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here's your host, Eric Kavanaugh. Yes, oh yes, folks, Hello,
and welcome back once again to the only coast to coast radio show that's
all about the information economy. It's yours truly, Eric Kavanaugh on Inside Analysis,
and we're going to talk today about a very interesting partnership between two companies,
Crimson Logic and MasterCard, all about payments and the payments industry, making
it easier to deal with fees that you have to pay the government, maybe
for your passport or maybe for some report that you want or whatever you want
to do, basically just making it easier. So we'll be talking to Melvin
Xavier from Crimson Logic and Our good buddy Eugene Burke from Digital Strategies Group is
here as well. He's got a lot of experience in the banking industry.
So we'll talk about that, and I'll just say a couple of words up
front. It's really fun to watch the innovation in the fintech space. There
is tremendous innovation, and that's good for the consumers. I used to work
at a bank in nineteen and eighty eight, I think, no longer than
that, nineteen eighty five and eighty six I worked at a bank. I
can still remember the keystrokes black, five, red, tea, now account,
enter in the account number and take the money out, et cetera.
Done the whole thing. And way back then, I mean it costs money
to go check your balance for example, I mean they were that were associated
with everything transferring money. Think about Western Union, right, they made a
lot of their money transferring money from one place to another, and they took
a little service charge twenty five bucks, twenty bucks whatever it was. Well,
now with Venmo or zell or any number of other systems, you could
just being send money instantaneously. Now under the hood, there are a bunch
of different things that have to happen to make sure that's all done correctly.
And that's one thing I do love about the tech space in financial services is
you gotta be bulletproof. I mean, banks are not known to lose money.
Everyone who's played Monopoly knows that fun card bank era in your favor collect
like two hundred dollars or something that doesn't happen very often. Banks don't make
that mistake very often, and when they do make mistakes, well, as
long as you got an audit trail, you can track it down. But
the payments space is white hot. There are lots of great things you can
do these days, much more easily than you used to be able to do.
And like I say, that's good for consumers, it's good for everyone.
And in this new partnership, Crimson Logic based in Singapore, I do
believe, is partnering up with MasterCard and they're going to really do some very
clever work around integrating these environments and making it much easier to pay for government
services and much easier for the governments to track where the money came from,
who spent it on what, and all these fun things to make sure they're
doing their jobs. So with that, let me bring in Melvin Xavior from
Crimson Logic. Melvin, welcome to the show. Thanks for dialing in at
four o'clock in the morning your time. You're a dedicated consultant out there.
Tell us a bit about yourself and Crimson Logic and what this partnership is all
about. All right, thanks Eric for having me here for this show.
Well, my name is Crimson Logic. I worked in Singapore. This is
where our headquarters is. We are a company which was started in the year
nineteen eighty eight. We have about thirty five years of experience digitizing digitally transforming
government organizations worldwide. Our home base is in Singapore. We do quite a
lot of work club in Singapore government, but that doesn't stop us here.
We have expanded globally. We have offices in over twenty countries. We have
done projects across forty countries. Most of them are nationwide critical systems starting from
trade, to government, to judiciary and so on. So with this new
partnership that we have with master Card, we are hoping to take the government
services which involves in payments, collections, dispersements of subsidies to the next level.
So in terms of government being able to pay the members of the public
who are beneficiaries of certain schemes, giving the ability for the members of the
public to be able to have a single platform where they would be able to
see all the subsidy programs that are available, allowing the government to evaluate all
the applications that they come they receive from the members, and also to have
some sort of automated capabilities to allocate funds. And then subsequently the actual dispersement
itself and government money which is given to people have certain TNCs that people are
supposed to the two. So that's where mastercut comes in. They allow the
people to take the money out, spend the money for what it is to
be spent for, provide their ability for the governments track the funding, track
the spending, and then it goes back into the system. It's a feedback
loop, so the government goes back into their analysis to figure out whether they
have done the right job, whether people who are in need have got the
money. So that's more from the dismerscement angle. From the payment angle,
again, governments want to simplify the payments for the services that we be subscribed
from the government. It could be utilities, it could be public services,
civic service. So this capability that we have with a MasterCard allows the governments
as well as the members of the public to have one single suite of systems
integrated together and offer to them. Yeah, and that's a single source of
truth, if you will. That's very powerful. It's good both for the
consumers and also for the government to have a marshaling area where all the information
is going to be processed and stored. So from the consumer perspective, it's
easy to come in, get to the services that you're looking for, be
able to quickly apply, put in whatever information is necessary, and then fairly
easily get your money. Right. I'm sure they probably connect their checking accounts
or some other kind of account to that system. And then from the government
side, it's great to have a partner like MasterCard that can pull all this
data together. I'm guessing it's delivered mostly by API, and so again you
have a nice clean audit trail. And it's also very good, which you
were kind of implying for reporting an analysis, right, to be able to
do some analysis of the data and understand did things work the way we wanted
them to work? Are we getting the people the right, money they're supposed
to get. All that kind of fun stuff is really enabled by this kind
of very tight partnership, right right, you're right. It also addresses the
unbanked population in many of the developing countries, where with this partnership, people
really don't have to go and apply for a bank account and then come back
to the government declare that this is my bank account. And it also avoids
people from misusing the capabilities and facilities that are provided by the government. One
beneficiary doesn't get benefited from two different schemes which are not supposed to be availed
at the time, so that there are many revenue leakage subsidiary leakage prevention that
can be put in place with this consolidated platform. Well, you know,
and you're picking up on something that was a really big deal here in the
United States, especially Calca, but also I'm sure other countries too, which
was COVID relief money. And apparently there were just a tremendous number of bad
actors jumping on the bandwagon and siphoning off millions I think tens of millions of
dollars in the case of California, and a solution like what you are working
on with MasterCard, and the Government of Singapore and other governments really addresses that,
right, So it gives you a safeguard, so you at least have
another essentially wall of security around the money to make sure, Hey, is
this person who they say they are? Should we really be giving this money?
I'm talking. I think it was tens of millions of dollars. I'll
look it up while we're on this call today. But that's a nice value
add for the government and for the taxpayers too, right, because when people
rip off the government, they basically rip off every single person who paid taxes
to that government. What do you think That's exactly right, So it's all
about being able to deliver the support for the right individuals are qualified. So
there's I mean, as you rightly pointed out, the issue is with the
discustment side as well. Right, So when the money is there with the
government, when there's a fund allocated by the federal or the local or the
state, the governments usually struggle in determining who needs to basically be paid and
how much is that amount that need to be paid, So there's a lot
of paperwork that needs to go in, which also kind of pays this whole
process, people are not able to get the money on the right time.
They have to probably queue up and apply for it online and wait for days
and months to to get the money. So this entire integrated platform actually solves
few problems. Problem number one could be the visibility accessibility getting to know what
services are available for the members of the public to subscribe to. So the
problem number two could be the government being able to evaluate test whether the means
and it's out in place for people to avail these benefits. Three is the
dispersement. Four is the control on the dispersed money, whether they are using
this money for the right reasons. If it's given for buying stationary for children
who go to school and universities, they're being actually used to buy stationary.
So MasterCard comes in with they are powerful network of payment terminals across the world
where they can potentially block card payments which have for subsidy money inside from being
misused and then subsequently again as I said previouslyeed goes back into the feedback feedback
loop where the government can actually evaluate whether the money is being spent for the
right reasons or not. Yeah, that's right, Well, let me bring
in a Eugene Burke from Digital Strategies Group to comment on this, and I
just looked it up quickly. It was thirty billion dollars, so tens of
billions of dollions, not tens of millions, billions. A million times one
thousand is a billion, and we're talking. It's just it's embarrassing, honestly,
you know, to lose that much money, and like I say,
every taxpayer feels that into some small degree. But Eugene, you've got a
lot of experience in the banking world, so you know the rigor necessary to
put together solutions, the security hurdles, to clear, architectural hurdles to clear
you have to dot every single I, cross every single te and be very
patient. Right you do. And interesting that the master Card network is a
very very highly developed mature payments network. So I'm curious in the three areas
that you outline, so visibility to the services, eligibility testing and disbursement monitoring
the second. The second and third are interesting that Crimson is bringing capabilities to
master Card that they found really attractive. Can you elaborate on capability either in
eligibility testing or disbursement monitoring that you're adding to the Microsoft network, but not
the master Card network. All right. So when at the time of crisis,
let's take COVID for an example, there was this sudden search of need
in terms of assistance to be provided, governments had to intervene and then there's
an emergency purpose that needs to be put in place, which which requires people
to be helped at that moment. So that's where we are all talking about,
right. So the thirty billion dollars or the multi billion dollar that every
other country went through in terms of providing eight so the governments actually have challenges
getting the services or getting these subsidy programs to the members of the public.
So in an online world, in a digital world, it doesn't actually cut
it out by just going online and publishing the service, but then you don't
allow people to apply for it. You don't have the mechanisms to quickly have
them to subscribe to those services. That's the part of the visibility issue that
we are trying to solve here. So if we can provide the governments with
the tool with the capability where with the click of a button they are able
to publish a scheme and all the information that needs to go along with it
is configurable, so they don't really have to go to the developers program it,
they don't have to have the wizards created to capture the information in terms
of the data points that they need from the applicants. And most importantly in
country Lexingapore, where we don't really have to tell many things to the government
about ourselves, the government actually knows quite a lot about us, our identity
information, our economic status and so on. So we are all talking about
allowing people to apply for it. Why should people apply for it? Why
can't the government determine automatically and then distribute this without me asking the government?
So that is the next paradigm shift that we are trying to help governments achieve.
And of course there's a lot of emphasis on privacy, a lot of
emphasis on security. Once you have a bundled package that we can take this
forward. So that's in terms of the eligibility check and all that. So
moving to the dispersement angle, most of the governments have two challenges that we
have seen. One is the ability for them to be contradent that the money
that they are giving to people is being spent for the reason for the right
reasons. What it is meant for. As I previously quoted, one of
the Asian countries having challenges controlling the money that is being given to children to
buy stationary by books pay for their transport. But they also have challenges that
children should not be misusing this money that is given to them. How do
we control the spending that the government has given So that's the controlling in the
spending part. The second major problem is governments. Usually we try to avoid
or try to control this by issuing special purpose tokens as we would call it,
or it's a voucher, or it's a token, or it's some sort
of a closed loop payment system that only works with people who have come into
that network of accepting those type of payments. So if it's a voucher,
then you need to look for a merchant who has a mechanism for them to
accept the voucher for a service that they provide to the members of the public,
and then they have a challenge of going back to the government and claiming
that money from the government. So master cut comes into play where they have
this vast network of payment terminals, they are able to use the classifications that
they have about shops about establishments, and they're able to put all this digitally
in place with a click of a button. So those are some of the
values that we think we can bring forward to the government with this partnership.
Good stuff, And as Eugene mentioned, the MasterCard network is already very mature
and very robust, and of course you guys have been doing this stuff for
about thirty five years now. So connecting those two environments, obviously it does
take some effort and some work, but I'm guessing that you obviously have a
lot of expertise in that space. Can you talk at all about how you
bring these two systems together. We've got about a minute and a half for
the break. Go ahead, all right. So from a technology point of
view, MasterCard is a well matured company with a lot of emphasis on APIs,
interoperatibility and so on. They already have the products which are digital in
nature that allows cross border integration with other parts of the world and so on.
So we have been developing products with the same thought process in mind.
Because our systems cannot work independently previously from a traditional mindset, our systems have
to integrate with other government organization systems through APIs and all that. So fundamental
linking between these two diverse products which are required to be put together are through
APIs with definite interoperability standards, with PCI specifications and so on. So that's
that's how these two systems come together in terms of information exchange. Yeah,
that's pretty good stuff. And you know, once again, folks, we're
talking about how MasterCard is now in a partnership with Crimson Logic working with governments
around the world, including Singapore, to really tie this all together. And
you know, anyone who has ever worked in government services knows there are lots
of different systems. It can be very difficult to integrate all this stuff.
So to have this marshaling area where you have an audit trail that's very clear,
where you have reporting and analytics that you can run, it's very very
useful and it saves money, it saves time, it saves quality, it
ensures that the programs are doing what they're supposed to be doing. So there's
really just a long list of benefits for having this kind of public private partnership,
and that's what you want to see. You want to see organizations working
with the government transparently building out these systems to where we can all see and
then the consumers can log in, the citizens can see what's going on,
they can get their money easier, faster. That's all good stuff. Don't
touch dot got folks would be right back. You're listening to Inside Analysis.
Welcome back to Inside Analysis. Here's your host, Eric Tavanaugh. All right,
folks, take us to the future. Indeed, your host Eric Kapernick
here on Inside Analysis. We're talking today with Melvin Xavier of Crimson Logic and
Eugene Burke of Digital Strategies Group, all about payments, getting your money on
time. You know, I was talking earlier about my early days in the
banking industry, and it used to take a while for a check to clear.
It used to take like five, you know, three to five business
days for check to clear, and then it was three days, and then
it was a couple of days. And it's getting faster and faster. And
now we have course ach transactions, and we have wire transfers and all these
things. And next up we want to dive into international payments, paying from
one country to another because obviously you got all sorts of rules and regulations that
come into play, and you want to be able to track that stuff,
especially large amounts of money going from one country to another. You got to
wonder about that, and then you have things like sanctions to be upheld and
to worry about. Of course, you've got wars going on all over the
planet right now, which is really unfortunate and quite tragic. And then a
lot of times you get sanctions associated with bad behavior. So how do you
enforce those sanctions. Well, we have the swift banking network, but I
do recall that in the beginning of the Ukraine War, there was all this
talk about Russia just going off our system and saying, fine, the heck
with you, I'll just do it some other way. And of course they've
got other countries going along with them, so that's another challenge. But I'll
throw it over to Melvin to talk about this being able to handle cross border
payments. That's important stuff because you've got you follow the rules and regulations of
the target company or the target country and the source country right right. So
when it comes to cross border trade, there's been a lot of emphasis on
moving information from one location to the other location. The whole idea of trade
is to move goods, right, So from modern location to the other location.
It might be for manufacturing, it might be for consumption, or it
might be for many other reasons like transhipment and so on. But what about
the data that has to move along with this shipment. Traditionally, the data
for shipments have been sent over through in a very traditional sense careers or mails,
or sometimes it's hand carried by people from one location to the other location
if it's within the country. So crimso Logic has an advanced cross border platform
which allows traders across the world, sitting in two different locations, be able
to have this information transfer this information from the shipper to the receiver. So
when it comes to moving cargo or goods from one country to the other country,
the country where it is exported have certain regulations that you need to adhere
to as a shipper and as a consumer or as a receiver. The recipient
country also has certain regulations in terms of import. And in between these two
different characters you have the fundshipment countries. Because cargoes just don't jump from one
location and then land in the other location. It has to move through the
sea route or through the air route, or maybe it is a land route
if it's in Africa for that matter, and it has to go through multiple
stop points or checkpoints, so along the way there's an essential need for this
information to be transferred. So we have perfected the capability to allow these traders
to move this data from one location to the other location in an online world
and allow them to file this information to the destination country or get clearances from
the source country then or at least get the in principle not from the transhipment
countries to allow this cargo to flow through. So that's from the cargo flow
movement point of view. Then what happens to the money the shipper needs to
pay the receiver. The receiver needs to pay the duties for the government that
they have to owe for the for the goods to be imported into the country.
So there's a lot of money involved, but there's no automation. As
we see people still use very traditional ways of being using wire transfers, they're
using count deposits, they probably have to have escrow accounts with the government where
there's a bulk of amount that is blocked as a security. So there's a
lot of trust gaps that has arised out of this, and of course we
have the banking system. The bankers help with letters of credit and the trade
financing part, but those are not link back to this trade ecosystem. So
what we are trying to do with master Card is, let's say a shipper
wants to send a piece of cargo that's costing them about one hundred dollars and
it needs to be sent from one to one country to the AAA to B
and at the recipient side, the receiver from the B has to pay the
person a and there's a lot of intertwining letters of credit, some sort of
a guarantee if you don't pay me after I receive who's going to be held
responsible? So we are trying to automate all this with the movement of the
good. So the entire process of releasing funds, releasing partial funds based on
certain stages of the life cycle are all automated, and at both the sides
you need to have a payment partner, and so somebody has to pay someone
and it has to go through a payment system. So MasterCard nicely comes into
play where they are able to automate this entire process with agrations that we have
established with them from the trade system, so that largely kind of you know,
summarizes this entire ecosystem. Yeah, and real quick. You know,
one thing I've noticed is that phones, mobile devices have a different profile and
are treated very differently from laptops and desktop computers, et cetera. And you're
seeing some real innovation in the insurance space. I think the company is Lemonade
maybe where everything gets done. It's it's like for insurance for cars and things
like this, and everything is done on the phone because of course you got
geolocation data, you have the signature of the device itself. Does that play
into your logic for security and for governance and kind of knowing who's who,
being able to tell which phone it is, you know what version of the
phone, what operating system, all that kind of stuff that comes into play
right, right, So we do have a mobile first thought process in developing
solutions because people have people, especially on the ground, like trade dealershippers,
straightforward is have kind of started adopting and appreciating the use of mobile phone factors.
So the apps that we develop, the systems that we develop are mostly
mobile first, so we make sure that it works in a mobile device.
But that again comes with security because we don't want somebody to take a mobile
phone away and then then use that for other purposes and so on. But
lifting a big laptop or a computer from an office is going to be much
more challenging than just lifting up a device that's like a very small piece of
device. So we do have a lot of telemetry data that we capture.
The apps are secured by the trust protection modules that are available within the devices,
or we leverage on apples or Google's capability to protect the apps that run
within the devices from being accessed. So there's a lot of digital identity comes
into play, whereas there's a national authentication system provided by the local governments that
gets integrated with the systems. So what we are essentially talking thing is about
the regulated space of usage where governments have a strong emphasis on security, privacy
and compliance. Mm hmm, yeah, I'm reminded of the keyfob. Right.
The key fob comes along, Now I can unlock my car from a
distance, and it was hailed as a security achievement or an innovation. But
at the same time, if a bag gets your keyfob, he or she
get is a walk around the parking lot clicking that thing until they find your
car. So it's like these something that seems to be helping security can actually
hurt security. And of course you guys have to think through all that stuff,
right is all the different touch points, all the different checkpoints and these
days, I mean security. Maybe we could talk about that very quickly.
Security is obviously very important when you're talking about payments going from place to place.
A friend of mine is a developer and he worked for Salesforce for a
while in a very special group where they would deploy security artifacts into the system.
And now you can kind of see this in websites. It takes a
little bit longer to log into your bank, you know, sometimes you'll get
like an extra step, like a capture something to get through, and the
reason is because they're trying to keep this completely secure. Air Tide. Isn't
that right, Melvine? Yes, yes, that is right. So in
terms of security, uh, there's there's few dimensions on how we can look
at it. Transactional security, data security, and then comes the privacy part
of it. How securely is the information about me kept by the by the
system? Whoever it could be. It could be master Card, it could
be crimson logic, it could be the government themselves, so there are different
uh. Over the last few years, the emphasis emphasis on security has kind
of increased as the mainstream understanding on how information needs to be protected. So
the governments all over the world are working very closely with partners like Crimson Logic,
like MasterCard to put in place controls, put in place methods and mechanisms
that protect the information of individuals. And it can be at the transactional level,
as you rightly pointed out, stopping people from gaining access to certain systems
on behalf of someone who should not buy right happen. So that's why the
biometric the leverage on the biometric capabilities of today's mobile phones come into play.
Of course, we don't have access to the biometric signature of the individuals,
but we rely on people like Apple, people like Google to provide us with
the validations that are necessarily in place. Then comes to service side security.
Then you have the communications security. That's why the capture comes into play and
all the standards that we need to adhere to isms the ISO twenty seven thousand
and one. They are very strict protocols. And a shift that we see
in the area of privacy is every country has come up with their own privacy
locks, and every country have their own privacy commission data Protection commission, and
those commissions are largely sharing well documented, concrete guidelines that are expected to be
adopted, followed, complied to, and audited. So there's a lot of
protocols that need to be done. And most of this learning is coming from
the banking space, is coming from the military space, and governments are learning
from each other and then trying to make things more stronger in terms of securing
the information. Yeah, and real quick before I hand it over to Eugene.
One thing that really excites me about policy in the nexus of policy and
artificial intelligence and systems design and management is that we're getting very close to,
thanks to chat, GPT and some of these other AI engines, to be
able to interpret policy written policy in different languages and map that to code.
We're not quite there yet, I think, but it's very close to being
able to take a policy from a government and map that over to Python or
C sharp or C plus plus or whatever the case may be. Are you
folks playing around that up yet and what do you think about that? So
there are two paths to it, enabling governments to use AI and also protecting
governments and their systems from the misuse of AI. So it's quite easy for
people to now go to chat rept or Bard and ask a specific question and
then Bard and chart Rept can give pretty much good answers to certain questions that
probably people might take a few years for them to learn through self reading,
through self teaching and so on and so forth. So if I say,
I want to write a piece of code to hack a system, and I
can just go to chat rept and ask for it to generate the code,
and it can just you know, chenderate the code out of the blow and
then put it into vulnerability and then try to exploit the vulnerability that is their
So so the vulnerability part of it is protected. So the difference mechanisms that
are currently in place are also appreciating the use, so they are trying to
uh play against the antagonists with the same capability the antagonists is trying to exploit
the vulnerabilities that that probably are there in the system. So that's from the
security part of it. In terms of the usage of AI in public policy,
a usage of AI in government services, there's a lot of appreciation for
the government uh to to use AI to to help them provide services to the
to their subjects in a much faster, much efficient way. We do foresee
the governments all over the world may not be at the right form, at
the right shape, have difference of opinion in adopting AI. So there was
this interesting conversation that I was having having with one of the government organizations in
the world about how just justified is AI going to be in terms of determining
who I need to serve? Would there be prejudice, would that be a
buyers, Would the AI programs be trained in the right manner to see the
service delivery with the right optics, and so on and so forth. So
there's a lot of research, a lot of uncovering that needs to be done
in the usage of AI, especially with public policy making, but we have
seen a lot of headway being achieved already by certain governments. Cool you,
Gmaily, got two minutes left, but I'll let you take over the next
segment. Take it away. The area where a lot of innovation and there's
frankly a need is personal data protection and protecting people's zone of privacy and how
different that is in every country and so in the next segment, I'd be
really interested to see how if you're doing cross border payment processing government to government,
government contractor to government across the world, you're managing so many different privacy
regimes. I'd be curious to see how you're approaching that. Sure in terms
of privacy as as you have said, as we have discussed earlier, there
are different regimes that usually governments try to apply to and these regimes are are
kind of very similar, but they have their own nuances because of various various
variables that come into play in terms of culture, in terms of the fundamental
constitution of the country. If they are more liberal, they're more capitalists,
are they more democratic? So there are different dimensions that come into play into
how governments look at privacy or personal data. So the Europeans have a different
understanding and interpretation of privacy the Continental United States, Canada have their own version,
Singapore has our own versions. So when it comes to moving data across
various systems, we rely on the party partners, like the cloud service providers.
Most of the cloud service providers, even though they have this notion of
cloud, they do have certain adherances that they need to comply to another the
level. Yeah, no doubt about it. Let's pick that up after the
break, folks, Fascinating conversations today with Crimson Logic about a master Guard partnership.
Or we'll be right back. You're listening to Inside Analysis. Welcome back
to Inside Analysis. Here's your host, Eric Tabanac. All right, folks,
back here on Inside Analysis talking to Melvin Xavier from Crimson Logic and Eugene
Burke from Digital Strategies Group, talking all about this partnership between Crimson Logic and
MasterCard making it easier to pay the piper, as I say, but not
just pay the piper, really also do analysis to reporting, business intelligence,
all that fun stuff, have an audit trail and be able to really manage
the numbers and understand is the money going to the right. And I sadly
referenced the thirty billion dollars that's estimated the California loss to fraud during the COVID
relief programs and that's just embarrassing beyond belief. And they were cross border too.
There are people in Africa somehow scamming the system in California. It's like,
what kind of system did you put in place that you can't tell you're
being connected to from some other nation moving money across the planet. I mean,
that's just beyond belief. I think it's beyond approach. But Melvin,
you hinted at this whole concept of shared responsibility, which refers to in the
cloud computing environment, when some breach or virus is the fault of the cloud
computing company like Amazon or Microsoft or Google, and when it's the fault of
the tenant who is in that environment. And typically the line drawn, as
I understand it, is that if I have a virus in one of my
systems that I allowed to get in through some mistake or some hole in my
security, that's my fault. But if there's something on the infrastructure side that
will allow this breach to happen or that caused me some trouble, then it's
the cloud provider's fault. But the bottom line is cloud providers are really big
and a lot of companies are pretty small compared to that. So, you
know, Eugene had a great story about Capital One fighting them and winning,
but a Capital One is a big company, right, So what are your
thoughts on the shared responsibility and where do you draw that line? All?
Right? So when it comes to the government's governments space or the public service
space, most of the governments have very strict policies that they have put in
place with the adoption of cloud infrastructure. So again, as you have said,
from a small company to a big company capital one being able to sue
the CSPs. It also kind of applies to the size of the country.
So if you're looking at smaller countries in the Pacific, in the Caribbean,
or in the Oceanic regions, they may not have the muscles to go up
against such a big that was providers. So they are very conservative in nature,
so they don't really appreciate the use of cloud. They try to host
the systems within their own in house data centers. So there's this version of
public cloud, private cloud, and so on and so forth. Countries like
the US, Europe, Singapore have demanded the CSPs to carve out their entire
cloud infrastructure to be locally placed and with controls in place. So for example,
for that matter, in Singapore, there's a version of AWS, GCP
and azure that is available for the Singapore government organizations to subscribe to. So
that's what we call it as the government Commercial cloud. Now, the government
commercial cloud has very strict controls that are put in place that are very specific
to Singapore. So, as I previously said in the previous segment about the
culture, the different variables that come into the interpretation of privacy, interpretation of
security is kind of taken into consideration when the CSPs are asked to have the
data reside within the country and and and its own terms, the country's terms
and the country's security requirements. So then then the next thing comes This is
from the prevention point of view, what happens after the event has record,
when when there's a vulnerability exploited or whatever it is, that that's where the
investigation comes into play. The common understanding that we have in the market is
if my application that runs in a cloud environment, and if I leverage on
a run time that is provided by the cloud environment. It could be at
a virtual level, it could be at application logical level, it could be
at any level. And if my application has resulted in the vulnerability to be
exposed to the to the Internet or to the to the exploitation and so I
take responsibility for it. So it's very clear thanks to many of the incidents
that have happened over the last many years with the cloud service providers. There's
a there's a common understanding that is kind of coming to some level of maturity
for professionals to treat each other professionally and then have some sort of mitigation plan
in place to protect those issues from happening. So that's how I see things
are being done in this area. Yeah, it helps to have policy.
I'll throw this over to Eugene. To have policy and then to be able
to demonstrate to auditors and regulators and government entities and your colleagues how that policy
is implemented. And as long as you have something like that in place,
you should be pretty you should be pretty well off. But what do you
think, Eugene. Yeah, So Singapore has a well earned reputation of because
of its history having an extraordinarily well run government, and that is not the
case around its own region, and it's certainly not the case in other parts
of the world. And having the Singaporean perspective on how do we ru go
out government payment schemes in the good sense of the word scheme, because it
shouldn't be boiling the ocean every time is a It's an interesting market offering because
it shouldn't require reinventing the wheel every time, every time, every time,
because there should be a fairly well understood recipe that we can just execute.
And it's a welcome thought because if you pair what Crimson can do with its
system security and understanding cross border payments with the reach and breadth of master Card,
you've got something pretty interesting. Yeah, what do you think about that,
say, or Melvin, I'll throw it over to you, all right.
I mean that's a very good perspective that the Eugene has brought up.
So it's a recipe, right, So you have a recipe to cook something,
and the contextualizing or the localized seeing part of it is more of the
ingredients that go into the recipe. The recipe largely remains the same, but
where we have seen the recipe needs customization or needs localization that we have done
in other parts of the world. So we do have projects in the Latin
American region Caribbean closer to the continental United States. We do have a cross
border facilitation that we do between the US and Canada. But if we take
the recipe that is identical to what we have done in Singapore, in other
parts of the world to that part of the world, it doesn't really work.
So there's a lot of customization that we need to do, but the
recipe largely remains the same. So understanding from the best practices that we have.
I mean, Singapore has one of the best digital ID platforms in the
world. We were the pioneers and rolling out one of the world's first filing
systems, one of the world's first trade facilitation platforms. So a lot of
such systems are in use today across the world. Taking reference to taking the
learnings from what we have done in Singapore, if you take the case in
point comes logic, we have been quite successful in deliving the recipe that we
have created in Singapore for many of our Singapore public government organizations of public service
organizations to other parts of the world, be it in the developing part as
well as in the developed part of the of the geography. Mm hmm.
And it's good stuff. And maybe for the podcast Bonus Segmal, we'll dig
deeper into trade because you talk about this even your tagline right, simpler trade,
smarter tech, trade gets very complicated. You have all sorts of bill
of goods, you've got erp systems that have to come into place to be
able to manage all this supply chain stuff. Of course, we saw post
COVID and even pre COVID quite frankly in the last administration here in the US,
we had these levees and Taro's placed on goods from China, so we
had some advanced warning that there is going to be some disruption to supply chains.
And you folks are pretty strong in that area as well. Hence your
focus on trade. Right, you have to understand building materials and supply chains
and going back and forth within these systems as pretty complex stuff. Just talk
very quickly about that, all right. So Krinso Logic has its genesis from
building the world's first trade facilitation system, and that was in Singapore. So
I mean, this is something that the likes of United Nations World Bank have
given us the credit of having done. So. So when it comes to
cross border movement of data, and as a company who's majorly owned by one
of the world's largest port operators PSAU, PSA operates the Singapore port. Likewise,
they operate a large pots in the Europe, in the US and so
on, so our focus has been pretty much aligned with our primary shareholder on
digitalizing and digitally transforming the trade area of the business. So there are two
parts to the trade business. One is the merchant to merchants supply to supplier.
We call that as a B to B the business to business segment of
the complexities that arise out of information sharing between the ERP systems, and you
have market players like sap Ariba, Sales Falls and all the likes who provide
some level of facilitation of organizations to work between each other. Where there are
invoice systems that are in place, there's a people standard and so on and
so forth. But when it comes to the government, there's a lot of
lacked in terms of inter government intra government operatability, which is where our companies
like Crimsologic come into play. We facilitate the movement of data between the private
people who are on the private space they are ERP systems, integrate them with
a mediator or a middleman like Crimson Logic, and then we take this data
to the government. So we have around seventeen notes across the world. We
directly integrate with the government systems to push the data in. Yeah, that's
great stuff. Well, folks will die more in the podcast bonus segment into
all that. But what a fascinating conversation today with Melvin Xavier from Crimson Logic
and of course Eugene Burke of Digital Strategies. You were listening to Inside Analysis.
All right, folks, time for the podcast bonus segment. Here on
Inside Analysis, We've been talking to Melvin Xavier from Crimson Logic and our good
buddy Eugene Burke from Digital Strategies Group. And Melvin, I was getting all
excited thinking about trade and you were mentioning something very interesting that Crimson Logic built
the first I guess trade system, and this is really important. You know
what gets me excited about is transparency and numbers, right, because there's all
sorts of shenanigans that go on in the world, and if one country ships
a bunch of stuff to another country. Of course, we have arms shipments
that we have to watch out for these days, but even products and goods
like food stuffs and things of this nature. It helps to know how much
is out there and how much is coming in and being able to kind of
manage those numbers helps with grocery stores, It helps with supply chains in the
target country. It helps with all kinds of things. Can you walk through
some of the functionality that you were able to build and that is still existent
today for being able to really understand international trade and provide visibility and audit trail
and all that fun stuff. Go ahead, right, So I mean if
I take a few steps behind, few steps back, the system that we
have implemented in Singapore, Crimson Logic was formed in the your nineteen eighty eight
because Singapore went through its first recession and today's Prime Minister, Prime Minister Lee
Lison Loong was the Minister of Trade and Industry back then in nineteen eighty eight,
who had conceived this grand plan of leveraging on singapore strategic geographical location,
which is straight in the middle of the Malaca Straits where the cargoes move from
the Asian side of the world to the Western side of the world. So
in order for the movement of goods to be facilitated, you need to have
a very robust process in place. I'm not even talking about the IT system.
I probably want to talk about the process first, because that's where most
of the bottleneck, most of the red tape lives. You can have a
fantastic it system with all the latest computer technology programming principles in place. But
if you do not have a very streamlined, homogeneous process which works in tandem
with the technology that you're putting in place, that's where most of the countries
have a challenge. If you take just a dipstick survey across the world,
every country would say that I have a system in place, I'm able to
do this, I'm able to do that, but how efficient are they?
For example, in Singapore, every permit that is submitted to the government,
actually there's no difference between a permit and a declaration. So for people in
the trade sector, they would understand the between a declaration and a permit.
Permit is to give you the permission to bring in the goods into the country.
Declaration is for you to pay the duties, if at all any,
to the customs before the goods are being brought in. So in Singapore,
what Chrinsologic has done many years ago is we brought these two things together and
now we have one single document, an online document that you need to submit
as a trader to the government and Crimsologic system, as a concept of single
window, takes this information to the various government organizations behind the scenes. So
the complexity of the trader being required to go to different organizations to get the
necessary permissions before a specific cargo is brought into the country is completely abstracted.
And in the olden days before eighties, it used to take three days,
it used five days, and in many countries even today it takes about five
ten days for a specific clearance to be obtained from the various organizations who are
required from the government point of view to provide views of approvals. But in
Singapore it just takes less than three minutes. Ninety five percent of the trade
submissions that happen in Singapore are cleared within the first three minutes, and that's
the service level agreement that we have which we need to honor. At three
minutes is an exaggeration in my view. It just takes a few seconds for
the system to run through the submissions and then then flag out if there is
any anomaly, and if it's a flagout, it will obviously throw the thing
back to the traders saying that you're probably not addressed as part of the document,
or if it wants to go for a manual review, it will just
rout it to the relevant authorities behind the scenes. So that's the level of
efficiency that we have achieved over the last few years, and we have managed
to export this efficiency to other countries in the world. So today, based
on the Singapore system, we have about twenty countries around the world using similar
systems with the same recipe, but with different ingredients and different taste matters.
Yeah, and that's so important for trade because when you can automate a system
like that where you can tell based on documentation, I'm sure there are steps
that have to be taken for that to clear through. Right. Straight through
processing is one of the terms that they've used to describe that kind of thing.
You just you facilitate transactions and you open the doors and things work and
everyone's happy. That's just I mean, I can't say enough about a system
like that. It's so powerful because it enables commerce. And when you have
systems that are inefficient, and I've lived in places where there are very inefficient
systems, it inhibits commerce and that slows down business, it slows down wealth
creation, it slows down transactions, that slows down everything. So final comments
from Eugene, I just think that's fantastic stuff. What do you think,
Eugene, if only Singapore could run Washington DC. That's what wait, So
that you guys, having thought through everything and understood understood when something needs a
human eye and when, like the vast majority, if you thought it through,
it doesn't need a human eye. And architecting this the straight through processing,
as you indicated, is extraordinarily powerful and all of the time, now
all the friction that that saves is is really really valuable. Well, folks,
when you get your stuff from overseas on time and it went through Singapore,
you'll now know why Crimson Logical was part of that magic. And with
that, we're going to bid you farewell. If you want to be in
the show, send me an email info at inside Analysis dot com. We'll
talk to you next time. You've been listening to Inside Analysis Southern California Radio
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Radio, I'm Chris Kragio. President Biden says the responses coming following the overnight
drone attack at a US outpost in Jordan that killed three American service members.
Biden held a moment of silence during an event today in South Carolina, calling
it a tough day in the Middle East. The White House is blaming radical
orion backed militant groups for the strike. It marks the first US troops killed
by enemy fire in the Middle East since the start of the Israel UMAs War.
Former President Trump says he will not support a bipartisan bill that would give
President Biden emergency authority to shut down the southern border without congressional support. Trump
made the comment last night in a rally in Las Vegas. He also praised
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