With respect to growth, we are convinced that we can be a fundamental part of Singapore’s ambition to become the leading fintech hub in SouthEast Asia, Dorian Selz explains. We believe in this ambition and want to be part of it, Squirro's co-founder and CEO adds.
Dorian Selz, how has the pandemic impacted Squirro's business?
The impact of the pandemic has been profound on all of us. And first, our thoughts are with those who lost loved ones, or who today suffer from Long-Covid. Apart from the effects that the pandemic, we can highlight some positive impacts we’ve experienced, especially in the role that Augmented Intelligence is playing in digital transformation processes.
The pandemic accelerated the digital-first (or digital-only) approach across industries and departments. This trend will increase over the coming years, boosting the number of touchpoints and interactions between companies and customers, and creating interdependencies and interconnections that will be hard to manage without the right data and analytics tools.
«Asia has become one of the most promising markets for Squirro, with some award-winning projects»
This is leading to an increasing interest in Augmented Intelligence, as a human-centered partnership model where Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays an assistive role, connecting and computing all available data to deliver professionals the highly relevant information (insights) they need on their daily work.
Over the past two years, we’ve reinforced our positioning in the market as the most visionary Insight Engine (Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, 2021) and have developed quite a few innovative projects to expand the benefits of Augmented Intelligence, especially in fintech and regtech.
Asia has become one of the most promising markets for Squirro, with some award-winning projects coming from our Singapore office (e.g. «Client Insights» for Standard Chartered Bank, in partnership with Synechron).
What are the main developments that will influence your business in the years to come?
We have seen a strong acceleration of digital transformation sparked by the global pandemic. The way that we interact with each other, collaborate, share and consume information has changed fundamentally. Ideas and information are predominantly exchanged in the form of unstructured data. The sheer amount of information can be overwhelming, let alone the complexity due to the format and context.
With more and more data being generated, we have seen the fundamental need to make sense of the contained information and break it down into digestible pieces is growing.
«At Squirro, we saw a necessity for a different kind of approach to working with data, a more purposeful one»
One of the key developments that we are seeing is that corporations are redefining the way their employees find information. They start to adopt state-of-the-art search solutions like Squirro Cognitive Search. In addition, corporations are putting new data strategies in place by developing processes to channel data. They are also establishing a common infrastructure for their data streams.
If we look at financial services specifically, then we observe that the majority of our clients are building internal data lakes to get access to data that is so far inaccessible. We then could connect to these data lakes, provide the required analytics to generate business value.
How would you define and position Squirro in your peer group?
At Squirro, we saw a necessity for a different kind of approach to working with data, a more purposeful one. We turned information provision upside down: instead of the user going to information, the right insights come to the user when needed.
In marrying every and all kinds of data with intent and context, we forefronted intelligently informed decision-making and created a seamless, bespoke insights experience for the entire organization.
What is your added value compared to your competitors?
Squirro marries data from any source with the user intent and context to intelligently augment decision-making. Every organization benefits from our scalable Insight Engine to unsilo, connect, and synthesize all data types and generate highly valuable information.
«Our focus will be on growing our client base in Singapore and also the neighboring countries»
Our Insight Engine is our core, the starting point for building vertical-specific Augmented Intelligence solutions. This creates a seamless and bespoke insights experience that helps everyone in the organization save time.
What are your plans and priorities for 2022 and 2023?
We hope that in 2022 we will see an end of the pandemic or at least a start of physical meetings again. In 2022 and 2023, we want to further strengthen our efforts in Singapore by expanding the local team and addressing the demand for Search & Insight Engine solutions. Our focus will be on growing our client base in Singapore and also the neighboring countries by intensifying our cooperation with local partners.
This comprises our implementation partners who work with their consultants very closely with the business on concrete digital transformation projects. We support those partnerships with training courses and education material to turn Augmented Intelligence efforts into concrete solutions. At the same time, we work with data partners to facilitate the integration of their content.
What kind of clients and which markets are you targeting?
Our Insight Engine and Augmented Intelligence solutions can be leveraged across several industries and companies, with Financial Services being our core focus. Asia is a key region for us, together with Europe and North America.
«We are also experiencing an increasing interest coming from central banks»
Over the past couple of years, we see an increasing interest in banks, central banks and regulatory institutions to incorporate insight engines and Augmented Intelligence solutions to accelerate their digital transformation processes.
Standard Chartered Bank is a good example of how to leverage Augmented Intelligence to increase efficiency in their customer service processes and equip their front-of-the-house teams with the insights they need for an improved customer relationship.
We are also experiencing an increasing interest coming from central banks and regulatory institutions, with some interesting projects we have developed for the Bank of England, the European Central Bank or the Deutsche Bundesbank (the German central bank) to improve access to information and increase efficiency across different departments.
How has Squirro's journey toward being accredited by IMDA been?
When we heard about the program, we immediately reached out to IMDA to understand the requirements for the accreditation process. During the five months of the evaluation process, we have provided IMDA with information about our business strategy, our software technology and our growth targets for Singapore. The evaluation and onboarding process delivered some meaningful learnings for us, but it was well worth it, as already now, we can see the benefits of being accredited by IMDA.
What are some key learnings and areas of growth?
One of the key learnings for us is that we need to be concrete when talking about AI, data analytics and machine learning technologies. When speaking about use cases, we always try to understand first the key challenge and the respective data before we talk about how we best solve the problem with our Insight Engine technology. In the past two years, we have invested in building our own learning platform to address the need for education around machine learning.
«We can also engage more directly with government organizations now»
We have also understood how important the role of data security is for our clients and have undergone an information security evaluation process which led to us being ISO27001 certified. This has been a major step for a small company like Squirro.
With respect to growth, we are convinced that we can be a fundamental part of Singapore’s ambition to become the leading FinTech hub in SouthEast Asia. We believe in this ambition and want to be part of it.
How has Accreditation @SG Digital benefitted Squirro?
Being accredited by IMDA has clearly benefited us. IMDA does a fantastic job of bringing us in front of their government as well as industry partners. We can also engage more directly with government organizations now and the fact that IMDA is sharing information about Squirro to their network helps us to have more relevant discussions on use cases and our Squirro Cognitive Search offering.
Just looking only at our offering of Search technology, we see an enormous interest from a government organization to make their internal data accessible and automate the information extraction process.
Dorian Selz is CEO and Co-Founder of Squirro. Before that, he founded the Swiss search platform local.ch and made it the market leader in four years. Previously he was a partner and COO at Namics, the largest e-business consultancy in Switzerland & Germany.
