A Finance Buyer's Guide to Treasury Cloud Software: Why Cloud-Native Matters & How to Spot Imposters

Joseph Drambarean:

Welcome to FinTech Corner. My name is Joseph Drambarean. I am the Chief Product Officer here at Trovata. I am joined by none other than our founder and CEO, Brett Turner. We’re going to talk about my favorite topic today, which is not often that we get to talk about exclusively tech, but the reason we wanted to talk about this today, I guess just a little bit of context, I feel like we have had a chip on our shoulder for a while now about whether or not there is a level playing field in terms of technology in the space that we are in. I don’t want to get into semantics in this podcast because we could probably spend the whole podcast talking about why Trovata’s not a TMS, okay? But the truth is-

Brett Turner:

Next episode.

Joseph Drambarean:

Yeah. Next episode. But the truth is we have to deal with this often when we’re talking about who we are, what we do, why we matter. One of the things that comes up is comparisons between Trovata and other TMS platforms. One of the things that has irked us, I think for a very long time, is this false comparison that Trovata as a tech platform is comparable to the legacy tech platforms of the TMS systems that exist, but if we want to just extend this conversation beyond TMS, let’s just look at the entirety of the finance software provider ecosystem.

Your TMS Isn’t Cloud-Native

I thought that this would be a fun topic to dig into and be vulnerable and honest about, because it is something that we find annoying in the industry because it’s not true. I’m going to give you the-

Brett Turner:

Well, I think specifically, let’s get right into it, the use of the term cloud.

Joseph Drambarean:

Oh, yeah. Don’t get me started. I’m going to let you have first crack at it, okay? Why do you think that it’s an unfair thing to say if you are an existing TMS player or a different software provider that you’re natively in the cloud? Why is that offensive to us when we hear it?

Brett Turner:

Yeah, again, you are the technologist, you’re the engineer. You’re definitely rightly so offended, but I have this… It just wells up in me as well. My last startup was this company called 2nd Watch, and it was really a pioneer in enterprise IT, and the whole thing was the journey to the cloud. It’s exactly 10 years later now, coming up in May of 2023, coming up, it was 10 years prior when that was the tipping point in our business in that space. Is AWS, is it enterprise grade? AWS didn’t invent the term cloud. Everything just rallied around what they provided, is this massive, incredible sandbox of the tech community, and everything’s built natively in cloud, but you have this term cloud now that even then it was an annoying thing to really sell around, and the old establishment, the adage of if you can’t convince them, confuse them, and that was happening then.

It was all about like, “Wait a second. Public cloud. Oh wait, that sounds scary, public cloud.” AWS of course did this massive deal with the CIA, and it’s like, “Yeah, well, public cloud is secure,” but all of that stuff that you… Then it was like the private cloud. Well, that sounds safer, and “Oh, you mean your own data centers?” It’s like, “You’re a private cloud? Really?” What’s so amazing to me because all that stuff, it felt like we had to deal with and sell against and educate in the IT space, now, which is a lot of the segue for me in starting Trovata, not just the finance background stuff, but it’s also a front row seat to the whole digital transformation and how cloud was just a key part of that with AWS.

Here we are 10 years later, digital transformation, finance, banking and all of that, and you’ve got these really legacy treasury management systems, the TMS space, any corporate whose 5 billion in revenue and above, stats are roughly 60, 70% of them will have a TMS, but they’re 25 to 45 years old and aging. You’ve got a few of the prime players, they’re saying, “Well, we’re cloud-based,” and somehow they’ve been able to get away with all the customers thinking, “Oh, well, it’s in the cloud,” or another term that’s misused, “Oh, it’s SaaS, then it must be modern.” That is just not true.

Assessing Cloud Softwares

Joseph Drambarean:

Yeah. I’m glad that you took it in this direction because I want to zag just for a moment. If you are a customer and you’re trying to assess the viability of the vendor that you work with, you want to hear that they are cloud based. You want to hear that they have enterprise grade security, that they’ve thought through how to manage your data effectively. From a marketing and sales perspective, I can see why you would want to say, “We are a cloud company.” The problem is that the customer might not be educated in all of the various meanings of what it might be to be a cloud-based company. When we think of cloud, we think AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, the main players that provide the highest level of security, resilience, global availability, all of the things that you would expect when it comes to a public cloud.

When you hear cloud from any TMS provider or any finance software provider, one of the things that you first have to get past is are they hosting those data centers themselves? Because if they are the ones that are on the hook for that resilience, security, et cetera, you immediately then have to compare them from a proficiency perspective with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Could they ever do it at that level of capability? Let’s rewind the tape and think about even those players, Microsoft, they just went through a major breach just a year ago. The most elite tech company in the world is facing these issues and they invest all of the money, all of the resources, everything that they can to keep their government contracts safe, all of the enterprises that depend on them, and now think about that. Will your TMS provider do the same thing? No way.

That’s why the first layer of, I think, our issue with it is that it’s preying on the lack of knowledge of the buyer who trusts that, “Hey, at a minimum, I need to know these things are true because that’s what I’m hearing. I’m hearing from IT that it should be in the cloud, it should be safe and secure. You should be passing certain requirements, et cetera,” but just because you’ve checked off that box doesn’t mean that now you are at the same level as Microsoft or Amazon and Google. I think that’s why the reaction is so flagrant from our perspective because… We haven’t even gotten into the thick of it.

Brett Turner:

Well, I think this is the first layer. We just went through and we did the previous podcast the last week in the banking crisis and SVB meltdown and all that, and this is akin to like, “Okay, now, take care of your cash.” That’s a really important thing right now. If you look at this whole movement with the cloud, it’d be the equivalent of saying, “Well, it’s my private cloud. It’s in their data center,” it’d be like, “okay, I’m okay with having all of my cash in a suitcase in the back closet practically,” or maybe the door’s locked. There’s no windows and it’s safe in the basement versus having it in JPMorgan, too big to fail. Is it safe? First, there’s that aspect, just getting it in the right place.

We’ve been seeing that over the last few years. Okay. That is not playing well. Let’s go ahead and we’ll get some savings. We’ll move it into Azure, we’ll move it into AWS. Azure definitely has gained on AWS, but I don’t think they have quite the level of native services, web services that you can really utilize on and build stuff on, but it’s still really good and they’ve closed the gap a lot. When you look at that, this is the next thing. Just because you’ve moved from your own data center or maybe some other hosted provider that isn’t as reputable as Microsoft or Amazon, and you’ve moved it into maybe the Azure cloud, does that mean it’s cloud? Does that mean you’ve checked all the boxes and you’re good now? It’s cloud. Everything’s good.

Joseph Drambarean:

Yep. This is the next stage of being upset.

Brett Turner:

And it’s wrong.

Joseph Drambarean:

Right. I’m going to keep doing this during this podcast because I don’t want to be irreverent of the buyer that is honestly just trying to assess the differences here, but you would never know as a buyer that at the end of the day, that software provider may be taking the very same software that they have had for the last, as you said, 10, 20, 30 years, could be whatever Java application they built back in the early thousands. They can simply take that and install it on a set of servers that are just managed by Azure and then call themselves cloud, but nothing has changed. The software is still what it is. I think that’s why we get to this point of…

Brett Turner:

Now there’s a little bit of benefits in fairness. You get a little bit of the cloud, maybe the availability of service. You’re getting this managed service that’s a little bit better than you doing it yourself and maybe a little more secure than what you generally get, but natively building it with the services that Microsoft or Azure will be providing-

Joseph Drambarean:

That’s the key.

Brett Turner:

… or AWS is providing, I don’t think any of the buyers understand what that even means, that there’s a journey there, there’s really a delineation. I think that’s really what gets…

Joseph Drambarean:

So what is that? Because it just happens to be the case that tech and tech companies have evolved dramatically over the last 10 years. If you want to expand the window to 20, these are quantum leaps we’re talking about here, and the latest one, the one that is probably the most important to distinguish is what you just said, native cloud. 

What is Cloud-Native? 

What does that even mean? Well, it means that you bring a different philosophical approach to how you build that software. If you have an older platform, let’s say that you built this software 20 years ago, the likelihood is that you’re not changing it very often because it’s hard to, because you are constrained by the way that it was built then, and it may be pretty reliable, but it has gotten to its shelf life, if you will, in terms of sustainability.

Really, the differences here are a monolithic application versus a microservice-oriented application.

Brett Turner:

Bingo.

Joseph Drambarean:

I know I just threw out a buzzword, and you can go on Wikipedia and look it up and whatever you want to do, but the takeaway in all of this is it’s a philosophical difference. When you build something big and heavy, it just is more difficult to make changes because you make a change over here and it might touch something over here, and you have to then test the entire thing to guarantee that it’s still safe.

When you build things in a microservice-oriented way, what are we saying? Microservice, so it’s small. It’s little pieces of software that ultimately spreads the risk out so that if you want to make a change over here, you might not feel it over there.

No, I know that the commenters will jump in and say, “Well, wait a minute. That can still happen in microservice.” Granted, of course it can. You still have to be a good software development shop. That doesn’t go away.

Brett Turner:

Garbage in, garbage out.

Joseph Drambarean:

But the point is that it’s a more sustainable approach if you want to commit to more releases, and that’s one of the things that we see in the industry is that you might have a software provider that says, “Guess what, guys? We’re going to give you two releases this year.” “Oh. We’re so excited.”

Brett Turner:

Cooking with gas now.

Joseph Drambarean:

We’re not used to that because we release every two weeks. The idea of releasing twice a year is almost like… It’s comical.

Brett Turner:

Well, I think when you said this monolithic, just this aspect of this rigidity. I try to tell folks if what you’re buying is more than maybe 10 years old, maybe even 8 years old, you can’t natively build in AWS or Azure because those services didn’t exist before that time.

Joseph Drambarean:

That way of thinking didn’t exist.

Brett Turner:

Yeah. You could start to really build things maybe eight years ago. 2014, 2015, you’re starting to hit where there’s enough services to really build something like what we’ve built and even what we have today, we couldn’t have done it with the services that were available then, and even new things that are releasing all the time, but this aspect of the world is speeding up, and in the technology world, if you’re not changing constantly, if you’re not innovating constantly, then you’re standing still, and there’s nothing worse than that in the technology… You can’t live with that. That’s what’s happening in the TMS world.

You’ve got these big systems that have been around for 35 years. They’ve made the transition of moving stuff into Azure or into maybe AWS. I’m hearing coupa maybe moved to Azure, so they’re hosted there. They’re simply hosted in Microsoft data center, getting some benefits, but if you haven’t built from the bottom up natively on all of those services that are available to you within that environment, then you don’t have all these componentized… If you think of APIs, which is now, it’s like, “Oh, an API,” in banking, and that’s a big part of our story too, but when you think about microservices, how many APIs do we have that’s essentially part of the fabric or the architecture of Trovata?

Joseph Drambarean:

They change all the time. That’s the thing, is that-

Brett Turner:

Isn’t it thousands? We have-

Joseph Drambarean:

At this point, it’s definitely hundreds. If you were to do cumulative over time, over the last four to six years, it is thousands. It’s because we evolve. We change the way that we query data, that we put services and features together. We come up with new ideas altogether for features and parts of our roadmap. Don’t you want to be nimble in the approach of being able to tweak, react to customer feedback, improve your own design? You don’t want to be tied to the ideas that you had a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, and ultimately be put into a box because you’ve ultimately forced yourself into that box because of the constraint of that service. That’s not the most efficient way to build software. We haven’t even gotten, though, to the part that finance people will appreciate, which is cost.

Brett Turner:

Absolutely. Well, one quick thing on… Just to let everybody know that maybe a good analogy on the monolithic or that inflexibility of it, think of it like a… If you were going to paint something or build something, and it was just one single form factor. It came out of a mold, and you can’t do anything with it. If you’re going to change it, it’s not made of Legos. You can take a couple of pieces out. If there was a Lego piece that’s yellow and you want it to be blue, you could take the piece out and pop a blue piece on. That’s that componentization that you really need, because you have ultra flexibility. You’re constantly refining it.

If there’s a piece in there you want to change, it’s like a garden and a bonsai tree. Maybe you’re doing clipping and you’re changing and you’re just constantly evolving and molding to something that’s continuously great, but if it’s monolithic, you’re not able to swap out parts or make upgrades or change things, it requires a large tech debt, meaning large engineering department to really build big things and then somehow figure out to migrate and move those off. Am I clarifying a little bit-

Joseph Drambarean:

Absolutely.

Brett Turner:

Who wants to be stuck in that or at the behest of that kind of technology platform as your environment?

Joseph Drambarean:

It’s stifling. It also means that if you want to have one of the top engineering programs focusing on that topic, it’ll be really difficult to recruit the best talent if you start off right out of the gate saying, “Hey, you can’t use all of the best tools, all of the best approaches, the best philosophy with regards to software development. You actually have to use 20 years ago’s philosophy and do your best under those circumstances,” which means that at every level, you are holding yourself back when you are in that model. 

Cost Benefits of Cloud-Native

What about money? I think this is one of the most fascinating parts of this whole thing, and coming from 2nd Watch, this is the biggest thing, because the biggest innovation with regards to cloud is not the fact that you’re trusting Amazon or Microsoft to run those servers.

That was what it was back 10 years ago. Now, the biggest important development is this concept of just-in-time services. In the past, you’d have to run your servers 100% of the time with backup because there’s no other way. The virtualizing of servers and the concepts around that just didn’t exist back then. So the big innovation that’s taken place now is this just-in-time processing, which is exactly what it sounds like. You only use server capacity when you need it, and the rest of the time, it’s not even on. Think about the comparison there.

If you’re running an old 20-year-old system where you have a set of customers, all of them are enterprise grade, all of them are relying on you, and you need a certain service level to run it, and it has to be on all day, 24/7, 365, that means that your cost will never go down in terms of service, whereas with a nimble company like Trovata, we only keep those services on when they’re being used, which means that when we architect, when we sell, everything about our company is tailored around this concept that we’re not throwing money away on reserve capacity for no reason. If we were to say nothing else, this one piece is like… Well, that’s why Trovata has such an incredible price point. It’s because we can.

Brett Turner:

Well, then you look at it, it’s like, well, how is Trovata making any money at these prices? Well, it’s because when you can build something natively and you could take advantage of that model, everything can componentize, there’s no… You think of all the environmental concerns that are going on, but nobody’s really talking about how wasteful it is not to run your technology stack like that. There’s no wasted motion. There’s no wasted effort. We’re using everything, and if it’s not being utilized, it’s shut off. Maybe folks are out there thinking, “Okay, I know I have a TMS. I know it’s old. I can’t articulate why. I just know the interface looks old and I can’t do a lot of stuff with it. I don’t quite know why,” but really, it comes down to that underlying architecture that just isn’t allowed to make these kinds of changes or keep up. There’s not a way to make those changes very easily.

Joseph Drambarean:

I think that therein lies the ceiling of those companies, because we are just at year four of being in product and in market, and we’ve had all this time to innovate on those native services. Well, guess what? Amazon’s not done innovating. They’re only accelerating. They’re continuing to add more and more capabilities that take platform that we are at currently and it’s going to get elevated just by us being part of it and being native users of it.

When you look at the roadmap of Trovata from a technology perspective, it grows with Amazon. The more capabilities that we have access to, the more we’re going to take advantage of them, the more we’ll be able to give that benefit back to our customers, both in terms of cost and in terms of services, and that’s, I think, ultimately the story here, is that do you want to use something that is stuck? It’s literally stuck. It can’t move beyond that because of choices that ultimately cannot be undone.

Why Go Serverless? 

Brett Turner:

Right. Hopefully, we’re conveying, again, microservices, architecture, what that means, componentization. The other thing is you just even think about it, is there an easy way to explain what serverless is? Maybe if you’re looking to buy your next TMS or you’re going to ask hard questions to your own TMS, ask these kinds of questions so you could see what the answer comes back because there’s no way to BS it. 

It’s pretty easy. You’re yes, or you’re no. If you start to go off and start to ramble, okay, there’s something there, but do you have a microservices architecture or do you not? Are you using some of these other services? A serverless environment, just also, nobody’s going to know what that means, but maybe try to-

Joseph Drambarean:

Yeah. It sounds like you’re making things up when you’re saying serverless. Wait a minute.

Brett Turner:

Doesn’t it have to be on servers?

Joseph Drambarean:

You just told me that there are servers, and now you’re telling me there are no servers. What are you talking about?

Brett Turner:

Totally.

Joseph Drambarean:

It’s exactly what we had just referred to, this just-in-time processing. The official way to talk about that is serverless architecture, and all it’s saying is that you’re really running on a virtual container, and because Amazon is in charge of running that container and providing that back to you, they can decide when that container is turned on and created, how much of a slice of an individual server you might have access to, and whether or not your slice should be living with another slice or be on its own. This concept of serverless, the simplest way of thinking about it is you are not maintaining a server. Someone else is maintaining a server in every context. What you are doing is just saying, “I have some code and I’d like for you to run it for me.”

They say, “Great. We’ll take it from here. How it happens, why it happens, how much it costs, we’ll let you know, and we have every implementation detail.” 

Now that might sound scary just in terms of loss of control, but what ends up happening as a result is that they’re able to take the quality of service dramatically up because they control, effectively, the full stack of logistics of how that code is getting executed. 

Think about it. If you were running that code, if you were on the hook for how much CPU am I going to be using? We’re talking about just like if you’re on your laptop, and you’re running an app.

Brett Turner:

Yeah, no, thanks.

Joseph Drambarean:

You want to see that app, do I have the right laptop? Is this app going to make my processor get so hot because it’s crunching numbers that it freezes the whole system? Do I have enough memory? Do I have enough hard drive? Guess what? Those very same things are the things that you’re asking when you’re running any software on any server, and so this concept of serverless is basically saying, “Hey, you don’t need to worry about any of those details. Let us worry about that. We’ll take care of all of it for you. You give us your code, put it into our container, and we will figure it out. We will run it optimally. We will only run it when you need it and we’ll give you a bill that is a fraction of what it would be if you were doing it all by yourself.” Now, why would you want your provider to think in this way? It’s because at the end of the day, all of these costs are going down. What if your provider, they’re stagnant? Their costs are not going down. Eventually-

Brett Turner:

Who’s going to pay the bill?

Joseph Drambarean:

Who’s going to pay the bill? You are. As new vulnerabilities come out, as they have to upgrade their hardware, because think about it this way; you are getting the net benefit out of Amazon constantly upgrading their hardware, taking advantage of the very best processors, the very best architecture for energy efficiency. They are planting these data centers in optimal locations so that they have the lowest latency in terms of internet connectivity. They care about all of these details. Well, if you are handling all of that and you are on the hook for that-

Brett Turner:

How can you? Yeah.

Joseph Drambarean:

How can we know that you’re going to be able to do it?

Brett Turner:

They have an army of folks who are experts managing all that stuff for you at this incredible scale. There’s no way you could ever get that on your own, and it’s amazing. Especially when you think of, again, making that first move of putting… You get a little bit of benefit, but it’s only a tiny, tiny fraction of what you get. Cost is a huge part of that. That cost decline, you could take advantage of that. For us, we’re able to continue to drive the costs of the architecture or the infrastructure as low as possible, and then it allows us to really pass on a lot of that savings to our customers. Why would we want to do that? Well, everybody knows the model pretty well. Amazon did that in the retail space. They did it at scale and it was part of their virtual flywheel.

When you have scale and you can lower cost, you pass the savings onto the customer, and what happens? Then the customer buys more and then it comes back. Now you have more volume. You can get more cost out of the supply chain. You lower prices further. Guess what happens? The customer buys more. You start around the wheel again. All this thing is just this continuous aspect of just… That’s been happening for the last 10 plus years in tech. It’s just now finding its way. It’s crazy it’s taken this long into this space, and in some ways, we’re bringing something into the space that just hasn’t been introduced before. If you think of the treasury space, you have these really old aging systems that are stuck in these old models. Customers know that they like to get off. There’s really not a good alternative.

Even though we’ve been around for a while, we’re now starting to inch our way and it’s like, “Okay, now we have…” We just released payments. We’ve just released cash positioning. We’re starting to now add some of these core treasury pillars, and as we do, we’re going to be putting the TMS on notice. It just becomes so obvious when the alternative is there isn’t a good one, but now there is. Trovata is coming up as now a true new technology alternative with all the things that you really want as your technology partner. I’m excited because it’s just going to be a landslide.

What to Look For in a Treasury Cloud Tech Provider 

Joseph Drambarean:

I love that you said technology partner. I think if we want it to end on any point, it’s this. The reason we get offended when we get compared with TMS is because we consider ourselves a technology company. When you partner with us, you’re partnering in that way. You’re trusting us to manage all the aspects of this technology, whether it’s backend services, cloud infrastructure, the user experience, innovating in all the different ways, mobile and all of that is a comprehensive ecosystem when it comes to how you take advantage of our features and services. At the end of the day, do you consider your partner a technology company? Because if you are thinking about this from a 5 to 10 year roadmap perspective, you should trust that they are an actual real tech company.

Brett Turner:

It’s important to.

Joseph Drambarean:

Yeah. So I feel like we’ve gotten it off our chest. We might need a few more therapy sessions.

Brett Turner:

Maybe a couple more rounds, couple more reps. No, it’s good. I’m excited to be able to start to really tell this story more. I think again, at the end of the day, if you’re in treasury and you’re evaluating these systems or you’re even using one yourself, and it’s hard to articulate why is this thing so slow? I’ve got gray hair. I’ve been in technology for a while. It’s like, why do I run this routine or this job and it goes over here and it does its thing and I have to wait and then because of that, it’s like, “Okay, I’m just going to go to lunch and maybe it’s done when I come back. Oh, it’s still not done. Maybe it is when I come in the next morning.” You have to run jobs overnight. To do that, those shouldn’t exist. You shouldn’t have to do that.

Joseph Drambarean:

That’s just a wild concept. Meanwhile, we’re used to ChatGPT where you can ask it anything under the sun and it will respond to you.

Brett Turner:

Totally. It’s crazy. It’s going to be fun. Again, like I said that also, there’s this aspect of… Sometimes people say, “Well, I don’t really need to understand technology. Why does it even matter? Cloud, native cloud or these microservice…”

Well, it matters because we’re telling you all the results. All the things that you just see and experience firsthand, that’s why. Hopefully, it’s connecting the dots. I remember in some of my days in telecom a number of years ago, it would be this… Part of this aspect of in the network of network resiliency, it would be called, does your hardware have the ilities? Flexibility, agility, reliability. At the end of the day, you can’t get all those things. You need that from your tech partner and you can’t really get that truly.

I think the last thing too is that everybody’s used… Especially in a very risk averse… Rightly so in treasury and finance, but there’s notion of just constantly being a good defender. You’re playing defense a lot. I think the world is speeding up so fast and it’s all about data and it’s all about information and access to information. That’s what runs the world right now.

It’s those who have access to the information and those who don’t. At the end of the day, you’ve got to have a data platform, essentially. Technology that’s going to give you access to that, help you so that you can go on the offense, because if you… You used to be able to… You can just continue to play defense and you’re going to be okay. Now, you have to get in the game.

You have to play offense now too, and if you’re not, you’re starting to be left behind. The bar continues to go up of what’s expected. If you can’t actually do those kinds of things, you can’t stay ahead. You can’t be proactive. You have to be doing more, faster, better resiliency around your forecasting and you have to have insights and visibility into your cash. Just this last week was just a reminder for every… You need to be multi-bank. You need to be looking at APIs. The upgrade is we’re going to see this massive wave start to accelerate of digital transformation and this big upgrade. It’s just going to be fun to be a part of it because we feel like we’ve… Part of why we want to just share with people, we’ve truly built something that’s great, checks all those boxes. It’s not just about necessarily this one feature in treasury if it doesn’t really work all that well, and so I think those are the things that we’re going to really get to step in and make a big difference.

Joseph Drambarean:

Honestly, if you’ve been listening to this podcast all the way through to the end, which we appreciate, we have a bunch of resources on our website that dig further into this topic. Just encourage our listeners to check it out, even if you don’t sign up for Trovata.

Brett Turner:

One more thing. I know we’re getting close, so maybe really quick. One of the things too, what we did last year was pretty incredible and I’ll just say because I was so impressed with you, our engineering team and what we pulled off and it felt like, “Could we even do this?” was a year prior, but being able to… We basically, even ourselves, rebuilt a lot of our data infrastructure to support what we’ve recently done. What it enabled is incredible. We now have Trovata as a freemium.

Companies can go to our website, like you’re saying, sign up for free. We could have this really low cost free. It doesn’t get any more lower than that to try. It’s Trovata. There’s no way you could ever do that with the TMS because it’s super expensive just to-

Joseph Drambarean:

You’d have to pay for every single one of those customers to join.

Brett Turner:

Yeah. You’re incurring might be like 15,000 minimum just to get in and do the most basic thing. When we can offer that for free, maybe connect the dots part of that thing, which was really an incredible feat that you and the team were able to pull off and allow us to even do that. That happened late last year.

Joseph Drambarean:

Yeah. I appreciate the shout-out on the pod, but I’d say at the end of the day, it actually is related to this conversation that we’ve had about cloud, because the only way that you could make a change like that, one that is so fundamental, because it touched everything. 

It touched APIs, it touched how we store our data, the database itself, and what we did is we looked at this audacious question; how might we welcome the whole world into our platform and give them a great experience while still maintaining a level of cost that is feasible for us to operate as a company? We know it’s possible, because we look at services that are available all over the world, social media companies, et cetera, that deal with billions of users and are able to operate and welcome all of them in and still be profitable at that kind of scale.

The only way it can be done is if you even go further and more deep into taking advantage of those cloud services that we’ve been talking about where you look at every aspect of your infrastructure and you ask yourself, can it scale? Can we do the multiplication exercise of we currently can manage thousands, could we do millions? Where things break are always at scale. I think that we went through this exercise mostly because of the fact that we knew that our partner, Amazon, has services that can scale at that level. We just didn’t take advantage of them. That’s why I think stressing this point, that being a true tech company, one that is nimble, one that takes advantage of cloud native, one that looks at costs in this way, in a self-critical way, and constantly evolves is so important, because what if we had just said to ourselves, “Oh, we’re fine with the way that we’re operating and we don’t want to welcome the whole world into our platform.”

Well, we would’ve had a ceiling and that would’ve been the end of our run, if you will, but we were more audacious than that and we saw an opportunity to take the software that we’ve built and evangelize it at a much wider level, and what we did is we put our money where our mouth is. We said, “We’re going to have to work hard and change the way that we’re thinking and the services that we use to achieve that goal,” and we did. That’s not the last time that we’re going to do that. We’re going to keep doing that.

Brett Turner:

It’s happening right now.

Joseph Drambarean:

So I think that that’s just the nature of this story, that if you are a tech company and you commit to this kind of approach philosophically you’re never done. You don’t just build your software and it’s like, “All right, let’s hand it to the sales team and for the next 20 years, here’s the key to sell it.”

Brett Turner:

Right. No, it’s super exciting. I’m so proud of what you and the team had built.

Joseph Drambarean:

Thank you.

Brett Turner:

What’s so cool was that just now you can… I mean we have. We’ve essentially opened up the door to the public. What was unheard of, to be able to give best practice at scale, this CFO treasure in a box and be able to do that for companies that just generally never have access to anything like this, who are just stuck in Excel. The things that I used to deal with, it’s just you’re… Whether it’s at month end close and you’re like, “Why am I having to work at every month end close and I try to get ahead, but it’s still 10:00 PM and I missed another dinner with my family?”

I think at the end of the day, these are the kind of things that we’re able to offer to everyone. I think now when everybody has uneasiness and answering a lot of questions and a lot of communication with… Whether it’s their board or their executive team or even their employees about their banking relationships and where their cash is held and do they have a good beat on all that and those kinds of insights, you really need a true technology partner as part of that now journey. Of course, we hope everybody finds it. They go to our website and discover it for themselves because it’s right there in plain sight.

Joseph Drambarean:

For your consideration, Trovata. Awesome. Well, yeah, like I said, I feel a lot better. Probably not done, but it’s a good first stab at why we feel so strongly about this. Yeah, appreciate you getting vulnerable about this topic. I know we’ve been talking about it behind closed doors forever. Yeah, thank you for joining us on this conversation. This has been the FinTech Corner podcast. I’m Joseph, and this is Brett. We’ll see you next time.

Brett Turner:

Great. Thanks.