanor, the chief marketing officer for Treasure Data, the California-based enterprise CDP that powers an entire business to shape customer-centricity in the age of the digital customer. He said CDP is becoming important for business.

“A lot of tools are focused on what’s the function that they serve. All these tools are developed in how they manage the data. There is no one tool that cuts across all those tools and allow you to aggregate it in one place and makes that data useful back into those tools,” Mr Treanor told Talking Business.

Mr Treanor said by aggregating all that data, CDP “makes all the other aspects of that stack better”.

“It actually improves the stack by giving more intelligence to each of those tools as well,” he said. 

PERSONALISING CUSTOMER DATA

CDP personalises the data and makes it more customer-centric, Mr Treanor said.

“There might be some personalisation tools that handle one channel or focused on things like email or the web, which is very transactional, but this allows [more], since you’re aggregating data across the whole experience, “ he said.

“I can include sales and support and other functions in there, that are customer facing. You actually get that omni-channel view of the customer as opposed to a lot of these tools that are looking at a view of the customer within a particular silo,” Mr Treanor said.

“To be able to do omni-channel personalisation, having the advantage of that data that sees the customer across different experiences, whether it is in-store, on the web, whether it’s talking to support, then you can personalise the message and make recommendations, whether it’s on the web site, or that support call or whether it’s in an email campaign.

“You can have the information to personalise at the customer level or at the segment level. You can utilise AI (artificial intelligence) to make predictions.”

BREAKING DOWN SILOS

Mr Treanor said companies with no centralised management of customer data, which sits in a lot of silos, cannot manage customer data well. This is critical for marketing teams and for risk reduction in their compliance.

Customers that have used Treasure Data’s CDP platform include the global brewer Anheuser-Busch – which produces beers such as Budweiser, Bud Light and Stella Artois – and Subaru. 

Mr Treanor said customer data was important for much more than marketing.

“What we’re looking to do is utilise the customer data in sales and support as well and across other divisions,” he said.

“When we work with the data teams that manage these organisations, they find it of value and sometimes the product teams utilise the data and can do activations within their product.

“People, sometimes for the first time, understand how many customers they actually have,” Mr Treanor said. 

“There have been cases where all these different systems tell them different information about how many customers they have, so [when]they unify their data, they know how many customers they have and they actually have insights about those customers and a better understanding of the customer journey.”

www.treasuredata.com 

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business11

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