Shams Elevate

We’re delighted to have you all with us for first. It’s an exclusive series of value driven sessions focused on growth of our community. Today’s session is in collaboration with Mashreq Bank and Galabox. The first part will be a master class focused on AI WhatsApp and Instagram marketing by Galabox followed by on globalization of businesses in the UAE with our industry experts.

So without any further delay, let’s start with the master class. you have all been waiting for. Introducing Karthik Jaganathan, co-founder and CEO of Galabox. Karthik is the co-founder and CEO of Galabox, a leading WhatsApp and Instagram automation platform trusted by over 10,000 businesses worldwide. Since founding Galabox in 2021, he has led its rapid expansion across India, the Middle East, and the US, positioning it as a platform for fast growing businesses focusing on modernizing customer engagement. With over two decades of experience, Karthik was a founding team member at Slea and held leadership roles at Tata Teley services and CEI contributing to the early growth of India’s digital and telecom sectors. At Galabox, he drives go-to market strategy with a focus on product simplicity, localizing, positioning, and agile outbound execution. Karthik brings deep hands-on insight into mult uh multimarket expansion, efficient growth engines and using automation to scale lean fast growing businesses globally.

Karthik, welcome you to the stage. It’s all yours. This is for the light. Yeah, thank you very much. Uh and uh first off uh I think the the name for the session elevate actually from the time uh I got it uh I think it was in itself very inspiring and uh the bar has been set very high I guess at this point and especially calling it a masterass. So what I’m going to do is uh over the next maybe 45 minutes uh draw from some of my experiences both as an entrepreneur and as an employee in my earlier stance and uh try to lay out some of the mistakes that we made so you don’t have to make those mistakes again so you can make new mistakes u and um also kind of uh shed some light really on uh what are these new technologies and remove the jargon kind of shed more uh simplicity to how we how do we use it, how do our clients use it and uh how it’s kind of uh relevant in today’s day and age in the way we are marketing and selling to customers. Right? So thank you very much. Uh I think uh it’s been a pleasure working with Diva and team and uh straight off over the last few months we’ve been planning towards towards this event and uh you know the the team has been super professional extremely helpful in putting all of this together. So we’re very happy to be here today.

Yeah. So I uh I spent my initial first maybe 10 years I started my career in advertising and uh and then I spent some time in uh in a technology company called CFI uh really an internet company based out of India early internet we’re talking about early 2000 right 8 minutesand we’ve realized that uh much of our time really was going around trying to figure out how do we drive awareness across advertising and marketing. So I worked in Ogilli, I worked in gray and all of our energy was spent doing trying to figure out how do we generate awareness, how do we get discovery enabled and then you know induce trial and then move the funnel downwards, right? Move people down the funnel. Um in my stint uh at SULEA where we were a local services platform that was connecting local businesses on one side and consumers on the other side. We were again serving like about 70,000 businesses at at the height of of the organization and of course a you know a very large number of users on the other side and we were focused on generating leads for these businesses and again we were focused on generating leads but then little did we pay attention to what they were doing with those leads right so we came to the conclusion that most of our at least 70 80% of our bandwidth really goes on you know trying to get the new customer, right? Which is to go and find this customer under the stone, leaving no stone unturned. But as marketers, we pay little attention or maybe inadequate attention to what happens after a lead is generated, right? So in our earlier stint, we realize that businesses will leave no stone unturned to go and generate leads, right? I mean, it just comes naturally to us to be able to go and acquire the next customer and be able to have a more engaging conversation and so on. But what happens after a lead is generated is what is what today’s session is all about. And um and we’ve seen this from experience. Teams are drowning in messages coming from multiple channels, right? And uh you know there’s no context. Sometimes they talk to they talk to the customer with very little context. Customers can get frustrated answering the same mundane questions and teams are getting frustrated because they’re asking the same mundane questions with customers, right?

So we started thinking what if we could respond instantly what if we could uh kind of humanize this whole thing yet at the same time be able to automate this so that we can scale and small to mediumsiz businesses and enterprises alike can scale and this also happened around the time of COVID and that kind of reset businesses to a large extent where uh small to mediumsiz businesses were were expected to be able to deliver value such as larger businesses and therefore new technologies such as this started coming into play and that’s really how the whole Galabox was created way back in 21. So that much about Galabox.

We’ll quickly move on. Um, and today we partner with businesses across different sectors. And um, this is another phrase that we really like to talk about very often, which is that we all, you know, generate leads. And if you flip the alphabets a 11 minuteslittle bit, what we’re looking to really conclude those is is into deals, right? And um, and today’s session is all about how do we do this? How did we do this?

How do we enable thousands of our customers to be able to convert the leads that they generate into deals? So, we’ve seen that the new path to revenue is no longer the same, right? So, we today see a stranger walking in and uh you know they start chatting and uh and then you know a lead gets created in that sense it gets qualified and it goes out to getting converted into a deal. I think the fun fact is you know we all have phones we kind of we spend we spend like enormous amount of our time on our phones but uh the phones were created to talk but we don’t like to talk right we like to text we like to use the internet so that’s what we seem to be doing with our phones we either text or we use the internet uh and which means that’s the behavior that is 12 minutesbetween us as co-workers or as friends as family members and then that kind of spills over also in the way we engage with businesses. Now we very comfortable texting a business and then of course at another point of time maybe calling a business talking to them. So texting has become the new form of conversation between people, right? And and the and the good part is that when the texting starts and it’s a very asynchronous mode of conversation, right? You’re not under pressure to respond immediately. You can do so at your own sweet time and you can do it in a way in which you can construct your thoughts and so on. But the best part for a marketer is that as soon as the conversation starts in a chat looks like half the deal is already done because we have we know the name we know the number right and we we have a significant set of the context that’s already available as part of the conversation. So it’s possible that once we get them to a conversation and that’s a really that’s really how all our all 13 minutesmarketers have always been talking about for so long right get them to the table I’ll make sure that we are able to convert them so that’s what today’s platforms able to do for us and I mean if you circle back a little bit and go back to seeing how customers were really acquired you know let’s take email for instance right 18% open rate, you know, 24 to 48 hours response rate if you’re lucky. And then it feels like a broadcast. I mean, the obviously the consumer knows on the other side that, you know, it’s not a tailored, it’s not custom for them. I mean, it’s it’s part of a large message volume that is going out, right? Whereas here we see that the message read rate is a whopping 98%.

Right? And responses happen within minutes and sometimes within seconds, right? because for some reason we don’t want to keep a message waiting to be responded to right and uh it feels like a conversation it’s no longer just a one-way broadcast right and I think in that at a very uh intrinsic value that we are able to generate with with these platforms the conversation starts and then it goes on to the next level and I’ll talk about how it can be automated yeah uh I may be repeating this u repeating or maybe even preaching to the here. But leads get cold because leads have a shelf life. They’re like food, right?

They will get spoiled at some point of time. And uh they get cold because really it’s not about the pricing. It’s not about you know the fact that you know we are not ready for them. But when they are ready maybe we are not ready right because like consumers are expecting a 24 bar 7 365 days availability of businesses. So the expectation the bar is already very high and to be able to have people man phones to reach out to consumers or when customers call users be available for them is no longer tenable right and uh as they reach between these touch points as they connect between these touch points it’s very possible that they can forget about this right I’m sure all of us have experiences in some form or other both as consumers as well as marketers and uh like I said, you know, they don’t die because of price because they still haven’t discovered the price.

Maybe they die because of the delay, right? So, this is really where we u we discovered about four or five years ago that WhatsApp is really a very powerful platform. In fact, and as we compare WhatsApp with um you know, with the web, with the mobile app, uh with the call center, I mean, it seems that it’s really greater than all of these put together, right? And think about it, right? I mean, the mobile app, there’s only so much real estate on our phones, right? We are not going to download a mobile app because we’re going to use a service maybe once in a month, right?

So, we are very very careful about what app we download. And the web is of course you know we just walk in walk out you know we just check these websites as as and when we need them right and call center is a call center you know I don’t answer phone numbers that I don’t recognize right it’s just just it’s become basic nature now so I’m sure that’s really how marketers are that’s really how consumers are behaving today but WhatsApp has emerged as a a large platform and in fact this side of the world it maybe is even bigger than WeChat Right. And uh just like how WeChat is to China which is and and you know it’s able to bring in multi-programs within the app super app and be able to serve customers across you know it’s just unbelievable what you can do on that particular super app and that’s really where WhatsApp is headed you know in some form you know ability to be able to have conversations run transactions take payments you know receive payments and so on and so forth. So, first off, it’s ubiquitous, right? It’s it’s like the global south platform, like three and a half billion users around the world. 90% open rates. And that’s, you know, we’ve seen brands be able to convert leads that come through WhatsApp at about 3 to 5x, right?

And uh the close sibling part of the meta wall garden, which is WhatsApp on one side, Instagram on the other, and then the Facebook and Facebook Messenger on the other side. You’ve seen that Instagram is is a very powerful discovery engine, right? And it used to be only for products. It used to be only for uh you know funny videos, but it is also for services for products and for and significantly for everything that you can lay your hands on, right? And and I can see this, right? I mean, I see my battery time use. I see my screen time use. WhatsApp is on top, Instagram is second, and then comes my work email.

So you know what I do with my phone all the time then. So 3 billion plus global users. The good thing is that there is a a nice vent diagram that you know the way where both of these intersect right it’s about 77% of them are already using WhatsApp. So which means discovery happens on Instagram and the engagement can happen on WhatsApp. Right? And the third is uh we’ve seen that the DM rates are you know also significantly high and in fact it’s a younger audience and which is which is really what all of us marketers want to be able to reach out to. Yeah.

So just quickly a few examples from from around the region here as to how some of these big brands have been using WhatsApp and Instagram. Uh Equity uh has been using it fundamentally for conversational messenger ads, right? Which is really bring an ad running through Facebook and move it to WhatsApp, right? Instead of moving it to the web, you move the conversation to WhatsApp, right? So which means you can start a conversation without having to go take a click, put it on a web page, push that click to a CRM and then verify that and then ask an agent to go out and call from the CRM. None of that, right?

It goes a click goes into WhatsApp, right? And u similarly care for right I mean I’m I’m sure the grocery store that we all like to go to they used all the three channels right and one of the things that they wanted to do is to send out the flyers right the weekly discounting flyers and they did that using these platforms and be able to get significantly high subscriber rates as in you know walk-in rates grew and uh they are able to improve their net promoter score as well because then people were able to say hey I am looking for this is there a discount for this particular category and so on right Turkish airlines used it to be able to improve awareness personalized messaging and retargeting with offers so one of 20 minutesthe things that we’ve seen uh is that you know we pay a whole lot of money right in CAC which is cost of acquiring a customer to Google right or to the meta platform or to any of the other platforms right But what we don’t do really very well is we nurture that customer and to be able to acquire a similar set of customers and we go back to the same platform. So which means rinse and repeat we add more to the overall you know the cost of acquiring a customer. So what Turkish Airlines has done here is you know they did this retargeting which means that they built a similar audience those who are engaging with them. They built a you know a persona of those audiences and which means now they were able to get the similar audiences again from these platforms but at a significantly low cost right because they were able to map them based on the engagement they were doing on WhatsApp and and then Instagram.

21 minutesum Vodafone Turkey uh focused specifically on Instagram because they were obviously going after a younger audience and u you know they qualified them because qualification in telecom and we’re talking about a very large mouth of the funnel where you know customers can come in in different sizes and shapes so it’s very hard to pick and choose the ones that you really want to acquire you really want to move them down so the ability to verify validate and qualify these customers along the funnel that became significantly easy when they did this on Instagram. So these are some of the brands that we’ve seen uh do this and I like this one which is this is how we used to be and I can say this in my younger days when I had a headful of hair and much of it black.

This was the funnel that we were obsessed with, right? We focused on hey how do we get discovery? How do we get them to consider? How do we get them to buy and how do we get them to refer and regenerate which means get the next set of revenue right? But this is today P it is dead right the funnel doesn’t work anymore actually it’s what is what what we’re seeing happen is this is like an infinite loop ob obviously I mean at some point discovery is the starting point but discovery to awareness to engagement to nurture to purchase to advocacy to repurchase it’s like it just goes on and on and the smart thing that I’m seeing all of this I mean if there’s a common trend that I see is that all of these big businesses, these large companies that we just saw, right, they use this so effectively, right? I mean, it’s it’s almost like what that was affordable to a few is now become available to many, right? We kind of we are in this age where we are able to democratize some of these tools and technology and the knowhow that only the large companies had and we able to today be able to dissect it and be able to use it for businesses across different sizes including small to mediumsiz businesses.

Yeah. So very smartly they’ve they’ve been able to reduce acquisition costs. They’ve been able to increase their conversion rates and somehow it’s not magical. It is all well thought through right somehow they were able to bring this customers back somehow able to get similar customers you know to come and consider them so this is a very fascinating part of the of the curve that we see and that’s really when we realized that the the WhatsApp Instagram are such powerful tools because what they’re not is a distraction they’re not a distraction right they’re sitting in you they’re sitting inside your phone and we do this day in and day out you know with with you know with with our telephones, with our mobile phones, and they’re right there helping businesses get to you and helping us get to the businesses who really what we’re looking to uh see. Right.

Right. So, I think the cost of repeating SMS, email, very analog, very archaic, right? Uh hard to measure, you know, hard to be able to even track what’s happening. It’s like we just do a blast and then we hope something happens both in SMS and email. But that’s not the case there. And customer churn rates are also customer acquisition costs are high. Customer turn rates have become high. And we we’ve also seen that you know customer uh attention span is so low, right? I mean they they’re kind of they have very little time. They’re restless all the time and which means we have only a very short window to be able to gap get their attention.

So yeah, so I think uh in a in a nutshell, this is what these platforms are doing for us today, right? They qualify leads instantly. They’re able to have zero context loss, right? Never miss a follow-up, be able to offer an unlimited pipeline capacity. So, and the last of course is is you know where the counter is open 24 by7 for lead closures. Yeah.

Okay. So, moving on. Uh I want to talk a little bit about AI and automation. Um back in my company, we we started automation as a way in which we said, hey, how do we get businesses not to do the same mundane tasks in such a manner that people are freed up to be able to do what they can do best, right? In whatever way that works for them. And uh so we started with what is called a rule-based automation right which is you know you just say if then you know make sure that if this customer comes and if they say this please say this right which is really how I would behave when a prospect walks to me or an existing customer talks to me right so we built these engines and we built a lot of templates across different categories and sectors for and for industries and we got our businesses customers to be able to download these templates these workflows and they started using it Then they realized that lo and behold, yeah, it was saving a lot of time. It was making their team members significantly productive, right?

Um but what and what they were able to do is is exactly that, right? Which is move from chaotic inboxes, slow replies, leads slipping away, each person saying whatever they feel like, right? their replies are sitting in their personal phones whereas the customer is talking to them and then uh when if they move out of the company or if they quit the company or for if they’re on leave all of the entire conversation walks off with them. So from there and they were today able to centralize all of these conversations these responses to customers.

So messages were organized, they were instant, personalized and every lead was captured, right? Yeah. So traditional automation is how then we said hey the traditional automation is really you know it’s still hard because you still have to write these rules right and rules can be subjective. Now who are we to write these rules and say this is how they will hold you know invalidity. So we said u no there’s a way in which we can do this with AI and obviously there’s there’s significantly a lot more that we can do than with rulebased engines. So we said it should be conversational right because that’s really how people talk to people. Nobody talks to each other saying would you like to go for dinner say yes or where would you like to go for dinner what kind of food would you like to eat? We not talking to each other with menus, right? Saying press one if you want to eat uh whatever, right? Pizza or press two if you want to eat something else. I think we talk like I’d like to eat, I’d like to go out for dinner. So, it has to be conversational.

It has to understand intent and it has to adapt. It has to keep learning and it has to adapt. And we said how could we do this right if we are dealing with like I don’t know I don’t know a few hundred categories right in different languages right it could be an existing customer it could be a new customer it could be uh somebody complaining it could be somebody I don’t know complimenting it could be somebody asking for a doubt not really interested to buy right now but maybe consider it later so the ambiguities and the variables were so many and we said you know would we be able to pull this off but looks like today’s technology and as it grows every quarter we see a new generational change happening in AI it’s possible right and that’s really how we started injecting uh you know AI into our into conversations and therefore the the best part is that these conversations that are all AIled are happening on WhatsApp and Instagram they’re not happening they don’t have to happen on the web. They’re not happening on a mobile app that they have to download. So, as far as a consumer is concerned, there’s no behavioral change. They just continue texting the business like they typically text anybody else. Uh or go to Instagram and, you know, click on a link like they would do for any other platform, right?

But actually, what’s happening is, you know, they don’t realize, but all of this automation is happening to them along, you know, with them uh and for the business to be able to use that. So yeah, I have a couple of videos. I think I’ll see if I can. Yeah, I mean this is uh I I must say this which is really that you know bad AI replaces conversations with scripts. Yes, people get confused with uh uh you know if you don’t have clarity of what is a rulebased automation and what’s a real conversational automation. we tend to go back to writing scripts like how we write a sales script let’s say a script for a agent when they receive a call u good AI has better conversations than most humans absolutely in fact uh I was listening to a podcast last week and u they say that L1 support which is customer support uh coding uh sales development activity such as pre-sales development activity all of these three things already have super product market fit. You don’t need to think, hey, will it work? Right? AI can do a great job in being able to prospect a customer today than most human beings can, right? I mean, AI can figure out that I’m here at an event and it can figure out that, you know, I’m speaking at this event. Maybe somebody who’s trying to sell to me is impossible for me to expect that they would know all of this information. But because AI can go scan LinkedIn can figure out what’s happening in my life and and actually have a far smarter conversation with me, right? And that we already seeing that happen here.

So well, we designed the conversation flow and we train the AI on our best responses, right? And uh we’ve seen this in our own organization where actually we just fed our tool with some of the best sales conversations that we’ve had, some of the best customer success conversations that we’ve had. And it’s just miraculous how it’s able to train itself and be able to come up with the best responses. And then what we do now is we learn from those responses and and you know things just get better and better. Yeah.

Right. Um so this is a an example of uh Bazine, you know, in our office who’s trying to book um for a plan, you know, he’s planning a holiday, a vacation, right? And then uh he says he’s going on a friend’s trip to Dubai and all of this conversation is just happening without any rules. It just says I want to go from M Mumbai and this is kind of my 32 minutesbudget and u and this is the agent this is the AI agent talking to right and say so for for Dubai typically a package is starting 50,000 rupees because you’re from India so he says oh my budget is 40,000 rupees you know we are Indians right you say if it is 50,000 I want it for 40,000 so how can you customize it so we’ll tailor your Dubai trip you know it’s it’s kind of having a back and forth conversation And it’s hard for Vasim to know that he’s talking to a, you know, to an AI agent, right? Of course, what what we what you what’s happening really is that we’re in a era of co-pilot, right? We’re not in the era where I can just let the captain, you know, just walk off to the washroom and the flight is still flying. Maybe it’s happening today, right, in airlines. But uh coming back jokes apart we are in a co-pilot era right so what this is happening is that you know there is a human agent right and of course if it’s an inquiry that is coming uh the human agent can go out and be able to kind of take control of that inquiry but they don’t want to do that because they can do better things what the agent the AI agent is doing is that it’s really verifying validating setting the right context and I’m truly figuring out that this is worth my boss’s time. Right? So it’s like a co-pilot working to ensure that you know only what is really relevant what is what benefits your time comes to the agent the human agent right and when we also built it in such a manner that if when the AI agent fails at some point it stutters you know it kind of hallucinates before it starts to hallucinate before it starts to stutter you know exactly when the AI agent’s role is over and then the it shifts back to the human agent Right? And the other way around is also possible that the human agent has done all of these conversations and the Agent is already learning figuring out oh this is really how I should engage with this customer and with such other customers and for such other requirements so that it learns and then it gets better and better right so by really by calling it a co-pilot we are training this AI agent to get better and better over time right sure so speed um and personalization right um all of it which is like you know in chemistry we have the catalyst the AI is the catalyst and then so as long as there is speed and there’s personalization and there’s AI enabling whole thing we’re able to see 3 to 5x conversions right so while the funnel was something that we saw you know earlier on um this is really how we see the whole marketing pieces coming together, right? So there is, you know, we are constantly worried about capturing the right lead and many of them and making sure that we are qualifying this lead, we’re nurturing this lead and we are focused on of course converting this lead. So it’s possible that you know you know we we may fail at any of these four steps right as marketers but then what we’re trying to focus today is you know how do we get WhatsApp and Instagram? How do we get this social engagement to start conversations right with the right customers of course? How do we get them to share the right intent and so that we are able to make sense of it without any manual screening? Manual screening is is quite obvious but then it cannot be scaled. It fails all the time. We’ve seen that right? How do we get the how do we get nurturing done which is uh nurturing engagement you know these are synonyms really but how do we remain top of mind so that even if they’re just considering today and may not buy right now and and maybe at another point of time how do we ensure that we remain on those touch points and the last of course is how do we close deals with complete conversation history because you’ve seen in the past that the customer prospect comes for I don’t know like a $10,000 deal but the saleserson has closed it for like $1,500 and you know they’re celebrating but actually in truth they shouldn’t because what the customer was looking for was far higher. So to be able to close the deal at the right value, right? So that’s that’s really how the four-step funnel looks like. Uh we’ll start with the first one. How do we capture leads verify them without friction? Right? So we talked about click to WhatsApp ads. You know this is a phenomenal innovation done by the uh by the meta API where you can run ads on Instagram and Facebook and move the ad to WhatsApp right WhatsApp QR codes are another way in which you know we can we can start a conversation of course if it is physical let’s say there is a you know there’s a billboard or there is an ad you know what of a print ad or in some form you know there is a small poster out there that you want to start a conversation you can you want to capture leads you can do Yeah, links also sit within the website so you can start a conversation. You don’t need to really go fill a form. You know, consumers can come to the website, you know, see the widget and then start engaging with the brand. And of course, inapp advertising. So on Instagram uh we built uh a set of uh AI intent because we’ve kind of distilled all of the Instagram uh traffic to to really realize what do people come to Instagram for and we’ve distilled it down to eight reasons why they come right typically to to engage with a brand right of course personally you know know we are seeing roles you know reals and uh videos and so on I’m not talking about the personal ones when they visit a business page, what are the there only one of eight things that they coming to them for, right? So, we built these intents where uh a brand can really engage with the customer based on the intent that they come for, right? So, this is the best way that we’ve seen that brands are using today to be able to capture leads. Yeah.

So we do this for uh MR uh group uh address hotels. We already uh you know we work for them and uh we help them capture leads on on WhatsApp for the address group of hotels. Yeah. So you don’t need to fill a form. You just walk into your WhatsApp, start figuring out, you know, when do you want to go, where do you want to stay, which location, how many people are there that you want to stay. It also brings a a promo code in real time. You know, if there’s a promo code, it also recognizes your stay from the previous one and recommend the right room for you, right?

Actually, this flow is for address hotels. No, we don’t do gull box hotels or resorts. That’s not our business. So, obviously for data privacy reasons, we don’t want to come back here and talk about that. Yeah. And the um the next one is you know we’ve seen uh how do you capture leads from Instagram right so typically the way it works is Instagram the flow is very different so you you know users go into a particular I’m sorry I’m sorry yeah so Instagram the behavior is a 40 minuteslittle different u so you go to a profile and then you go to a handle and then you see the post from that particular handle and you like something from there and that’s really the way an engagement starts right a lead is captured not by filling a form or by clicking on things you know as a form so like I like I’m sorry I’ll play this again so I like this chair I want to say hey I like this chair it’s stunning great work and then somebody reaches out to me and And that happens to be a human agent all along. So we’ve automated all of that.

So which means any DM that you get in your Instagram profile, you know, we can automate that based on you know the intent that people are looking for, right? Yeah. So quickly these are the ways in which you know leads can be acquired. U secondly we we talk about how do we 41 minutesqualify these leads right? So we we’ve helped build these bots uh AI chat bots that can actually go out and u verify all of this. So you saw Vazim trying to book a you know a vacation right think of it really as a way in which if Vasim’s lead has come in and the bot is trying to verify validate qualify kind of you know build more context to it because if you look at you know in B2B right um or in B2B marketing right so let’s say I’m selling software to a business now most likely I’m going to be able to connect with that particular business either on email, Slack, Microsoft Teams of course or on LinkedIn, right? So which means I have a finite number of places where I can go find a prospect, right? So I can I can find out if they got a promotion or if they if they posted on something uh that could be of you know interest to me and I can go back and engage with them based on the behavior that I am able to see on all of these platforms, right? And the only way to connect with them is of course on email and slack maybe right but in B2C it’s very difficult it’s very different in the sense that I don’t have access to my consumers Instagram profiles right I can’t go to their Facebook profile and see you know who that’s like really snooping around right we can’t do that as marketers right so what we can do is chat with them right and and typically be able to ask them the right set of questions so that they’re able to answer those and we build a profile as we go right based on what they’re looking for at the particular point of time right so let’s take real estate so somebody’s looking to buy a property now the leads have been acquired through WhatsApp you know from Facebook or Instagram now I only know so much that they’re looking to buy a property and they clicked on a particular campaign which is let’s say a location which has a specific price but beyond that I don’t know anything else about that. So I we have to start talking to them right now.

Are you a salaried person? You know what? When are you when do you plan to buy this property? Are you going to take a loan? You know, are you selling something and being able to buy this? And do you know that it’s going to take us 18 months to get this done? So are you willing to wait? So there’s a lot of information exchange that’s that and that can only happen with conversation.

Right? So think of it this way, right? I mean it’s like a a a let’s say a pool of knowledge sitting out there you know when somebody’s looking to buy a property and we know exactly what questions they would ask we know what questions we should ask of them we know the answers both ways for that matter so the bot does really exactly that right it just verifies validates all of this and then um the other thing is it it helps to build WhatsApp flows so which 44 minutesmeans you can you can start a conversation and based on what they say you can respond back to them and the good thing is it it’s so superbly integrable so let’s say uh human agents all of us are used to you know getting information off a CRM right which is a single source of truth all of our leads are sitting out there all our customer data sitting out there so these platforms can really integrate seamlessly with the CRM and all of the business tools such as calendarly or payment systems or u you know marketing you know tools that you use and so on like HubSpot Salesforce Zenesk Freshworks Zoho you know we’ve I mean Galabox is integrated with about 50 plus such software and what I mean to say is that the it’s both ways connectable so which means you can integrate so uh you know a lead comes in it gets verified it goes sits in the CRM right and similarly on on Instagram like we said We set up and train these AI intents to identify and automate all of these comment replies so they can also go and sit in the CRM. Yeah.

So this is really how we help our customers build these AI agents, right? So it’s a it’s a very it doesn’t you know we don’t need to be you know technically qualified to do this. You don’t we don’t need an engineering degree to be able to do this. Right? So we help them build a bot in just a few minutes and and once a bot gets built, you know, we also help them kind of train these bots by adding information that you’d like to add, right? It could be a PDF, it could be videos, it could be PowerPoint presentations or it could be scripts that you’ve given to your sales agent.

So anything that you want to upload can be uploaded into that and the bot gets built and it starts talking to customers. Right. And the third part is really nurturing. So how do we do this multi-touch campaigns really which is uh okay so I’ve I’ve come in I have shared my requirement for an apartment and you have you have been able to engage with me over time but then I’m also looking at other things right I’m looking at other apartments I’m looking at other maybe other locations other builders developers so you’re out of my sight so I’m you’re out of my mind So it means you know it’s possible that eminently now that you can actually be able to be in their consideration set for a significantly longer period of time. One is to be able to do bulk broadcast, right? We can create personas of customers who exhibited exact behavior, right? Those who looked for this property in this particular location. So which means they become a cohort of customer numbers that you can reach out to and uh and you can do personalized broadcasts. So you know Richard gets hi Richard Sana gets hi Sana Dana gets hi Donna. So it’s not just sending one to many right the second is u we do uh we enable something called drip marketing which is really like uh like I think of it the analogy I have is of a sniffer dog. It won’t leave you till you act on it, right? It won’t leave you till you pet the dog. So in this case um what it does is you can create um you know you can create these campaigns in such a manner that till the person responds you know in some form you know these messages can go to them. Uh of course care to be taken you know it’s not it’s not a you know it can create a lot of nuisance value. So which means that we we have a way in which we advise our clients to be able to use it carefully. But it’s a very powerful tool. So you run a campaign and then you run this drip marketing campaign. So you’re in touch with them on an ongoing basis. You can update them on status and so on. Or the other thing is that they have come in through some other source. You know they came in through Facebook, they came in through Instagram or any of the other platforms like we saw some time ago. and you can continue doing the bulk broadcast and RIP marketing from here on right so it’s like like I said it’s the loop right so they came from some platform we are doing something with them at this point or you can start using this tool at this point as is as well right and um the third one is uh automated agent assignment which is that you can set rules and say you know if this lead comes from this particular whatever geography right or this particular domain area then it goes to a particular set of team members and so on. So, so it’s it’s just beautiful when you think about it this way, right? So, you run these campaigns, leads come in, then you remind them, you know, drip marketing, then you assign it to your agent in any way goes and sits in your CRM. So, there’s no lead lost, right? And as these conversations are happening, you know, these are not personal conversations happening from individual mobile phones. These are conversations that are completely visible to the people whom you know to whom it matters.

So which means as a manager I know exactly what conversations are happening with the customer that my agent is doing. I can run I can run multiple analytics such as you know what’s the meanantime to respond, what kind of uh you know time my exact you know one particular agent took, what’s the NPS, what what’s the quality score and so on and so forth. Yeah.

And the last of course which is all of us love this which is how do we close deals faster with greater visibility context and so on. So the shared team inbox is really the u all agents who are sitting in you know irrespective of where they are right they could be geographically elsewhere they could be working from home but really they all part of one shared inbox right it’s like an inbox but shared between all of us.

So that’s really the way in which customers are able to talk to these agents, right? And then whoever whichever agent is available at that point of time can actually start the conversation, continue the conversation with the customer or they can actually go out and claim a conversation that is sitting out there in the CRM, right? All from the common inbox.

Uh yeah, close faster with Genai. We talked about that. And WhatsApp payments of course are uh available in a few countries. I think it’s only a matter of time that it’s going to come into the GCC as well. Uh but we’ve seen this across countries where WhatsApp payment is now a reality where you can have a conversation, you can do a lot of things and you can finally pay. It just sits like in India for instance it sits on the UPI network. So as you pay it draws from your bank account and pushes it back to the other person’s bank account.

So I it’s lead to deal and more right. So it’s unified inbox that combines. So in the case of Galabox, we’ve added uh we’ve imagined a world where all of these conversations, you know, not just WhatsApp and Instagram, we’re also working on other platforms as well, such as uh AI, voice, right? Even text messages because in some countries text is still a very powerful platform like in the US for instance. So all of these platforms, conversations that come in as an agent, I should be able to see it all in one place, right? so that I’m able to then start the conversation or continue the conversation then.

Yeah. So we kind of help our businesses do AI rewrite all of the features that typically that we have all gotten used to thanks to using chat GPT for the last few at least couple of years now. Right? So it can translate, it can u you know it can give you a summary of a conversation between two people. It can rewrite, it can check the tone, it can check your grammar, right? Because the last thing you want is a customer looking at a grammatical error or wrong English or wrong, you know, a wrong language for that matter. Yeah. Okay. So uh I quickly want to uh walk you through uh you know a live demo really something that we that we are working on at this point of time.

So sorry. Yeah. So this is really how uh we we are imagining the platform to emerge kind of evolve over the next few months. And we see this like a typical dashboard that you would you know that you would like an agent to see that this is the number of conversations that have come in. These are active leads that the conversations have actually brought down to and this is the current conversion rate and this is the efficiency right and these conversations have come from WhatsApp from Instagram from AI voice calling right and this is kind of the status where there is a lead qualifier agent that is active and that is actually gone out and verified the lead.

There is a interest bot that is verified not only verified but is actually added more value to that particular lead. there is a scheduleuler bot where let’s say I I’m looking again I’m looking for a property and I want to be able to go and see the the site and I want to go visit this Sunday right so it’s really coming down to fixing an appointment and it could be as as I mean it’s similar to I want to go for a manicure or a pedicure so there’s an appointment there so in services business time and skill is what they’re selling so which means an appointment can be fixed so that’s a scheduleuler bot and then there is a follow-up bot Yeah. And uh these are the conversations that uh Yeah. So this is the dashboard. These are the conversations that you will see that are coming from multiple channels. And these are the contacts that have come through these channels. And this is the pipeline of what’s happening to each of these leads as they’ve come in. and uh how many of these AI agents have been effective, how many of them are working for and what what needs to be done to be able to make them more effective and what’s the analytics of all of that’s happening right and the channels are WhatsApp, Instagram, voice calls and maybe a couple more in the coming months but this is how you know we see our industry moving towards yeah so we are seeing this as a way in which what was really WhatsApp WhatsApp automation or Instagram automation or just WhatsApp conversation is now moving from that to how do we use these platforms to be able to build pipeline to be able to close deals faster. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Very quickly, uh, some of our clients, uh, you know, some real case studies that we’ve seen and we can obviously, you know, we’ve got the permission to be able to talk about this. So, we’ve seen that Medon pharmacy the pain point was they were rapidly expanding across multiple branches. uh customers were not able to find you know they were they were finding it hard to locate a branch right it’s a good business problem for a pharmacy chain and uh there were discounts but the discounts were not centralized so each store had its own way of giving out discounting and feedback collection was inconsistent right so typical growth problems and as they scale up we saw that these were problems that they had and how we help them is we help customers discover the nearest branch through WhatsApp because location has got shared so which means you can get that u automatically assigning them to the right location centralized broadcast for discounting and post visit feedback again went back on WhatsApp so they can give us you know an ability to share their experience at the particular store so that’s with Medon uh we work with Forbes Middle East um so this is the events arm of Forbes so what they is they run multiple simultaneous events across the region but they that created a lot of fragmented registrations delayed payment follow-ups and agents were struggling to keep up with high volume inquiries because there were like I think 22 events that were run at one point of time so it’s impossible for an agent to be able to know exactly what each of these 22 events were all about right so how automation is helping them uh with AI is a dynamic registration form instant payment requests based on selected events. So they don’t really have to apply expensive human talent to go out and follow up for payments. You know that’s also an embarrassing question conversation to be had. Uh thirdly, realtime notifications for successful failed transactions. So which means customers know that they paid that they’re ready that they’ve got a confirmation and of course bilingual support uh given the region for all regional audiences. So this is another very powerful case study that we that we see here. The third one is uh uh in education with uh with the culinary arts school. The the pain point was manual marketing messages. They just couldn’t scale up and uh the team lacked tools to nurture leads through the enrollment journey because what happens is students typically you know they evaluating multiple schools sometimes evaluating multiple professional careers and there’s also a parent involved in some cases. So which means there is a lot of touch points there and u and that just means that the lead time to closure is also longer. Yeah. So drip marketing campaigns nurture students from inquiry to enrollment automatically. AI answers most of the questions that you know the students had and click to WhatsApp ads you know captured interested leads instantly so we know exactly what they were uh looking for.

uh in insurance uh kqatar insurance company legacy systems you know there was certain practices that they were not able to change of course they change with a lot of difficulty teams use personal WhatsApp accounts because you know that’s really how you know all of us claimed that we have a very personalized rapo relationship but that’s really not true right we can build rapo relationship as brands and we help them with a centralized team inbox uh with AI qualifying and rooting leads 24 by7 CRM integration provided the right leads to go sit there you know so that the agents can still be able to talk to them and uh yeah this is an interesting one this official metaverified kind of gives lends a you know an element of trust that you know who you’re talking to it’s not just an agent who’s masquerading as a company but really the company who’s talking to me at this point yeah so that’s kind of the uh case studies uh very quickly There’s a checklist for what you need to get before you jump on this. It’s not, it may look like a lot, but it’s uh pretty simple. Uh my team’s here uh so they can help if if you really want to talk about if you want to know more about what you need to do to be able to get ready to get on to WhatsApp and Instagram. Um yeah, so there are some requirements that Meta has which is really to establish some bonafideess about the business. uh you need a phone number of course without which no you can’t and there are some access and permissions uh with your Facebook manager ID and of course uh what we’d also like to know is what’s your business goal how do you plan to you know take this journey forward you know what KPIs are you chasing so that you know we really know at least the right expectations are set by the platform by us yeah great so a little bit about us uh we serve about 10,000 customers worldwide um and uh you know we’ve always focused on automating conversations so which means every day we are able to automate like 200 million conversations uh we work with 150 plus partners we have offices in the Middle East I mean in UAE US and India and u the channels we support of course are Instagram and soon AI voice as well we serve very proudly some of these very Proud to be part of these brands. Uh Shams Free Zone of course, Mr. Non, QIC.

Uh yeah, we talked about Ford, Shurukq here and uh Sautes and so on. Yeah. All right. This is this is a this this is where it gets very interesting. So we have an exclusive offer for Shams Free Zone members and uh we’ve worked along with the team to be able to offer a plan that you can try. I mean, typically all of our subscription plans are only paid for and you can go to a website and see that. But we’ve created an exclusive plan for Shams where you can try this for free for 12 months and you get to capture leads. You’re able to you can respond, qualify, you can connect your text stack and you can re-engage customers. Yeah.

So, yeah, you can scan this and our team is here to help you, you know, if you do it different. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Let me take this one. The second person is downstairs. I just just introduce and just say uh he’s on the way. Just Yeah. Good morning. code. Oh, all right. All right. VIP. The VIP tables. Look. Hi. Good. How are you? Really?

No. So, we’re waiting for you. So, then we ask people to like coffee. I think I’ll There you go. I’ll just skip this for you. Sure. This is the live I’ve been waiting now. My call is done. Really? Oh dear. Okay. And Vak has been trying to reach you. Just wait for No, I called Vay back. I got a call from Vayak. No worries. Just settle down. Please have a seat.

You like a coffee? I just had Thank you. How was it till now? It was good. We start with the master class. I’ll introduce you this one. Hey, how are you? Good to see you. Yes. All of you. I’ll come in. Uh, how is the session? How is the not any intro? Huh? No. Nobody. Yes. M. Turn out a little bit lesser than expected from last time. Remember last time was cho block was very crowded.

I don’t know what happened this time. Hi everyone again we will start the next session. I would like for everyone to have a seat please. Next we have a session by Mashreq our banking partner who will be sharing sorry we will be having the next session by mash our banking partner who will be sharing some exciting insights the the session will be led by Mr. Rajarbati, head of product business banking at Mashreq. He’s a seasoned banking and fintech professional with extensive experience in the small and medium enterprise segment across South Asia, Southeast Africa, and the Middle East.

With a career spanning close to two and a half decades, he has held senior leadership roles in multinational banks and authentic organizations. Covering business leadership, strategy, sales and distribution, product development and digital transformation. A career at city banker, Raj strongly believes in the transformative role ofSMEs in driving economic growth and has been a frequent speaker at panel discussions and webinar focused on SME ecosystem.

Please, Mr. Raj, welcome to the stage. Thank you. Yeah. Is this the mic? Yeah, that you can you need this one. Okay. Uh, this is the one. Which one? Right. Yeah. Good morning everyone. and it’s close to afternoon. So I promise to make this interesting. Um and thanks for the kind introduction. So what I’ll try and do is I’ll try and keep it less towards Mashrek and keep it more generic in terms of how do you uh choose your bank account irrespective of Mashrek or anyone any startup company or any small and medium enterprises if they want to open a bank account or choose a bank for their day-to-day transacting activities.

what are the activity what are the indicators to be checked before you choose a bank. So the first slide is where I will spend some time on Mashreq and after that I will keep it as generic as possible. So um me and my team here sitting here and Vinak so all these we come from Mashrek. So Mashrek is one of the oldest banks in in UAE. So we established in 1967 56 years of uh UAE experience and we also have a strong footprint across the region which is Middle East, Africa, South Asia etc. So the reason why I’m saying all these points is that you either find a bank which is purely digital in general which means that they might not have any branches at all or you might find a branch which is superbly traditional brick and mortar where they will have a lot of branches where you’ll have to walk to the branch for each and every transaction uh for your day-to-day banking. However, Mashrek is a golden mean between these two depending on the size of SME. So if you see the last column here we have a full spectrum banking covering corporate bankingSMEs retail etc. So depending on the size and the complexity of the customer you can choose what kind of relationship you want with the bank.

Do you fully want a digital end-to-end relationship with the bank? Which means you don’t want to get into the branch. You can do everything on your own through an app. Do your transfers, do your salary payments, check your dashboard for insights. That is also possible. And as you grow up in terms of your complexity where your turnover grows, your requirements grow, wherein you are looking for an LC or a bank guarantee etc. you also have an assistance of a relationship manager. So that is the reason why I have given you the context of we are a golden mean of the traditional and digital and forSMEs we are digital first.

So this again gives some some more points on what we are as a uh as an bank. Uh if you see the I will draw your attention to this point of 4 uh 4.9 rating here. So the app which we have through which you can conduct your day-to-day banking, we are the best in UA forSMEs. So be it in terms of account opening or doing your day-to-day transactions, you’ll be able to use our app without talking to any human without having the need to talk to anybody. You can do everything at your own pace sitting anywhere. I’ll go to the next slide here.

So this is where I’ll keep it generic addressing your pain points and I’m okay if you want to keep it conversational. If you have any clarification or doubt during the presentation also please put up your hand ask me any question and we’ll cover those. So if you see most of the SMEs be it here uh in UAE, Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the common issue for most ofSMEs is in terms of the simplicity of starting a banking relationship especially for startups. So when you go to open a bank account for any startup most of you startups would have already faced this is that they will ask a host of documents starting from your personal documents which is your emirates ID of course it’s a basic thing because you have to establish your identity then get into the company in terms of its trade license memorandum of association your buyer and supplier list and the list goes on.

So over a period of time what we realized especially at mashrek is that SME is a very wide spectrum. It starts from $10,000 a year to it can go up to 100 million US dollars also all of them it is micro small and medium enterprises. So I cannot have the same yard stick for asking requirements in terms of opening a bank account because startups you might not even know who your buyer and suppliers are yet. You have started a company, you want to figure it out as you go along, right? So which means you are a startup company with a very basic turnover in the initial years and after that you might be on a growth path. Then we put all our heads together saying that if we divide the customers of SME into very smallSMEs can we do an express account opening and these are the pain points which we have looked at saying that for example here in UAE we also see that most of the banks ask for a CV saying that what is your previous experience where all did you work uh what is your pre what is your experience in terms of starting a uh a service company so most of them don’t even have it right so these are the common pain points which we have observed and which we have simplified. Just take a 30 seconds to go through this. Tell me if there is any other point which you face other than this which you want to share with us.

Non-resident is one. Okay. Anything else? Any other pain point which you face? This normally covers 95% of the pain points which we see. But is there anything which is specific in your own experience that you have faced? Yeah. Minimum balance. Minimum balance. Yeah. Excellent. Then okay. Anything else as a startup? Yes, please. Sorry. Number of transactions.

Number of Tell me more about this business transactions. What about it? Does the bank restrict the number of transactions? Is that what you as long? How how long how long have I been doing transactions with my business? Is it already one year? Ah, okay. Understood. Yeah. So, that has something to do with your CV. For example, what is your previous experience in terms of business? Yeah.

Can you repeat the last line please? Okay. Okay. Okay. 25 minutesOkay. Anything else? Any other? Yes, please. Monthly fees. Monthly fees. Okay. Check discount check discounting facility. Okay. the translation. Understand? Okay. Then anything else? Okay. So, very good point. So, if I have to bunch them into big headings, one is in terms of the charges and the minimum balance requirements. The second one is in terms of the extra documentation be it in terms of passport or your bank statements and uh the third one is in terms of financing check discounting facility etc. So these are the three extra points which we have uh covered here.

Okay before I go to the slide so what we have done was let me answer the questions which uh you have raised just now in terms of uh the minimum balance the minimum balance and the fees. So we do very well recognize like I said that allSMEs are not the same. There are certainSMEs like your manufacturing companies where they can afford to keep some amount of and minimum balances by construction companies etc. They’ll get money in bulk depending on those percentage of uh project completion. So they higher uh you know growth companies will be able to maintain the average balances depending on the nature of business. Startup companies cannot and need not which is why the neo biz version which we are talking about so like I mentioned we have simplified the whole SME into an express version wherein we say that for smaller companies including your startups there is we have created a cohort of customers wherein they can access this neoase digitally and say there is no need for minimum balance there is a version which we have created you can choose light and prime version etc.

wherein there is no need for minimum balance. There is no need for an average balance. Yeah. And the third point is in terms of the documentation. The documentation requirements are a lot. What we have done was instead of asking you saying that give me your emirates ID, give me that, give me this, we have tied up with DU ue Dubai government has taken an initiative of Dubai unified license.

So more than 70 or 80 trade licensing authorities they have already tied up with DUL wherein bank we have created an API with them where I can take the documentation after obtaining your consent directly from DU that’s a 28 minutesfantastic development from the Dubai government we have cut down our TAT it used to be around 20 25 days TAT to 2 days as we speak Neo customers which means the likes of you startups uh and ambitious customers the tat for an account opening is as low as two days that is what we have done through integration with DU by not asking you extra documents that is point number one point number two to the latest point we don’t ask for bank statement for smaller companies I don’t ask you to give me a bank statement from from your previous country where you were there please give me translate and give it to me we don’t ask that for this new set of smaller customers so so that takes care of the charges, the the minimum balance, um documentation, the charges part, ma’am.

See what happens is if everything is free, you are the product, right? So, we want you to realize the importance of because we are giving you premium service cutting down all the flap, right? So, which means that you know I I’m giving you an access to your account within 2 days. there is no minimum balance but there is a lot of u day-to-day administration which I need to maintain to take care of this portfolio so I charge from each customer a basic amount of monthly subscription fees for that so most of the uh businesses are moving towards subscription model on a monthly basis you pay me this much I’ll give you services equal to or more than that uh that value so neoase we have different versions 100 dirhams 200 dirhams per month we are also looking at a variant where if you’re able to maintain a certain balance, then I’ll be able to wave off the fees. Something’s got to give, right? Either I get a balance or uh but unfortunately will it be free?

The answer is no. However, if you scan this, this is where the ads come in YouTube, right? So, if you scan this and apply for a NeoBizies account now, for the next 12 months, for the next 12 or six, 3 months, 3 months, the subscription fees will be waved off as a special offer. uh in terms of tie up with Shams Free Zone but on an on an ongoing basis across any bank I think you will need to pay the subscription service uh to get the value which we are offering yeah so here again the same thing you don’t need to give me any documents I go to DUL and get get your documents efr you don’t need to come to the branch we have also tied up with the Dubai government’s electronic facial recognition wherein through your own mobile you you can identify yourself and uh the KYC is done. So if you’re a soul prop startup, this is the best account for you to open the account say in one to two days.

Say for shares so Sharia what we are doing is we are because they are not covered under DU at this point of time. It’s a good question. So we are doing an API with the trade licensing authorities one-on-one. It’s it’s a technical term wherein we are having have conversation a technological integration with the trade licensing authorities so that if a customer gives consent I’ll be able to get your details if you want to open a bank account with me instead of asking you from them and then it the process is easier connects uh we are in talks with them as we speak. Yeah.

So within two months you should hear something. This is fees. Like I said, I’ll keep it generic. So, I’ll not go through the my product at this point of time. So, one more important thing. So, what what did we cover now? What what is the fees and charger structure? So, before you choose a bank account, the first thing which you have to see is how quickly will the bank be able to open a bank account?

Which means what are the kind of details they are asking? If they get everything from government in terms of the integrations, that’s the best thing. So, that’s a tick mark for you. Check that. Is that integration there? Is there a service promise like this 2 days otherwise I’ll give you thousand right the second one is the minimum balance and the fees and charges because all startups are very sensitive about the charges you should also look is there a variant of no minimum balance for example NeoBiz there is a variant of no minimum balance that’s the second check which you need to check you know the ease of onboarding the fees and charges and the third most important thing is in terms of value added services which means A bank not only gives you banking services, it expands beyond that because when you are a startup, you also want to know how do I manage my day-to-day expenses. So we have tied up with accounting softwares, expense management companies, etc. wherein a startup can have access in a one-stop shop access to all those at a discounted price because you are a mashed customer. So you also check whichever bank you are doing the homework for is that a bank also giving you those facilities value added services.

33 minutesThe fourth pillar which you have to look is in terms of the day-to-day banking activities because onboarding is easy. After that are you able to conduct your day-to-day transactions with as much ease or do you have to go to the branch because most of you people might be traveling. So one of you guys mentioned you’re a non-resident here, right? So if you’re traveling, business won’t stop. You cannot expect to go to a branch to do your transactions. So look for an app, a banking app that lets you do all your transactions through your mobile. For example, Mashreq like that. When you’re looking for any other bank, look for an app which lets you. So what are the three four big things which you want to do? One is pay your salaries on time monthly. So are you able to do the WPS transfers? Second one, your local and international transfers. Are you able to add a beneficiary and make the transfers seamlessly? Which means you also need to look at the international uh transfers and the FX rates. Right? Because FX margins is one thing which is uh very important for you. Right? So these are the three most important things WPS which is the salary payments, local transfers and international transfers.

On international transfers, what is the FX margin? Right? So that is the fourth thing which you have to see which is the day-to-day banking how easy it is. So broadly these are the four things onboarding charges beyond banking day-to-day banking. So this again is a marketing things you can figure out later. I’ll stop here if you have any questions. How much time do I have? Two more minutes.

Yeah. Yes please. We bank doesn’t have the WBS. We bank doesn’t have WPS for investor partner. How does Mashrek do that? They say that we don’t do full SH investors partner. So we have to just transfer manually. Oh, so Mashrek has WPS registration. Uh so you can we have uh integration with that wherein you have to give us some details the number of employees which you are uh in your company. This weird has the same thing but they say for investor partner of SHs cannot offer this. When you say investor partner means what is it investor partners or can my registered I cannot register in we we investor partners we open company we work ourselves with managers we can hire additional employees but we digital banks as type of shams investor partner they will not allow us to configure WBS Yes. So we have to transfer it manually under the some category salary which is for many banks not good for history because they don’t exist.

Okay. This specific thing let me check and come back to you. I’ll ask my team to okay I’ll check this part. I’ll check and my team will take your coordinates. They will come back to you on this. Anything else? How many of you have gone through the NeoBiz journey till now? How many of you have a bank account already? No. Or anyone your business bank accounts?

All of you any mashrek in this neo on this? You have so do you? Yeah. Do you have a mashrek? Yeah. But I was unable to register my company that my employees they want to get loan in the bank so I need to so I need to transfer the salaries through WPS okay and my company cannot be registered in WPS system because I’m registered so ah okay we’ll check that and come back okay other than that how are you generally happy with it you like it yeah any points of improvement works well any Another yes please.

So can a non res open a bank account bank account for example anyone want to take a license but he’s not res and you want to open a bank account quickly while sitting in their home country possible see the basic requirement is that you need to have an emirates ID for non-resident so that is a basic requirement for for a non-resident to open an account what we do is if it is a partnership company and if one of the partners is a resident the other partner can be a non-resident.

We don’t insist that the p certain percentage has to be a resident certain percentage has to be a non-resident. We need to have one person who is a resident. The other non-resident will be able to be a partner of it and can open a bank account. Flexi business bank flexi address is okay. Flexi address is okay. We do some extra due diligence of course if it is flexi we but yes flexi is allowed also 100% sure you cannot go it will take time it is not covered in the straight through route because we need to do more due diligence non-resident doesn’t have an office here then we need to know what kind of business doesn’t require any presence here no no uh residency so we’ll do some more due diligence before we open okay and in your presentation I saw that you are providing accounting integration so Is it any separate charges or it will be covered in the presentation?

So what we are currently doing is that we have a um referral tie up with some of these partners wherein you’ll be able to get some discount if you go to them. As we speak we are in discussions with them for integration also. So it will take three more months three to four more months before a seamless integration happens wherein if you’re a 39 minutesmaster b customer a NeoBiz customer you’ll also be able to have access to zoho cloud etc through single sign on etc. So that is what we are exploring at that point of time. I’ll be able to give you more details. And my last question is that as the pricing plan you showed starting from 100 but on website it’s not available 100.

It’s coming up now. So in 2 months so you got a sneak peek uh because of our exclusive arrangement with Shams. You should wait for 2 months. Uh now if you do it now it’s 3 months. So as a businessman you want zero or 100. If you wait for two months then it will be 100. If you do it now, maybe I have another account, so I do it. It’s up to you. Like I said, I don’t want to hard sell any of my master base.

The product speaks for itself. Now it is free. It’s a it’s a no regret decision for you given it is free for the next 3 months. Thanks. Are you integ? It’s also on the pipeline. Okay. Yeah. Hi. Uh I just have a question regarding the accounting softares. Accounting software. Okay. uh how secure is my account just in case I connect for example quickbook and master how secure is my account in terms of my details and informations and of course you know it’s it’s money matter it’s not just a personal account it’s it’s a you know it’s a daily blood sweat and tear kind of money so how secure is it so when you say secure what is the um apprehension you have in mind because it’s online and It’s Quickbook.

It’s uh from what I know is not local that the software and everyone knows it. You know there’s a lot of miracles happening online. At one point you will just see your bank account zero. So how secure am I with regards to my money in with my business account. If I integrate mate meu with Quickbook for example. Yeah it’s a very good question. So I’ll answer it. Any accounting software for that matter not just big books. Um every bank especially Mashrek we have a protocol on security. In fact that 4.9 rating which you saw is m majorly based on ease of transactions and security also. So we do have layers of security in terms of how can you access your own account through two-way authentication etc. So that is point number one. So we follow an international standard security protocol while sharing information.

Second, the information which we share is always consentdriven. If you don’t give consent to what information we are sending back to the accounting software, we will not share that information. So every time we take your consent saying that there is a bank statement here. If you say okay, this bank statement gets into your accounting software. I’m taking one use case here, okay? Goes to your accounting software for reconciliation because these are the bank statements of the last one month. This is where your ledgers are there.

Each and every account, this can go there for a reconciliation. Are you okay with this? You can choose your own period of bank statement so that it gets into your accounting software. That is point number two. Point number three, your accounting software will not have unrestricted access to your bank account. It will not. There will always be a middleware based on which the tokens are exchanged.

A little bit more technical tokens are exchanged only after the validation comes through will that specific information to which you have given consent to each share. It is not unrestricted access to your bank account. Point number four most important thing is the customer himself will have to be very vigilant in terms of using OTPs and all. So whenever you are getting a link to be clicked or OTP saying that you know you please give this put in this OTP and all you have to be super vigilant saying that is it a legit thing or what is it so look at the site is it Mashreq.com kind of site. So that is a basic level of customer awareness I’m talking in general not just accounting software wherein your money will be safe if you look at where you are sharing your information and what OTPs are you uh sharing. Counting is just a lecture. It’s not funny.

Yes. So the fourth one is more generic. So the third one is the one which he is talking about. Consentdriven specific information is shared from bank account to your accounting software. It’s not unrestricted access. Any other questions? Any other pain point which I have not addressed? Check checkbook. We have checkbooks. Yes, we do. I think first checkbook is free or something like that, right? Yeah, we do. And sorry, there is a gentleman who asked a question financing. Yeah. So startup initially will not get financing. So after 6 months to one year we look at your bank statement performance and based on that we offer a financing limit.

Yeah. How about PDC? Also same thing we need certain amount of uh performance to be checked two months two more months so currently we have a physical debit card virtual cards by March next event when we come I’ll announce virtual cards what’s the minimum balance to keep to avoid the subscription fee you have that already uh 5000 50,000 yes 50,000 thanks We have a credit debit credit to me. It’s not a credit card, but it’s a credit amount for the same card. Do you have the same invest?

It’s a switch. Yeah. So, we are working towards that. Not a switch card, a virtual card itself. to his question also we will introduce something not immediately it will take a little bit of time 6 months etc but we have this on our road map in terms of giving credit one card it’s it’s yeah but it’s not a credit card it’s just I understand you switch and uh yeah uh once I give you virtual card this becomes a moot point for you you can use within your app itself you can use it as a debit or a credit by toggling between those there multiple virtual cards And you can choose the validity of your postcards as well.

Yeah. But tell me something. Is there a use case for it? As in do you think as a room multiple create virtual the answer is yes we are doing that. Uh but I wanted to generally check offline payments you want to avoid because the merchants may you know the hackers can get the information. So virtual card is the best way to secure that particular. Exactly. And we were having a discussion with another bank I will not name who but we were just discussing uh for example for marketing u there is that need to we have the budget we have the marketing spend that we have for every particular month but every time we have to go through the authorization and you know the drill so we were just discussing the possibility and there’s another bank who is able to do that so I wanted to check if you are able to also select the validity and we can set the budget you can. So that that is on the cards now the virtual cards which I spoke about we are introducing these multiple cards so that you can every card is purpose-driven validity and purpose and amount of course and how many virtual cards can an account have four five yeah multi accounts you can how many accounts how many we have how many 16 you have Canadian currency CAD we have CAD we have JPY CAD euro GBP are you talking about that we can see the money or you can open the bank account with this currency no you can open the bank account in that currency yes of course that is the question that gentleman had so you need to give us some amount of bank some transactional history especially Especially if you are a startup for us to give you a loan then we are open.

My friend Ismmail will get in touch with you and uh explain. Yeah. We do online payments stripe. Stripe with a current bank can accept money in Canadian dollars, US 48 minutesdollars etc. But what they pay out to the bank they saying all they is like your house. Oh what is your banks because Canadian dollars I want to open a Canadian account that I open instead of going using 1% conversion you can get money in Canadian dollars transfer.

Yeah with stripe integration because we do online payments. Uh so we don’t have integration with stripe so we have our own subsidiary company called Neopay. So they also offer post terminals and payment gateway both. Are you planning to get stripe is universal because I have clients from China from other countries from Canada from India. Uh not at this point because Neopay is equally competitive across the market. So which is our own homegrown company.

So we stick to Neopay at this point. So, Neuropay, if I receive funds like payment in Canadian dollars, can it go to Canadian uh account with with? Yes. Without going currency exchange? Yeah. Yeah. Canadian dollars to Canadian dollars you can receive, right? Yeah. I’m not talking about wire transfer. I’m talking online. Let’s say they buy a service. Let’s say $1,000 for a course.

They pay in Canada in Canadian credit card, Canadian debit card which is charged in Canadian dollars. When it comes to mash, will it go directly to Canadian account they open with you like multiple accounts or it’s going to go through their I don’t think so. It doesn’t go through same account. There’s no conversion. Yes. Okay. Thanks. See any Okay. Any other questions? I know we in short of time, so our team is here. We’ll be more than happy to address oneonone queries more.

Any last point before I hand it over to Miss Dia? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Good to see you again. You are becoming younger and younger. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for this interesting session. Next up is the panel discussion. I would like to invite our industry experts Moderator for today’s session is our head of marketing DBS.

Our first speaker is Mr. Rashid Savu, director of operations Shams Free Zone heating strategic initiatives. How are you? Thank you. This is good. I could see the passion in you when I met you last time. That’s when when this opportunity came and I said we should sponsor. These guys have the heart in the right place for SM. It has a multiplier effect. Yeah.

Our first speaker is Mr. Rash’s director of operations leading strategic initiatives that drive’s growth as a global media. Since joining SH in 2018, he has played a key role in shaping its long-term vision, overseeing real estate development, invest investment strategies and operational excellence with over 20 years of experience in free zone real estate property development and tourism.

Mr. Ali brings deep industry expertise having personally managed high quality projects and generated over 180 billion in revenue. Last but Please I would like to welcome Mr. Clark and Mr. and good afternoon everyone and welcome to a conversation that isn’t about the future anymore because the future is already operational. Today’s session is not about if the businesses should digitalize. It’s about how smart, how fast and how strategically we can do it.

Before we start the session and the questions, I would like to say that I’m really excited because I’m writing the type with marketing and digitalization as they no longer are separate conversations. They are literally the same. Modern marketing is digital. It’s data. It’s experienced driven. It’s automation powered and it’s built on speed, storytelling, and systems. Every brand story today starts on screen through a platform. through a digital experience and you know the rest. So welcome to digitalization of this system in UAE.

We have experts from the business center industry to customer engagement and to banking and to automations and AI. My first question would be to all the panelists here today. Why is digitization so critical for businesses today? Sure. So the way I see it is uh you know I start kind of at a very macro level and uh let’s say that you know when the economy is growing I’m told that the economies of the GCC are growing at upwards of 5%.

uh over the next couple of years every year. So you know it kind of boils down to you know speed of execution, speed of decision making and being able to get citizens participating in the decision- making and in the progress and we’ve seen really rapid growing economies. I mean one of them could be South Korea way back to let’s say 20 years ago uh as just one placeholder example and uh so which means it’s it becomes inevitable for companies to digitize and that’s really no longer a choice to make right and on the other side the one is on on this side on the other side you know we have the citizens who have also experienced like in the case of you know in UAE we see this I think Raj also talked about this in the previous session that uh you know access to government services now being digitized you know it’s it’s it’s I mean it’s kind of the first set of steps that companies now can’t be left behind of any size for that matter I think the last point is co in fact there was a joke you know who is the you know the accelerator you know in your company was it the CEO the CTO or the CMO they said no it was co made us digitize is faster. So in fact that was kind of a watershed moment in the last five to 10 years that we see that companies have gone really rapid you know in terms of ability to adopt and last point is that services tools have also been becoming democratized right like I said what that was affordable to a few is now being made available to many so cloudbased services based services you know that makes it easier for companies to be able to try something maybe you know fail at it first time and try small and still be able to figure things out would be my answer.

Thank you Karthik Mr. Rashid. You see, we can sit here today and debate about outbound marketing and inbound marketing. Uh, which works best. And some would advocate that outbound marketing, the cold calling, the aggressive approach, the targeted campaign is still working. Others can argue that today the digitiz digitization is the priority. It is uh what’s working.

So let’s not get into that debate. I believe that the current circumstances with the regulations put on the outbound marketing and sales force companies, entities, governments, you name it, to capitalize on digitization. It is not only mandatory. I believe companies extremely require it if they would like to succeed in the uh today’s market. So coming back to your question uh DVIA the current circumstances regulations push us toward digitization whoever is not aligned on the current practices and the upcoming practices I believe he will be in a different world as simple as this I can’t agree more I wouldn’t say he is missing a lot no is in a totally different goal.

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Thank you so much, Mr. Rashan. Mr. Raj, there are many reasons why we should digitize. I’ll go with three. Mobility, choice, regulation. Mobility because most of you, I’m sure you travel at least 20 days a month. So which means if you want to do your business the way you would if you are based out of UAE and not going anywhere digitization is the only answer for that. If you digitize you can conduct your business from anywhere across the world. The second one is choice which means digitization allows you access to the best of everything you can choose from. Digital marketing you can get the best by looking at different options.

The third one is regulation. So now the moment it becomes regulation, it’s not choice. I’m not sure if you’re covering invoicing later. So for example, most of the companies in Dubai, you will have to subscribe to the e- invoicing requirements shortly. Which means if there is a regulator requirement, if you don’t subscribe to it and not digitized, you will not be in business. These are the three reasons.

Oh, thank you so much. That was definitely insightful. In addition to the same question, I would love to know and I’m sure the audience would as well. Uh when did you begin with your digitization journey and what was the first real problem you solved? Yeah. So we start in fact Mashrek is one of the first digital uh banks in UAE when we started. Yeah. For the business banking. So we started NeoBiz four five years ago. At that point of time if you roll back five six four five years ago account opening used to take 60 days. A simple bank account used to take 60 days. Wow.

1 minuteSo that was our problem statement which we wanted to address saying why does it take 60 days? We are not giving money. We are taking customers money and customer wants to open a bank account for his or her uh day-to-day transaction activities. So we started from there four years ago which was the origin for Neobiss and it’s been a great transformation from 60 days to two days now and 2 days number wise it is still plausible to crunch more and you’ll get there just stay tuned on this good luck with that Mr. Rashid.

Well, Dia, this answer you should answer this question. I’m the moderator because you’re leading the uh marketing department here. I mean uh Sha Media City from uh day one we’ve implemented uh a principle in a way that we said from day one we are born digital as the media city. So digit digitization was uh a major component on all our activities and we’ve always uh utilized uh the whole concept by simple frameworks for example to obtain our life uh to obtain the license at charge media city you apply you upload you receive. So based on this kind of frameworks, it assisted us in all the digital work uh that we’ve done just recently. For example, uh we’ve launched our 60 minutes license. So while we speak whoever would apply uh for a license within or from charge of media city he can obtain it in 60 minutes if all the documents uh was uploaded. So that’s how it is playing a major uh role with us.

Yeah we definitely doing a good job there. Mr. Karthik you’re setting the bar very high. God said 2 days. We said 60 minutes. Said 60 minutes. Should I say seconds now? Yeah. You say instant box and partners together. So Shams Free Zone and certain success you played the major role in what you are. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

So uh I think uh what we do is we try to uh at Galabox we try to see what KPIs are we trying to achieve for our customers right and in this case uh you know I think Diva has a mandate that we should get the license out in 60 minutes that uh there is a there could be a mandate for ensuring that uh you know existing customers get renewed you know So these are some of the KPIs that we work with.

But I I’ll cut to what we did. I think the question was really what did we do uh to solve for a problem with the digital right? So while we propagate a lot of these digital tools across WhatsApp and Instagram for our customers actually it’s a little embarrassing. We used to follow a very old method while we were marketing to our customers, right? We were quite ashamed of it and we said, “Hey, what are we doing?” Which means we said, “Let’s do this. Let’s do dog fooding, right? Or pet fooding.” So, we said, “Let’s start doing what our customers ought to do.” And uh and of course, we were also dealing with uh given we selling to customers who want to use WhatsApp. So we were selling to multiple countries speaking who speak multiple languages like for instance in I was in Brazil for a week. I mean I I survived with Google translate you know it’s very hard if you don’t speak Portuguese right. So which means you know the rest of Latam speaks Spanish and then the Middle East speaks Arabic and then we go to the Far East there are multitude of languages. So we were able to solve for this in our marketing by digitizing right by using AI that people felt welcome when they were spoken to in their own language right it’s because you have to do a switch in your cognitive there’s an overload in your cognitive sense you know you have to move from your native language to some other language I think with just one switch we were able to be able to be more relevant and I can relate with that because a lot of times when we are running international campaigns. What really works well is if we are using the local currency and the local dialect as well. That’s correct.

6 minutesSo that always speeds highly and that uh helps us with closing more deals and getting more clients. Absolutely. Thank you for that. My next question was for Mr. Rashid, but he very well answered about the 60 minutes license and how speed isn’t a luxury anymore. It is a necessity. But I have a question for Mr. Karthik. Okay, please go ahead. So, uh, Kartik, I know different AI apps have different features and benefits, but speaking about our subject today. Okay.

Simply if I would compare between ChatGPT and Gemini for an overall insight or a framework of what we are talking about today. who would you prefer or recommend to us as a kickstart and maybe not one of those two maybe a different uh platform I mean I kept my question a high level because I believe you can elaborate more I think that’s a very valid question because uh what’s also happening is that uh there is so much enormous investment happening in this space I’m told it’s $3 trillion Yeah. So it’s like the size of a midsize thing, a big economy, right? So given that kind of investment and uh you know we see that each of these platforms are developing capabilities that today seem superior than the other but they’re also kind of getting on par with each other, right? Gemini because it owns the model, it owns reach because it’s part of Google. it owns uh you know the framework.

So they have their own distinct advantages like chat GPT has become to a large degree synonymous with using AI for lay consumers like us right so you want to rewrite you want to say concise this you know expand this and so on that’s kind of how we typically use but I would go a step further right so a company like Galabox has built its platform and and we are not alone and I must say this you know this is a smart thing to do there are many other smart companies are doing this. They’re building the software on being platform agnostic. So which means we also eventually envisage an era where you would have a subscription with maybe Gemini and Shia GPT. You would have tokens, you would have credits with them and you would want to use those credits to be able to use the platform, right?

So we should be ready for an era where you know you know know people use they have more than one uh AI tool that they would like to use. Maybe over time it’ll also evolve that uh a specific AI tool is good for something and there’s another specific AI tool which is good for something else right and like like we are seeing every quarter is now a generation right so which means every maybe in two years we’re talking about like eight generations so in about a year we we are going to see a lot more changes especially with Gemini coming from behind and taking a huge lead given its reach know ubiquous reach with the you know with the fact that it could touch every chrome user that is also saying a lot of analysts are saying hey this is the year for chat GPT to win or lose right so I think that’s I may not have answered your question but I really don’t have the answer at this point of time because it’s evolving and we got to look for platforms that are building uh 10 minuteskeeping the tool agnostic of platforms because it’s very expensive for us to back one uh and not and kind of alienate the other.

But the way you gave the insight on what’s happening is a great indication for us as companies to evolve faster because of that speed. I mean you you just uh described precisely that Gemini came from the past and today it is competing with ChatGPT one of them will win or lose. So that tells us a lot about thing how things are changing and how fast we need to adapt with the whole concept of uh the digital world. Yeah, absolutely. I think uh you have to either jump on the bandwagon to stay relevant or you know you don’t.

So that’s really important. Sorry. Which are you using? So we use chat because APIs are easily available and not convenient but we’re also building it in such a manner that we always be as possible. Uh my next question is for Mr. Raj Raj uh since we are talking about AI so how is AI being used in digital banking to eliminate errors and ste speed up the processes because I’m sure it also has a major role to play isn’t it does so like Karthik mentioned AI is straddles across every stage of the business life right so if I take the banking use case I’ll take one specific use case which is for example onboarding okay then I’ll take about day-to-day also in onboarding currently the way it operates is while we are still doing a 2-day 1 day uh account opening the customer which is you you will have to figure out the journey steps all by yourself by reading what is it you know what is your company name please upload your so and so what is your expected turnover question answer question answer the way things will operate the moment AI comes into picture which is not far away at all in a span of 3 to 4 months the way you can envisage a journey is you give a consent for example if you if if you have a tie up with Shams Free Zone you have already consented to opening a bank account I have all the bank account the details of trade license memorandum shareholding details I will be able to generate an application of for you show it to you based on the requirements and the details you have given this might be the account variant that might suit you.

Are you okay with this? So now instead of asking we will show you and you just say click or you only change the things which you want to change. So that means AI is going to make account opening almost instant. So that is one use case. The second one is in terms of the day-to-day customer calling which you want to do, right? Suppose some checkbook is not issued or you have any other issue which you want to talk to a contact center person. You don’t need to talk to a con contact person uh anymore. Agentic AI based on the chat bots we have you we’ll look at all the uh previous history and your profile the question which you answer you ask us will be answered instantly through your mobile app itself. You don’t need to wait for you know please hold on all our customer agents are busy come back after 3 days or 4 days. No. Wow, that’s a huge improvement.

Yeah. Okay, so before we wrap up, uh I have a rapid fire round. A quick question for all three of you. What is that one area where instant has become the new normal in your respective industries? We start with you Rod since you have the money. So for me the obvious answer will be business growth which means bank account opening and transactions. Agreed. Mr. Rashid, ask the question again so I can think of an answer.

What is that one thing? One thing. One thing only. Okay. It is a rapid fire. What is that one thing which has become the new normal as an instant in your industry? You want an honest answer? 15 minutesYes. Everything is a new normal today. No. What is that one thing which is instant instantly available and has become the new normal? I believe the the today today’s subject the digital world I mean uh the digital world today is not only paid campaigns on social media platforms like what people might think of it let’s say 3 4 years uh ago the whole uh market is uh changing and algorithms are changing so the new norm is to adapt every day with the whole concept of digitization. I mean you and I have discussions sometimes on daily basis just to catch up on what’s happening in the market. So you know we do something similar, do something better, do something different. So yeah.

Okay. Thank you for that. So we seeing that the what’s become instant is uh is our customers expectations of what automation can do. Uh I mean that kind of doesn’t conform to the definition of instant. I’m kind of using that to to say that their expectations of what AI can do, automation can do, digitization can do actually is a it’s like a it’s kind of hazy in some form, you know, meaning there are big dots and small dots and big circles and so it’s like there are some who are very aware of what what to expect and therefore they have the right expectations. There are some who are not very aware but they they think AI can drop the kids in school which is not possible right uh could be good it could be good too like somebody said you know why is AI taking away all the interesting things like writing and why isn’t it doing my dishes and washing my clothes 17 minutesso I think uh what’s what we’re seeing is that businesses of all sizes and shapes have come to realize that you know there’s something that’s going on right like there is this there is this wave that everybody’s talking about I’d like it to I’d like to do something with it I’d like it to grow my business and obviously talking about business customers and of course you know how business customers are we all business customers when we like something we want it immediately so therefore that’s where the answer to instantly also happens so we we think we are also at a stage where we are evangelizing we’re educating we’re kind of explaining things at length uh and once we’ve explained everything and vjigated them they say okay I want it now so I think Raj said you know like know you said about setting a benchmark right setting a benchmark of 60 minutes for a license has never been done before setting a benchmark for two days has not been done 18 minutesbefore right but in our industry in technology I think these benchmarks are getting created every day and what what helps is that customers make these demands and that kind keeps us honest, gets us more innovative, inventive sometimes, right? I think that’s where we are headed.

Absolutely. I can’t agree more. Like uh from AI to new deliveries, uh I mean, who back in the day would have thought you would have a delivery delivered to your doorstep in 15 minutes or less. So, uh yeah, instant is uh the the new way forward, I believe. Okay. Thank you so much for all the valuable insights. We’ll now open uh for Q&A. If anybody has a question, please ask.

Hello. Uh so my question is with Mr. Karthik. So how encrypt encryption works in your Galabox? So our messages uh business messages maybe business secrets we are communicating with our partners. So how you are keeping all these secret messages which are uh related to turnover or upcoming board meeting something so how you are keeping those encryptions I think the answer is very simple sir uh meta at its level you know make sure that these are all fully encrypted uh and therefore it doesn’t allow for you know it’s like a package that starts from the origin and then it reaches the destination there’s nothing that anybody can open that package Right. This literally is a package. It’s a data as a package that travels from point A to point B. It’s fully encrypted. Uh we are at a at a platform level. We are sock 2 GDPR compliant company, right? So which means you know we are up for audits at any any given point of time and uh we are in we are a VC backed company. So which means we are also liable for um some kind of scrutiny in that form.

Right? But to answer your question, technically there’s nothing that can there’s no capability that messages can be read because these are all fully encrypted by Meta. And you must also know that we work closely with Meta as a partner. But we’re not the only ones. We like hundreds of partners around the world. And for Meta to be able to maintain this level of uh you know trust and uh be able to have businesses like you be able to you know rely on the platform uh I would imagine that they would leave no stone unturned to ensure that you know it’s absolutely safe 100%. Okay, one more question from you. So uh like Mr. Raj told that there’s a Neo pay payment links we can generate and also there are more parties like teller or many other things. So can we uh integrate these solutions with with Galabox? Yeah, absolutely. We’ve integrated with uh stripe uh and with multiple with network with multiple other payment platforms. uh just that in certain countries like in India for instance and you know you are able to India Brazil right these is a very large WhatsApp economies where native payments are now possible because they al there is also a uh a payment infrastructure that the government has created in both these countries for that matter right but I’m told that the UK network is being introduced in UAE as well so I think pretty soon we should be able to send and receive money uh you know you can send and I will receive on WhatsApp I’m not trending. Sorry.

Thank you so much. A question just uh future looking what like Meta Facebook can tomorrow create Galabox because they own WhatsApp they own Instagram. So if I invest with you I have all the documentation tomorrow they have similar products. What is your risk assessment? Yeah, I think this is how a VC would ask me this question. So I’ll treat uh so we uh of course this thought has often you know come come up and uh of course it hasn’t given us sleepless nights but I’ll tell you why.

So Meta is uh is largely a consumerfacing platform, right? It it deres its energies from being able to create and build platforms that are adopted by consumers worldwide, right? I mean there’s Facebook, of course, and there’s Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger. Now, and of course, I like the way Raj said, if everything is free, you are the product, right? So everything is free.

So which means you are the product, right? Because you’re clicking on ads, you’re viewing ads. So that’s how Meta makes its money through Facebook, right? But over time, I mean, if you look at from an analyst standpoint, you know, ad revenues kind of degrowing for Meta and one of the ways in which they have figured that they can monetize the WhatsApp platform, which they bought for like $17 billion and they bought Instagram for just a billion dollars, you know. So one of the ways in which they are monetizing the WhatsApp platform is of course by charging businesses for messaging.

So that’s the monetization platform. So which means you are a business and you’re kind of sending messages to consumers to subscribers of WhatsApp. So you your message has to be templatized. It has to go through a approval process because you shouldn’t be spamming the users. And for the messages that you send there is a small penny charge that they charge you for those messages. So we work closely with them in Menllo Park, California and in India and we have this we are very convinced that that’s their it’s like giving the razor free and then charging for the blades small pennies right so that’s really how the model works for them right so they’re consumerf facing they’ve opened up the API so that companies like us can build on top of the API can build features so that other companies can can then benefit from that and then they make the money off the messages.

Hi, so my question was about collecting payments via WhatsApp. So I got a little confused. Is it possible to collect payments via Galabox right now or not in UAE? you can integrate with uh with Stripe. Okay. And uh be able to collect payments but not from the same screen not on the WhatsApp screen. Whereas in India or in Brazil you can actually collect money on the same WhatsApp screen. So which means you’re not exiting WhatsApp you’re remaining on the screen. Uh but here you can do that by integrating if you integrate since you integrated with stripe you can collect payment and what matters to you of course as a business is that money gets collected correct but then this feature can be integrated with say a chatbot if it’s created on it can be yes okay because there’s another payment gateway called Zena uh they have a WhatsApp keyboard so you don’t have to exit WhatsApp to create a link you can just do it there itself is that something you’re aware I’m not aware of that okay thanks Hi, this is to Mr. Karthik.

So, um a marketing agency uh can how they can tie up with null box and uh is 26 minutesthe platform dashboards and all white labeling? How about white labeling? Yeah, I think the answer to your first question is yes because we work with about uh 150 plus partners around the world and uh we have largely two sets two kinds of partners. One is the technology implementation partners who are typically uh selling CRM or implementing CRM and so on. Then the other is the marketing agencies, digitization agencies, digital transformation agencies, right? They’re the ones who are uh you know because they’re already doing some form of marketing. So what this does is this kind of it’s like backward integration, right? So it the leads that you generate or traffic that they generate, they’re able to show this and be able to effectively spend the marketing dollar, right? So yes, the answer to your question is we work very closely. We have a uh fairly sizable uh partnership team both in the UAE as well as in India, you know, who work with partners.

But we don’t have a white label product because like I said the product the platform is evolving not just with WhatsApp know with Instagram. In fact, we’re working on AI voice. In the next maybe two weeks to three weeks, we’ll have an AI voice beta product available. Right? So that’s why we chose not to have a white label solution because then you know it would be hard for us to be updating that and then we’ll end up having the partner have a very outdated product in in the white label solution.

Yeah. But I’m happy to have a conversation with you. We are available here. We should uh we should talk. Yes, for uh Mr. Cartik. Hello. Um so you mentioned the uh integration between Instagram as a discovery platform and WhatsApp to further the conversation with the client. uh will that integration also be possible with other uh social media platforms for example with Tik Tok?

So what we’ve done really is uh the answer is no but what I’ll explain. So we we landed with WhatsApp because that was kind of the way in which the world was communicating with each other and with the superior features that were possible for businesses to you know move through the lead capture lead nurture qualify and so on right and then we added Instagram because it was possible like you said as a great discovery platform and you’re right in that sense which is that we’re seeing that Tik Tok and Instagram really are kind rivals in that sense right so there are people there are a lot of consumers who are also using Tik Tok in different parts of the world so we are closely evaluating Tik Tok as a platform but it must pass one test which is that are businesses communicating with users on the platform right so if the answer is yes then it becomes part of a road map and then based on the prioritization that we have we add it to that and it can take anywhere between 3 to 6 months for us to roll it because we are we are a startup we have to be nimblefooted have to be agile right so right now it’s WhatsApp Instagram AI voice and then we also discovering that text messages with some level of uh you know uh with some level of uh value adding can actually behave in a way like WhatsApp so there are markets let’s say like the US where they continue to use text messages right but they still businesses still want to use text messages with their consumers but not they’re not able to run these bots they’re not able to do automation because text is very analog in nature so for that we’re building for the next version so our product road map includes these four channels right now but eventually I think Tik Tok yes Telegram is a is is another very very powerful tool so yeah we’ll we’ll have to add that to the road and uh prioritize that again we what we do is we also look at uh the geographies that we are operating in and right now because once you commit to a geography especially with the language and not just the language on the platform it’s a language that our people should be able to communicate with right so today our commitment is in India and in the Middle East in the UAE so we have an office in the UAE and we have team members here so we want that skin in the game so not just be sitting elsewhere like eye in the sky and have this platform in different parts of the world and not be able to know what the culture is, know what the traditions are, know the language, right? So, Telegram to that extent I think will come towards the end of the list. Yeah, because they’re already three of the platforms that we’d like to work on.

uh adding to the previous question, I wanted to know if you have any plans of having this uh solution or working on LinkedIn because it is also a very good networking platform and it can be used to align meeting create more you know good pipeline. Yeah, I think it’s a good idea but uh we have to take a stance as a young venture funded startup we have to pick the bets that we can put in the road map.

Yeah. Yeah. So what we’ve done is uh it’s an interesting question and therefore the answer is is also interesting which is that we picked that we will work with B2C services companies we will solve we can’t solve for all problems right we what we said is we’ll solve for B2C services companies because in B2C typically what they sell is a combination of skill and time right you could be a pet grooming spa and you have skill and time you could be a hotel, you have skill and time, which is really room is time, right? So, we picked these categories because that’s where it’s skill and time being sold. And interestingly, that’s where a conversation is to be had. If you’re buying a phone, you’re buying color, size, shape, whatever, right? You don’t there’s no more conversation to be had.

But when you’re buying a service, there is a you want to know a little more. So, that’s really what we picked and we said we’ll serve services, right? and B2C but B2C services are not on LinkedIn B2B services are on LinkedIn so LinkedIn will not be on our list and one more question um on the dashboard that you have shown earlier in that it was written that um all the conversations are tracked like messages and even on the last the voice was mentioned but in this if this is a WhatsApp calling it doesn’t work in UEIE so what type of calling or voice communication That’s a sensitive topic but uh uh but this is AI voice. This is AI voice.

The messages the voice messages you mean to say. So this is AI voice which is that uh you know today we are able to uh use uh I mean if you’ve heard of companies like 11 Labs for instance right these are companies one of them is 11 Labs. There are companies who are building very sophisticated voice infrastructure on AI where you know the machine can talk to you and you won’t know 100% for the first 10 minutes of the conversation you cannot tell that it’s a machine talking to you right so you can feed all of the information and it’s like a bot is chatbot is texting you back and an AI voice bot is actually talking to you and it can actually have a conversation right so it’s not WhatsApp calling it is not regular 34 minutesIt is a calling. It is it is not uh any of these. It’s really AI voice.

Okay. Thank you so much. The question is that if the customer reads the audio message right now, right now you’re showing that you’ll have text based communication answers, AI answering, but if the customer leaves a audio message saying I want to book this hotel. Yeah. Does your system can recognize it? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Sorry, I I I thought you’re talking about the channels being AI voice, but this is a very simple use case that we can solve for. Yeah. And also do you do right now or you going to solve in the next 6 to 12 months?

Uh we can solve for it right now because uh you know we able to decipher text to text. So it’s it’s doesn’t take a leap of faith to decipher voice to text and then send it back as voice or send it as text. It still has to read it. It has to listen. It has to transcribe it. Yes, that’s possible. So, I also noticed that you know in you know a lot of my friends and colleagues we leave a lot of voice messages on the phone here.

Yeah. We still haven’t thought through that as yet. Yeah. because uh uses are I mean we have a company registered in the US we have investors in the US uh we have a couple of c few customers in the US I’d say but really that’s not been a very key focus market up until now because it kind of we started with WhatsApp and then became a non starter in that way but this year we’re looking to focus on the US and of course SMS is one thing that we love to learn a lot a lot Karthik uh just to have a clarity on the previous question is there any my name is Baharov I am part of Mavian corporate services we are doing the business sector for the UE uh mainland all the free zones mostly uh is there any channel partnership available under uh your company because mostly we do the channel partnership for most of the uh ancillary services with or without uh financial benefits. Is there anything available with you?

Yes, the answer is yes. We have a very channel partnership. We have a channel partnership. Love to talk to you. Sure. My team is here. They’ll be happy to talk to you. Sure. Thank you. Thank you. I’d like to thank uh all our wonderful panelists on behalf of all of us. If we can please give them a round of applause. Thank you for your valuable insights and thoughtprovoking discussions. Can you stand for a picture, please? Thank you.