The FinTech Report Podcast: Episode 64: Josh Foreman, Founder & CEO, Indebted

Speaker A: Welcome to the Fintech Report Podcast. I'm your host, Glenn Frost. Thank you for taking the time to listen to our conversation. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with Vanta. Uh, Vanta helps you build automated, scalable, secure and compliant programs that work for you, whether it's SoC2, ISO 27001 or managing vendor risk. Vanta's AI powered platform makes it easier and faster. Visit vanta.com fintech to connect with Vanta. That's V A N T A dot com fintech I also want to thank our friends at Australian Fintech for their support. Sign up for their free newsletters@australianfintech.com in this episode, I'm delighted to welcome founder and CEO Josh Foreman. He's the founder and CEO of Indebted, a global leader in human centered debt resolution. Through its AI powered platform, Indebted partners with forward thinking organizations to deliver intelligent, compliant and empathetic collections at scale. Its proprietary solutions collect and receive help consumers navigate repayments in a way that are stress free and aligned with their financial well being. Indebted was founded in Australia and now operates across seven markets. Indebted say they are on a mission to, quote, change the world of consumer debt for good. Josh, thanks very much for being our guest and welcome to the Fintech Report podcast.

Speaker B: Glenn, thanks for having me.

Speaker A: You're welcome. Let's kick off. I love the description by the way, because there's this blend of tech and human. Um, could you sort of kick us off for those that don't know Indebted with a description of why you got into this sector and some of the experiences you had in the early years starting and building the business?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. So I stumbled into the business, that's how I would frame it. I had a company before Indebted that just so happened to be not nothing relation Collections happened to have a client that relied on a debt collection business quite a lot for cash flow. So in the B2B commercial space and when I exited that company I had a bit of spare time throughout sort of the earn out period and I ended up helping that client sort of quite closely within their business. I became quite close friends with a husband and wife that owned it. It's a large sort of digital media sort of agency business here in Sydney and sort of one way or another end up running an RFP for collections, um, and taking them from a small boutique agency in Sydney to the largest sort of players. Got to sort of see it and to be honest, the, you know my last business heavily correlated into the finance accounting sector. Overlapped a lot with Xero. Phenomenal business. Love that company. And I sort of thought, hmm, I feel like there's a, an opportunity for some sort of step change what Zero did to accounting in collections. Um, and I walked into a collections business that was pitching us for their services. And it's people on phones harassing customers for money. It's pretty much, pretty much all it is, green screens. And it just sort of opened up this opportunity in my mind, thought, well, if that's what it was like in accounting, what can it be in collections? And so you mentioned the human component, the tech component. There were sort of three, I call it three founding principles or product principles that sort of got the first version of the platform online, which was the first one, was that consumers would want to engage digitally. And there was. I faced a lot of resistance on that. In the beginning. The view was, these consumers are trying to avoid you from contacting them and you've got to sort of quote, unquote, pester them to get to pay. And I was like, well, I was at the time, didn't enjoy answering a phone call, right? And let alone from people I know. Um, but from certainly numbers you didn't know or blocked numbers. It was just something you would go, I don't want to answer that. As opposed to the convenience of a text message. Likewise the ability to be able to resolve that in your own time. And so, you know, we were originating credit products online, then we're doing all these other things. Why are we not doing the same for collections? And why can't I just pay my bill conveniently this way? And then the third part was more of it, say a, a personal thing, which was, I really want to run a collections business. Like, it's just not a very nice company to both work in for people to be a part of. And it's just not something, you know, where someone said, me, what do you do? I don't want to say I'm a debt collector, right? It's just not something I had to line to and worked so hard to sort of got to it. And so I sort of said, well, why is that? Why does that stigma exist? And it's very much because of the way you perceive when someone says, wow, you've been involved in a collection company, both how you perceive the consumer involved, how the person who's on the other end of the phone and then what that business does and how it makes money. And so there was this piece to me which was, well, could we be the friendly collector. And that got me laughed out of most of the rooms of all our competitors. Like, you can't be friendly and collect. And so that was sort of the founding principles, built the first version of the platform on those principles and thankfully we stumbled forward and managed to make it.

Speaker A: You make a, uh, point that you were having a different view to everyone else in the industry and of course this is what makes a good entrepreneur have a different view. But also you wanted to try and change the way that people engaged with the business of debt collecting. Um, and technology certainly helps, as I think you mentioned, the quote, old school mentality of green screens and desks and you have people that just make a certain number of calls per day and they have to collect that. And there was very high staff turnover and all those sorts of things. Um, but your business, as you say, started off with being laughed out of the room. Um, but I think the next step was interesting because you realized that to get scale, you did need some of that old school books and things like that. So you certainly needed the clients and the cash flow to almost test your own product on some real people and see how they're engaged. Could you talk us through what those next steps were for your business and how you acquired some of those books or those businesses to sort of test your platform on?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So we, in the very early, prototyping sort of stage of the business, we, um, were in the B2B space. So collecting four businesses from businesses very quickly realized the tams on the consumer side, that's a harder business. As you mentioned, you sort of work with larger financial services or telco businesses and collect from their customers, which are consumers. We did manage to get some good traction and thankfully Australia had such a strong fintech ecosystem that there were great fintech businesses that had, you know, I owe a lot of respect to some of the great founders that have come before who said, hey, I'm going to give you a shot, right? And so I won't mention names on the podcast, but there were great Aussie fintech brands that, you know, that are publicly listed businesses today, where I pitched. And mostly everyone's like, no. And that founder was like, no, I'm going to give that a shot, right? And some of the biggest BNPL companies in the country, some of the biggest alternative lenders, and so they gave me sort of enough to get enough proof point to raise a bit of capital, which really meant a lot. But then the big challenge came which had to get scale and those businesses were still scaling then and Often in countries that we weren't. And so we had to work through that. And so pretty early in the company's journey, we went down an acquisitive path and bought, um, a business in the US to start with. And we've since bought five or six businesses since then. Um, and it is very much like you said, for the client roster. And it comes down to a couple of things. And to be honest, I would actually say it reminds me a lot of what I'm seeing a lot of today, uh, which is, you see, there's been dedicated sort of private equity funds and even some venture funds going and buying traditional businesses and then injecting AI. Right? So I saw Thrive Capital doing a $750 million fund just for this in accounting recently. And it's. I almost think we're a little bit ahead of the curve on that regard, because you could see how the business could run. You looked at the sort of three or four clients we had running at the time and said, well, if that was a thousand clients, and this was around the boardroom, like, if you took the largest publicly listed debt collector and gave them our margins, everyone would invest in that company. And so there was just sort, uh, of, how do you solve the gap? And so we did the acquisition and we started to layer on what we'd learned. And it wasn't straight, wasn't a linear path in any regard. We had to learn through a lot of things to make that work. One of the major things was, though, it was a lot easier to influence from the inside than from the outside, because when you walk into that incumbent organization and say, we want you to do everything different, you're asking that individual to take potentially a risk that just they're not incentivized to take. It's a safer path to go with the big list of people who have proven time and time again, been a partner for 20 years. But if you come in as an existing provider and say, you know, there's a lot going on in digital collections, we should give this a trial. Let's do 5% of the book. Like, okay, yeah, we'll trust you. And then when that 5% outperforms by 100% every day, like, okay, how do you do this across everything really quickly? And it's actually quite interesting because we're seeing the same thing now with AI, even in our existing clients who trusted us as a digital provider, saying, what can we do here and how can we test it out? Versus coming in that way with the new AI startups in our space saying we want to work with you. Uh, we need to tiptoe through that. So there is some advantage of the incumbency of having clients of scale.

Speaker A: That's a very good point. And I'm going to come to A.I. um, in a moment. Could you just talk me through what I would. Let's say I, and you mentioned telco and of course just a reminder to folks that um, if you go to um, buy a mobile phone it's usually on a contract and that's a credit contract. So if you don't pay your bill you can be approached by someone like indebted for um, non payment of a credit contract. So um, and obviously the number of people that are taking up mobile phone contracts around the world is just in the last sort of 30 years, it's been phenomenal. Um, but can you just give me a really basic example of. Let's just say I haven't paid my mobile phone bill for a month or two. What would have happened in the old days versus letters or phone calls and what happens now? And also perhaps if I'm perhaps a non native English speaker, if I'm speaking uh, English is my second language, which I'm interested in that as um, how you approach and engage those people as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. So the original uh, approach you nailed, it was pretty much somewhat letters and a lot, a lot of phone calls. And it would essentially think of it as a. There's almost a salesforce equivalent. You've got 100 or 200 collectors. You divvy them out a portion of accounts, 300, 500, 700 accounts each per month. As they collect, new accounts are contributed to the pool and everyone sort of benchmark like you would a good performing sales team.

Speaker A: It's a fact.

Speaker B: It's a factory, right? And so it's Glenn collected X, Josh collected Y. And so therefore, you know, you're better or worse and push, push, push and push. Which if you think about it puts a fundamental disconnect between the incentives of the what's truly best for the consumer and what's best for that person who's incentivized. Because most of those, you know, I'm sure everyone would understand being a collector is not the highest paying job in Australia or anywhere in the world. But you can earn a lot if you hit a lot of commissions, just like you can in most good sales roles. So if you're in, you know, incentives drive behavior, right? And so that's one of the biggest problems, why most major compliance breaches and stuff that happen in the industry don't happen systemically because people want to do things wrong. It's because human behavior takes over and incentives drive the wrong outcome. Um, but people would call and then digital came along. And even when we. That's one thing I love about founding this business in Australia, because Australia was quite forward on the curve on collections. And so we came in and most of our competitors at the time would say, yeah, we already do, we already do email, we already do sms. But we had a different belief, which was sort of the early days on the ML side and now is everything with AI is that it's not just about sending an email or sending an SMS or making a phone call. Um, it is about understanding when you should do that and why you should do it and what you should say when that happens related to the behavior that that person's exhibiting. So whether it is a data point around language preference, whether it's a data point around, you've already been on the website and looked at the debt, so you know about it, but you didn't pay. So what do we need to say to give you that nudge or get you to engage with us? And for me, that sort of meant that the entire sort of platform and technical architecture had to wrap around this idea of not a CRM that used to delegate accounts to people, then delegating them to an email provider, but actually saying, no, it needs to be a platform that is feeding in data and making decisioning and then feeding it out either to a human or to an email provider and SMS provider. And so what that translated into was, you know, yes, everybody else sent emails and SMSes, but ours delivered more, ours converted more, consumers responded better and paid more, etc. And the performance sort of led to itself. And so when you look at how that works in practice, accounts will arrive in our system and every consumer to some degree will get somewhat of a different experience based on how they engage. And, you know, then we may send an email, it may bounce or get blocked back and therefore it'll be a different choice. Some consumers may get an SMS up front, some people still get phone calls, some people still get letters, whether it's regulatory reasons or we think it's those others. And then language preference, actually really interesting one, because in other countries, you take, for example, a lot of the Middle east, right, you'll have English and you'll have Arabic. Um, you have it in obviously in places like, um, the US in certain parts, certainly in Mexico, you've got English and Spanish. It's prevalent In Australia, in some ways, but not quite as ingrained that we have these one or two core languages. So you get a bit of sort of peripheral support across the collection businesses and agencies, but not a lot. As we've had to expand the business globally, we've built that in as part of our sort of functionality. And so we saw this when we launched, uh, in the Middle east recently. We built support for Arabic. We already had support for English. And when, uh, the client that we launch with will send across the accounts, they have a language preference field, English or Arabic. And then just based on that, it will change and the consumer can tell us of that or they can change it themselves on the portal. And then by doing so, all of the communications respond accordingly. And it's just, it's really cool. And I love one of the things I love the most in the business these days, when I see us go into a new market and I see what like the website and all our communications look like in Spanish. I can't read it, but I'm like, it looks very cool and I like how that works.

Speaker A: Love that. I also love the way that you're thinking about how to nudge people into payment. Because I think the point that you started with in the old days, especially if people are incentivized to get people to pay, there's a very easy way to get people to pay and that's to just become increasingly nasty, um, and threatening. Um, but I think if you be nice and nudge people, can you talk about the psychology of nudging people? Because I think it's an art, not a science. And I'm interested in. To hear what you've learned in your years doing this.

Speaker B: Yeah. So the most fascinating part, I think, is that not everybody is there for the same reason. I think it's one of the biggest mistakes people make is like everyone in collections, people just can't afford their bills or they're purposely dodging the bills. And it's quite more nuanced than that. Particularly when you think about, well, the age of how delinquent that account is. If you think I give you some stats where you think about the biggest bank in the country, you think about the biggest telco, you'd be pretty shocked about how many people miss the day one payment. Um, it's quite large and sometimes it's just simply because card details have changed. They went to a different bank and so now the money's in a different account that it was set up for. It could be cash flow. Right. Didn't get paid on time by their employer and that's the payday. So there's a pretty significant volume of people in the very early days of collections just sort of stumble in and they stumble out. Like it's very, very simple. And so, um, there's a different incentive there. And as it ages on, it starts to go down a variety of different paths because you have people who might, for example, not be happy with the service. And it's more of a reflection of like, I'm not happy to pay for something I don't believe I'm getting. It may be a case of fraud, it may be cash flow issues. And so one of the biggest things that we centered around early from a data advantage perspective was not worrying about the data that we could source externally. And we found that has been helpful over time, but more so the data we gather, ah, during the collections process. So, and there's a lot of in the power of digital collections versus a phone call is, if you think about it with a phone call, the first data point is did they answer? Did I get to introduce myself and get them to confirm who they are? Did I get to do a pitch and how did they respond? And that's very hard data to capture, structure, understand. And look at whether an email was opened or not is pretty clear and binary and well structured. It comes in an API callback from the email service provider and you know what time it was opened. You actually also know on what device you, uh, got a good idea of IP location and proximity and you can infer a lot from those sort of things. And when you accelerate that to. Then they did a click on the email and when they clicked on it, they went onto our portal and they reviewed the offers. Did they indicate towards needing a payment arrangement or did they indicate towards paying in full? What sort of device were they on? Um, is it the latest iPhone or the old one? How much does that retail for? And we started to realize that that data actually gave you a lot of insight because if someone owes let's $35 and they've got the latest iPhone, which is $1600, it's probably they can afford to pay. And if, hey, if they're based according to their address in Sydney, but it looks like they're in Mykonos, they're probably on holidays and maybe they're not getting the text messages and you know, that was how the other provider was trying to get get the pay or they're trying to call them potentially. Right. And they're on an overseas sim. And so There's a lot of those really good insights. And so how you asked how that relates to the nudge. Most of the nudging that we do is reflective to the behaviors they've taken. So what we found to be one of the simplest things was if someone got our email and said, mark is spam, we got that data feedback rather than just saying, okay, well now we must text or call them. You text them, but you text them relevant to the fact they've just done that. Hey, Glenn, we noticed you just marked our email as spam. We're not spam. We're indebted. We actually do represent company A. Look, we're here to help you. You can check out our website indebted co read reviews from other customers, or you can respond to this text and we could help you at any time. People are like, hm, okay, this is not. Not spam. Which maybe what they thought it was or fake or fraud. And we can see. Do you click on that link and go to that website and you do, and you have a look and then we notice you don't pay still, then we can follow up again and say, hey, we notice you reviewed the website. Do you think we're not real for any reason? And you can use that to be very, very smart about it over time.

Speaker A: Excellent. And regards to the sector of, you know, the people you're collecting money from, that, as you say, sometimes it's people have experienced a decrease in their income, so they've still got cash coming in, but it's how they allocate that cash across what they owe. Um, and as you say, there are these options to change the repayment plan, to defer things or agree a new amount. Is that the sort of the ideal garden walking people down the garden path for you that for you, that's not necessarily closed, because close is when they finish paying the bill. But once you've got them on that garden path, is that kind of you're happy?

Speaker B: It is. And I think it is. And there's also a couple other things which is we look at it as there's people assuming the account is real, it's not fraud, they do recognize it's theirs and they want to pay it. It really comes down to this very simple matrix of do they have the capacity to pay like you mentioned? Um, and then do they have the intent to pay? And so we look at intent as being, you know, obviously we can't deal with the product and the service they got. But as far as their experience with us, we want to Be empathetic. We want to be understanding, we want to make it convenient, want to be the easiest way to pay a debt with the best customer service you could ever possibly get. And we look at that because even when capability doesn't exist, you don't have the money. When the money does come in, the capability does go up. We want to be front of wallet because most of the time they don't just owe us, they owe other people. And we don't have 100% market share, unfortunately. And so we want to be there, um, when they pay us over paying the competitor, um, and go, yeah, no, that person in debt. Really understood. And that's where, you know, we have a very pro consumer policies in the business around. If you genuinely have fallen on hard times, like, we're happy just to give you a break and we're happy to liaise with the clients that this person needs 180 days off, they're trying to find a new job, they're dealing with a death of a loved one, like it just doesn't matter. Your portfolio matters. But this individual consumer, they just need time. And so we can focus on the portfolio and we come back to them, we snooze the account and we just let it go. And we'll come back and we'll do that in a good way. And then you're right, the garden path of putting them on some sustainable plan. And then I think in the future, this is something we haven't, we haven't even scratched the surface of. That I'd like to see us do much more of over time is how can we positively influence behaviors moving forward to stop that from happening? Um, and that's a. Yeah, yeah. Because I look at it as financial fitness. Like I think of it in a sense of, you know, if I look at it on a health fitness perspective, we know it's probably not good to eat McDonald's every day, but having it once every six months is not going to kill you. Right. We also know that you probably should exercise in some form every day. And so I sort of look at the spending habits and behaviors very similar. And most of us instinctively get that, right. You can buy yourself something nice that you want, a nice car, nice watch, whatever, once my. But if you do that every day, all of a sudden spending capacity exceeds owning capacity and you end up in some problems and you have that. Particularly in the early stage. We see people come in, pay come back out. You can get some early warning signs on how do you help. Instinctively manage that. And for the Customers who are in difficult positions that are outside of their control. How do you help structure that in a way that they're paying it in the most efficient way that uh, gets it done as fast as possible and also work with them to minimize any interest and fees and other things. And thankfully we oper mostly in countries that the regulators help with that. Um, but there are places that that landscape's still evolving.

Speaker A: Yes, indeed. Uh, I mean every country is different. Um, and talking about that, let's talk about America because. Or the United States of America. Sorry. Um, as you said you've opened up an office there. Um, tell us what attracted you about America. Um, it's giant market, 330 odd million people. The wealthiest country in the world, the highest discretionary, um, uh, incomes. Americans love to shop. Personal debt can sometimes be huge. Um, and people can quite easily go into personal bankruptcy. But it can also come out the other end quite easily in America. That's very different to the Australian experience. So tell us why you went there and what's been your experience in the States.

Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll preface it. I'm sure some of my investors would retell this. I'm sure I've made a comment 100 times that we would never go to America. And it was for a lot of the reasons that like the complexity and multiple, you know it's sort of 50 countries. Yeah. And it's all these things and we, and we had some, some venture backed competitors in the space there and it just felt like why compete in a crowded, crowded market? Um, but like everyone, no one was prepared for Covid and for us it had a phenomenally bizarre impact on our business. In Australia where we short term we were very happy. People were paying off accounts that were years and years old. Consumers, particularly in Australia got really focused on cleaning up their personal balance sheet. So we saw accounts that were placed with us three years before that would never pay, just started paying accounts. And so our clients were like this is amazing. Revenues through the roof, record months. And so board's happy, everyone's happy. But the data up the funnel was like there's no new debt coming in. So all the lenders pull back on originations. Regulators had stepped in and said don't send consumers who can't afford to pay into collections. They don't maybe don't have a job. Like, like all the regulatory intervention around Covid happened. And so we basically said well we're living in a dreamland for about six months and then reality is going to hit like a brick wall. And so we had a bit of time to work out what's going to happen and we stumbled into an opportunity. Um, a great Australian fintech business that had expanded overseas was in Canada. And one of the providers from the US that was going to launch with them pulled the plug as a result of COVID And they said, hey, do you want to go to Canada? And I was like, we have nothing better to do. So, um, we will give it a shot and we would love the opportunity. And from the Sydney office, sort of boardroom and remotely, the team sort of hustled together and we managed to launch in Canada. And unexpectedly, we began to be benchmark and compared to the North American cohort, not the Canadian specifically versus the United States. And so we got our first scorecard for performance and admittedly we were the only one in Canada and there was a couple others in the United States. And the client was like, these numbers are the best numbers. Do you think they'd be the same in the us? And again, we didn't have a lot of things going on and we had to worry. And I was like, look, I don't know why it wouldn't be because we'd never launched in Canada before. So, you know, it's not like we had a data advantage. No, we had anything else on the ground. I think it should work. And so we were presented with an opportunity, but we had the regulatory landscape piece, we had all these other things. We had a timing challenge with a client, it was now or never. And so we did that acquisition that I mentioned, which was driven to get that licensing and we did join on board with that client. The performance did outpace the other provider. Um, and overnight we became the largest sort of collection business for that huge fintech business. Um, and that one thing led to another and before we knew it, within a year, the US was multiples the size of the Aussie business. And it just sort of took off from there, which is interesting.

Speaker A: That is a lovely story and congratulations. I think you're going to be always able to lunch out on, um, that story amongst your peers in Australia. I'm interested though, in the idea that technology allows you to scale, whereby your marginal revenue is substantially more than your marginal cost. That's business 101. But also the difference between the marginal revenue and the marginal cost just goes up and up and up and up. With tech, when you've got a tech platform, obviously you've got some humans involved, but what's been that experience as you have gone to the United States and seen the Volumes just go on that hockey stick growth curve. What has that meant for the business?

Speaker B: Yeah, so as you mentioned, the revenue growth piece, the size of the market. One of the things that's still quite interesting for me is when we speak to Australian clients, even big ones or big prospective clients, um, there's a, sometimes a view like we're still an Aussie, just an Aussie business, and they don't understand that 70% of group revenue is coming from the US now and all these other things. And so I've had a bank, for example, in Australia said to me, like, you know, we've got a lot of accounts, like how do you know you're going to manage them? And I was like, okay, well how many accounts we're talking about per month, whatever. And they're like, oh, 25,000. And you sort of have to go, well hey, like we have a fintech business and you've heard of them, if we mentioned the name, but like they refer 275,000 accounts a month and they're one fintech client in the United States and they start to go, wow, like, okay, that's a lot of volume. And often people don't realize in comparison to all of the other agencies we have in Australia, that Australian businesses only that we compete with, we have way more accounts in our system than them because we have six other countries, including as you mentioned, one that has a population of 330 million people. And so the scale piece is remarkable and it translates, as you said, into the uh, unit economics. And so like all early days startups, you, you got some early signal into what your gross margin profile and things should look like and what you want to see, particularly in software businesses it's quite early. But in the B2B and in the Enterprise B2B space it usually is pretty constrained early on. Right. And you need to see scale and operating leverage to kick in. And we saw that in the US and as the business started doing million of revenue, 5 million revenue, 10 million started to pick up, you started to see, hey, here's the economics you'd want to see. And when we present our P and L statement, certainly particularly on the gross profit side to prospective investors, it looks like a software business. Right? And that's always the nice part is you don't tell them what you do and you show the P and L and they're like, okay, so some sort of like high margin enterprise software business, great. And then you compare that to a traditional collection agency doesn't look like that. Um, certainly once we Acquire and we've seen it. And so you get to see the power of technology. And the last piece I'd add is I think there's an instinctive advantage that Australia and I think this even more true in New Zealand, like startups have here is that we have to almost always think global. There's a couple of local markets, like if you're in the mortgage market in Australia, big business, um, but if you are in certain categories it doesn't really work unless you go global. Look at some of the best Aussie tech companies we've ever had or fintech companies. Even the afterpays of the world, the Zips of the world, they're bigger businesses overseas than they are here now. Um, Canva, it's another great example. And so you look at those and I always think that's true and it's even more true in New Zealand because just the market size doesn't present the economic outcome. And in most venture capitalists are going to need to make their returns and so it forces the founders to think that way. And so we made very strategic early stage technology decisions to allow the fact that we thought we were going to go to the UK first and we're going to go all these other markets but we didn't think we were going to have to like we knew we're going to have to leave Australia at some point and whereas our US peers were like. And they still haven't left the US and now it's almost the tech debt has burdened beyond that. And so those clients we have in the US that have expanded into Mexico or expand into Canada expand with us and we expand with them. We only go into markets, we don't just go to Italy. You know, it's a potential next market for us because we want to. It's because our clients are asking us to. And that's really, really helpful for us because we can grow with people who trust us and go that way. And I think it's just an Aussie New Zealand thing you have when you start in a much smaller market and there's other examples around the world.

Speaker A: Yeah, so true. So let's talk a little bit about the size of the business. Um, I guess there's how many clients do you have, which is organizations but then how many end consumers might have because obviously those volumes might, you might charge on a volume based, um. Is that how you charge customers?

Speaker B: Yeah, we do a performance based sort of, um, we saw a performance fee model essentially where we only charge if we are successful in recovery which aligns incentives perfectly. Um, and so we. Yes, if you think of it, our revenue is a reflection on as a percentage, call it mid teen percentage of, of the total dollars gross recovered for the client. Um, and then we sort of split in that and get a little bit quirky in some markets. But for the most part it's broadly around that way. So you asked about clients, um, in the hundreds. Um, it actually sort of recently expanded most. And I'll sort of preface this, most big collections businesses have a highly concentrated group of big clients in a vertical. Um, there are a handful of businesses that do really well on the tail. We've acquired one in particular recently. It's got a nice long tail. Um, a business in New Zealand, and we've sort of developed our own. But it's very unusual to see like a $250 million revenue business in this space that'll have more than 200 clients and even top 20 will make up 80% of the revenue. So that's quite typical. We do want to change that over time. But, uh, we're in the hundreds and I think sort of 3, 400 clients overall, but a concentration towards the top, sort of 30, 40. That are the big significant logos that we've grown with. They refer millions of consumers. And I think I'd have to check since some of the recent acquisitions, but, but go back six months ago at any given point in time, sort of 3,4 million active consumers that we're reaching out to on a nearly daily basis to engage from. Um, and we're sending digital communications and even across some of the voice and physical letters and stuff that we're sending now. But you're looking in the order of magnitude of well over a quarter of a billion digital communications a year going out. Um, there's probably more now and then a few million, maybe 10 million phone calls, um, and hundreds of thousands of letters still in places where you need to legally, legally send them. So that's sort of the scale of outbound and contact. Um, and then the part that excites me the most, the technology component, about 88% of all payments we collect are consumers, uh, doing it themselves without any human involvement. And so they're then being nudged. They're working their way through. They're using the tooling, they're using the tech. Um, and then there's 12% of a big number that, uh, still want to speak to somebody or need some handholding or need some support. And we've got the customer service team to support that. That.

Speaker A: That's Great. You mentioned that you're now in the business where you are a software business. You've got these higher margins, you've got a great track record now of understanding the psychology of consumers in a different way from the traditional debt collecting mindset and business you're passionate about. ML AI in the future. We, I mean, we've already got AI creating voice that sounds like you. You know, I mean, what do you think is going to be the power of AI to replicate a human? To call a customer about an outstanding debt and the customer doesn't even realize that it's. They're speaking to a robot. I mean, this is the definition of the Turing Test, you know, from Alan Turing. If you're sitting in another room and you're speaking with Glenn the human and something that sounds like Glenn and you can't distinguish between the two of us, that's the Turing test. But I imagine that's very real for you.

Speaker B: Very real. Like it's, um. If any of my investors and board members are listening to this, uh, when it comes out, they'll remember the board meeting we had yesterday that had slides pertaining exactly to this. So we think, um, it is the next thing like we think that. So voicing collections is there was a cohort of tech led players like indebted that sort of took a view that voice is dead. You shouldn't use it. It's bad. And digital is the only way. You've got to use us or you're stupid. We were not that dogmatic about it. We thought it's clear that the overwhelming preference will be digital. But just like if something's urgent and I want to call somebody on my team, I don't want to write out an email. I want to jump on the call, I want to call you. Or I want to jump on a call with a family member, or I want to jump on a call with Qantas and rebook an urgent flight or something like I want to be able to have the convenience if I need to. And that's reflective of a lot of what we see in collections. And there's a cohorts of accounts that are more complex. It's one thing when you're chasing the $100 overdue mobile M phone bill. Um, but what if a consumer has a $67,000 personal loan and you need to look at how you could maybe do a discount on it, repackage it, uh, you know, do a whole bunch of different combination that's just sometimes hard over a self service mechanism. And so voice has applicability in a variety of areas where it's really strong. And so the challenge has been well for a lot of the players like us in our spaces, how can you get that margin profile, still have that and work out where. And so some people have decided we're only going to focus on products that don't need voice and sort of others like ours have sort of said we'll find the blended piece. And we've been waiting and I think that waiting time is right right now in the sense that my belief quite clearly is that there will be the ability to do exactly what you mentioned, that there will be an A collector that will be better in terms of performance, scale, cost efficiency than a human equivalent. Um, ironically they'll be trained on the human data. Um, so they will require each other to build that leverage point. I um, think that the challenge in executing it will be you need. I'm a big believer in verticalized AI versus horizontal. I think horizontal works in some areas for sure. LLMs, all those things. I don't think we have one for every but I think when the application specifics can be verticalized and so I

Speaker A: think like debt collection, it's just perfect.

Speaker B: Exactly. Because when you collect a debt it is different than settling a mortgage. It is different than a legal call. There's things you've got to say, there's things you can't say. And so you need deep, deep, deep volumes of high quality data labeled categorized, which we have and interestingly we have in a more in abundance because of the go to market strategy that we've also coupled with which is if we'd stuck only on the digital path and we'd only stuck in that area, we didn't have enough that you'd really think. But because we've now bought quite a lot of businesses that have done this for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years, 30 years in some cases. They have millions and millions and millions of phone calls that we're leveraging. And we've got a prototype in market. The team been testing it out. We're actually gonna probably get it here in one of our Australian clients soon we can start to see the first. If you listen to the prototype, you'll be like it's good, good, it's not there yet. But what's. What I find fascinating is like I listened to the version two weeks ago and I was like that's pretty bad. The version I heard a couple days ago, I was like that's not bad at all. And that's the difference. Of, you know, 600,000 calls trained. And so I'm like, okay, well let's categorize and, you know, label 20, 30, 40 million more and train and let's see how this thing goes. And what's going to be the best one is I look at it like self driving. You can simulate like Tesla and Elon and that do. But then when you've got, got a million cars on the road, 5 million cars, and they're all driving and logging miles. Well, the more phone calls we make with the AI and it working and not working is just going to reinforce the models and the more ability to train. So the quicker we can get it in the market, albeit how good it is, the quicker we're going to get the feedback loop we need. And then the last piece going to be navigating the regulatory landscapes. Um, and this is why I love having a global business, because there are markets like the US where this is really hard. Like it's pretty much banned. You can't do AI voice for collections because of a. It's called Telecommunications Consumer Protection act, tcpa and you have to get consent. Most people weren't prepared, don't have consent. And so it's challenging. Um, but that doesn't apply in Australia, that doesn't apply in Canada, it doesn't play in Mexico, the UAE or the uk and it may apply in the UK in the future in Australia, but we'll be in six more markets by then. And so I think that we can allow the regulatory landscape in the markets that are challenging to develop, but it doesn't have to hold us back because, you know, we have the ability to like, unlike our US Only peers who go sort of, there's not much we can do right now. We're like, fantastic. It's totally fine in Australia and it represents 20% of group revenue. It's a big business, got millions of customers and like, let's test it out, see how it works.

Speaker A: That's fascinating. Um, I'll be fascinated to understand when Robo Glenn is as good as. Not that I want to replace, uh, my job doing podcasts with, uh, a robot, but I'm sure it's coming. Um, the interesting thing that you raised there is, is that the rules are very different and I'm very surprised. I always thought America was kind of open slather for, uh, anything new in technology, particularly, you know, anything out of Silicon Valley. So that's surprising that they've put a block on that.

Speaker B: It is. The US is the hardest. I just underestimated it by magnitudes of the complexity. Um, and part of my bullishness on the business moving forward is like, once you've done the U.S. i think everywhere else is easy. I keep always tell that to our US Execs. I'm like, everything else is easier once you've done the U.S. it's so hard in our industry in particular. Um, and look there. It's funny, there is a lot of gray areas which require sort of legal interpretations. And, you know, it's a very litigious state. So you sort of just wear the lawsuits as part of the navigation. It's just the way they do business.

Speaker A: Your lawyers are your best friend.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's. It's a. It's a bizarre thing when, you know, you face like these plaintiff attorney lawsuits. And I mean, it's so foreign in Australia, and it's just sort of everyone's like, oh, it's just normal here. Like, just, you go with the flow, but it is restrictive. And I think this is also a part where, you know, you balance. I think this is a challenge with FinTech versus some of these other areas. But you've seen, and I always often draw the comparison to Uber for a lot of our team. You know, today I just get out of the airport and I jump on the app and I just get it. Like, it's just normal, right? Like, just normal. And yet, once upon a time, you know, that business faced like, this is illegal. You cannot do this in New York. And the taxi union and all the things I had to sort of deal with. Weird. But it took, uh, you know, a team, an executive team and founder and a board that supported saying, hey, look, we're doing what's better. And we're just, we're trying to provide convenience and cost and everything, but we need to navigate it and you have to take risk. And so it's an interesting way to navigate. I think financial service is harder because it's a lot more regulated and a lot more nuances, but you have to just find the blend. And I think for us, one of the things I like to rest on from a principal's perspective is we are here to provide a better experience for consumers. And so, like, we're not implementing the AI voice because we want to use it to harass people. It's the very antigone of what we actually started the business for. It's the opposite. Um, but it's understanding. If, again, if I think about booking an airline ticket, or rather changing an airline ticket, would I rather call the call center and hear current wait times of 43 minutes. Or would I rather it answer, uh, from automated glance. Who's going to be able to do everything I want and be like, I need you to change my Sydney flight to this time I've got a book where it's like, yep, we can move. It'll be $15.10. You're like, cool. Use the credit card. Done. And you sort it. Everyone's going to prefer the latter and

Speaker A: have it in an English accent or an Aussie accent.

Speaker B: Exactly. Any accent you want. And so I think that's the, that's the key. And so that's why you'd want to do that and offer that to consumers 24 7. Um, in a way that's convenient for them and as you said, in a way that they prefer to be communicated with. Not everybody's the same. And you know, how you speak to someone in New Zealand, in Auckland, is going to be different than how you speak to someone in syd, Certainly different asp someone in, uh, Dubai.

Speaker A: You raise a very good point. And a large part of the success is going to come down to you as the founder, giving kind of the moral guidance as well. Because it's very easy to go off track. It's very easy, particularly in debt collection, as we talked about earlier. It's very easy to increase your collections by being nasty and hard and. And what are the guardrails for how to approach humans who owe money? Um, so I think you're in a really challenging space, as you say, juggling all this different nation state legislation, but trying to keep your, should we call it your philosophical approach. Would that be your philosophy on what debt collection should be? How to treat people as humans who just happen to have found themselves in this position of not being able to pay, as you say, sometimes through fraud, but sometimes, you know, and they've still got to pay until they. Unless they go bankrupt or something. Um, so what's your view on how you might approach this idea of moral risk or, you know, this, this idea of putting guidelines on what is ethical AI, what is, what is not. Are you having those sorts of conversations?

Speaker B: Yeah, you can definitely worry about the situation, particularly in an AI setting where an agent goes rogue and realizes that the reinforcement part of the learning is the more I collect and then it goes, well, hey, if I'm mean to people, I collect a lot of money. And so that's going to be something we have to supervise and model and things like that. But I often use the compass on what would I want. Right. And so we face this right now in New York, New York State, um, it has got a whole bunch of new legislation rolling out related to collections that essentially long, you know, tldr, uh, is going to make it impossible to do digital collections in New York State. And it's already very difficult. And you look at the principle to which it's been embedded and it's. I just, I just philosophically disagree with it on every notion. One argument is, well, you know, you're going to make it super hard to collect. So that's part one. So, okay, great. We're going to protect our consumers from receiving calls from debt collectors. But the downstream implication of that is means recovery rates will be worse, which means cost of capital will be much higher. So now the person who lives in New York, their credit card is more expensive than the person that lives in Texas. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me, right? If you've got the same earning capacity or worse. Because that doesn't affect the person who has the hundreds of thousands of dollars of spare discretionary income they pay their credit card cards. The person who doesn't, who actually pays the interest is now even worse off as a result of that. And as opposed to being reminded of the need to pay. And a lot of the people that we do prompt and they go, oh yeah, I do have to pay that. And they re juggle their own finances to make that work. If you don't tell someone about that, that'd be like if you, again, you eat McDonald's every day, but you didn't put on any weight, but your insides were rotting and you don't find out until it's too late. It's almost that sort of equivalency. And so I find that just to be so against the consumer. And then I go, well, well, so the alternative for indebted to work that way is we just have to call, call, call and call. That's just so annoying. Like no one wants you to call them four times a day, three times a week, as opposed to the convenience of an email coming through. And we dealt with this early on around like email delivery times being captured as part of phone call times. And people are like, well, you know, the email was delayed by the sender and it arrived at like 9:03pm instead of 9:00pm and so you need to be sued for $1,000. And so did the email interrupt the person? They just read in the morning, they're like, well, you don't know. I was like, actually, I do they opened the email the next morning at 8am but what people don't understand often is that like we have a, I don't know the current numbers, but back in the day it was something like 30 to 40% of all of our consumers resolved their accounts outside of traditional operating hours. 2:00 clock in the morning, people were dealing with things. And so it's just this, this, it's so against that part. So to answer your question on the moral piece is we just look at it and go, what's best for the consumer? Right. And you know, and of course we have to juggle that. Sometimes it's as crazy as if the buttons placed too high in certain emails in the US Then we have a risk and we have to weigh that up to like, well, the uh, bearing the button at the bottom when the person's trying to work out how to pay is pretty hard too. But we also can't afford, you know, $2 million of lawsuits as a result. So we have to sort of take the trade off. But general principle, follow what's best for the consumer. And then if we can't win that battle, it's like, how do we help champion those things? And so there are lobbying things and there's government relations stuff that we can work through. But, um, it's hard. And then as far as keeping the guardrails on, the one thing I'm very happy with with the team we have at Indebted is that to encourage people to come on the journey to work at a debt collection company, you have to tie it to something better. And so if you walked and asked any of whether it's an engineer at our business or whether it's someone in sales or client. Success, success. One of the things that helps make it a lot easier for everybody is we're here to help people become more financially fit and we want it. And we know that any account that doesn't get referred to Indebted that goes to another agency, that consumer gets a worse experience. So we're motivated and driven to become the number one dominant player in the world because we want people to have a better result. And we think we can build a lot of other cool products off the back of that, that'll help them in other ways. And so I don't worry about the team losing that. If anything, I think they become the good reinforcing guardrails, make sure everybody stays on track and, and you're not overdriven by shareholder pressure or other demands to deliver better and better margins. Um, and we See that we will often have opportunities to improve margins by doing things like on charging payment fees and stuff. And we don't do that because we just don't believe it's best for the consumer. Um, and we think that that'll pay dividends in the long run versus $100,000 in the short term.

Speaker A: Yeah. Excellent. I could talk to you for ages about this, but I'm, um, very conscious of time and I've got a couple of other questions I wanted to ask you. Um, but thank you for talking through that. You mentioned their investors. I think that's a great topic to talk about. And again, conscious of time, could you sort of briefly describe the funding that you've raised and, uh, a, uh, shout out to any particular VC or investor that had either been with you the whole way or has been particularly helpful in terms of taking you to a global, uh, business.

Speaker B: Yeah, so. And I was fortunate enough to have dinner with most of them last night. But. So we've raised a bit north of $100 million collectively since we started the business. Now, um, the most recent being we raised 50 million in a series C led by Airtree, uh, end of last year. Um, but starting at the beginning, we raised, uh, a seed round from Reinventure, um, from Danny and the team. Danny's been a supporter and advocate and had my back since day one. Like we, you know, just like I was about to say with Dean and Kathona, we wouldn't be here today without them. Um, and to be honest, it's way more than anything to do with a business as much as it's just been a support for a founder. Very few people can live up to the founder first mentality. Um, piece as much as I'm sure it's reflective of Reinventure as a whole. But my relationship with Danny is like there will be things that you would argue are not in the best interest of the firm. That is in the best interest of the founder. And they will make that decision more times than I've seen enough to go that someone really has the back of a founder. So that's part one. Um, the same is true with Dean and the team at Carthona James as well. They have been with us, so they invested in our Series A and followed in every subsequent round. Um, and even got participated in a bit of the round of Series C as well. Um, and have, you know, I think we're one of the largest investments they've made across the whole Kathona Fund. Um, and so that's, you know, They've again been with us. And Dean in particular was the person that always advocated take the business global and take the risk that we knew enough data qualitatively that we could make this work, but you couldn't really write it on a deck and put in a paper and know and, and the decision to go into the US was at the time arguably like madness. Like we were in the middle of COVID We had never been in the us we were going to do an acquisition, we've never done an acquisition. We had to borrow money. It was just wrong on every way. And I remember the conversation with Dean, he said we're going to do this, we're going to make it happen. And again, we would probably be alive today if we hadn't gone into the us but we wouldn't be a business that's at the scale we are, um, and it becoming competitive advantage. And then, you know, we, I'd say particularly with Airtree and with Craig in particular sort of backing us at Series C, it showed two things for me. One is we'd obviously pitched every single Australian VC every time we'd been here. And so Airtree was no different. And they'd passed on the business twice before. Um, having the ability to say like, yeah, we missed it and we're happy, like we've got gross stage funds, that's what that's for helped. And frankly it also helped and I was probably a bit against this thinking no one, after two times, three, no one not going to invest again, so don't even bother. So we didn't even reach out for Siri. It was Craig who came to me and said, hey look, we heard you're outraising, have a look. And when you're able to show, hey, we passed six years ago business, uh, was doing a million dollars a year of revenue. We passed two years after that you're doing 7 million a year of revenue and last year you did 40. So something went wrong. We missed something. Tell us what we missed. And I was sort of saying, well this was what you didn't see. This is what we actually didn't know and we sort of worked through. But the part that made me really happy, the second takeaway was, is the fact that the Australian venture community has got to the point that they can lead these rounds of these businesses and you don't have to go overseas. That's the part that it just makes me so happy because like you don't wanna. There's something hard about raising capital overseas as like a different amount of and time consuming.

Speaker A: So it's not just the mental ah, stress that you, the constant pitching and the questions. It's the time that it takes you, the founder, uh, and co founders and senior leadership away from, from the, you know, creating the next version of the product, introducing the next version of the AI, whatever it is.

Speaker B: And there's such a good ecosystem here for institutional capital to back great venture capital firms like all the ones that I've mentioned, you know, whether it's in superannuation or other firms like there isn't. There's so much wealth to be concentrated to share that you can build these phenomenal businesses here.

Speaker A: But I have to ask you this follow up question if I may, is that there's a perception that um, the Aussies won't give you the same valuations of the Americans. They're not as optimistic as the American VC funds. What's your response to that?

Speaker B: I don't think it's true. Um, certainly I think it's becoming, if not less true and certainly I don't think it would eventually become untrue because I think in order for competitiveness to work, someone's not going to take a valuation that's wildly over. What I will say, and I'm sure a lot of other founders feel this way now, having survived through 2020, 2021, because that was a mad time and it was hard for a lot of people to survive with is valuation's not everything. And I think you've got to understand that you have to grow into your expectations. And so there's a little bit of thing of like I want the highest number because the AFR says the highest number makes everyone feel good the day after. It's like when you take a big loan out to buy a really nice something, you buy a nice car and you're like this thing just appreciate in a way really quickly. It's um, it's like that you, like you. If it says a billion dollars, you've got to grow into a billion dollars. Right. And so I think you want to be with, you want to do it at the right pacing. Um, and so that shouldn't be the only decision to make. But no, I think that particularly what you're seeing in the growth stage funds coming out of firms like Blackbird, Squarepeg and Airtree is that they want to be as competitive on the global stage and they have a home ground advantage and you should lean into it like you got Canva, you got safety culture, you got these great businesses here. Like one, not that's true.

Speaker A: But also the fact that you know, you can go, as you say, you go out to dinner, you can have drinks, you can have coffee. Right. And sometimes that's a time consuming process but it's kind of handy if people are just down the road.

Speaker B: Totally.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, final question. Uh, let's talk about team size and in particular do you have a shout out? Are you looking for anyone in particular? And we do have a. Interestingly we do have a global audience for this podcast. Most of the listeners are, are Aussies in uh, Australia. But you know I look at the stats too and we get listeners in the States, in the mostly other English speaking countries basically. So Hong Kong, Singapore, some in Malaysia, um, some in the Middle east now because it's booming fintech sector there. Um, and it could just be Aussies that go overseas.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so team size. We um, and again we just did two acquisitions that welcomed on about 100 people um, into the business. So we're somewhere around like you know, just shy of 500 people now.

Speaker A: Fantastic. Huge. And where were those acquisitions?

Speaker B: Uh, us, um, to get into the big, big part of our telco expansion and then New Zealand. We bought a phenomenal business and brought that founder on board as the managing director of our New Zealand business, which is awesome. He came over yesterday too and saw the team which was great. Um, so yeah, team size is big. Um, and we're pretty, I'd say equally. Well it's becoming less so equally distributed to in sort of Australia, us and everywhere else. But now a good pocket in New Zealand as well. Um, if there's a particular role for me, I think it actually is we're looking for someone to lead our Australian business. Um, and so part of this sort of regionalization model and we're looking to go to market to that soon but looking for that sort of MD who wants to be able to drive the business to the next level. Um, own the P and L, own the go to market component here and sort of see it's still home ground and home turf and a lot of our exec team is still here. So it's a very, very important market and one we want to get right. And then the only other one would be is like yeah, anyone with interest in the Middle East. We hopefully will get the opportunity to announce a pretty cool deal that we're doing there, there uh, in the next sort of two to three weeks and will require us to build out a, a bit more of a team um, in the uae. And so yeah, anyone either there or interested in making a move over in a variety of different roles. Feel free to reach out.

Speaker A: No, that's fantastic. And the media partner that we have for the podcast distribution started uh, with Australian Fintech and he has launched um, publications in UAE in the US in, in the uk. Yeah. So the boom in um, what you might call the post petro economy and how some of those forward thinking um, nations in the Middle east have really started to think about well what do we do post oil. Um, and some of them have gone, well we've got to be a global financial center in that there's a great time zone thing. And why not be the kind of city of London or New York for the Middle East?

Speaker B: Absolutely. FinTech in the UAE in particular in Dubai and Abu Dhabi is exhilarating. Like I just encourage everyone to have a look. It is so fun. It is moving so fast. It is so open. It's been built incredibly modern. Um, you know there's a Neo bank that I'm, I've used recently over there. Like best Neo banking experience I've ever, I've ever seen. And this app is incredible. Um, and it's just, it, yeah it is, it's very, very cool to see what's happening there. And then to your point, I think there's just a, there's an acceleration that's driven by something bigger than just the natural stuff that happens on the ground which is we've got to rebuild this. Um, and it's been taken very seriously and it's um, yeah, the, where it connects into the hub of the rest of the world is very cool.

Speaker A: It is. And I think, you know I went to school in uni with uh, a lot of people whose say parents or grandparents came from the Middle East. You know, a lot of people did migrate to the UK or came because of problems, you know, wars and things. And I think the region has suffered because of this reputation as being a dangerous place. But it's um, you know there are many countries that want to try and look past that and build up successful economies. So I think as you say, it's definitely worth a look.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're having spent a lot of time with a very large bank in Abu Dhabi recently, um, as part of the work we're doing. It is the safest city on earth, which we didn't realize until I was getting all the pitches uh, from the team there. It's like you realize and incredible schools, incredible infrastructure, incredible health care and credit. Like it's, it is, it is really well done. He Said there's parts of the region, absolutely not like that. But I think that that reputational piece has been somewhat damaging in the past. But now is is incubating to something where again a lot of fintech products and I won't go into too long in this, but like a lot of the laws that prohibited lending for a

Speaker A: long time, well it's Sharia law.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Not allowed interest.

Speaker B: Exactly. Now that started to change at a regulatory level already it's small, minor parts of it, interest. But you think about a product like buy now, pay later, well there is no interest. And so you wouldn't be surprised to know that like the leading BNPL player in that region is a multi billion dollar company growing 100% year over year, that will almost certainly IPO in the next couple of years. And it's like you look at it and most people would never have heard of the name and yet it's half the size of a firm and everyone knows that name. Right. And so it's pretty cool when you see that because unlike the sort of adoption curve you might see a BNPL in Australia which was still up and to the right, this went at a pace that no one's ever seen before because there is no alternative. You didn't have to take people from credit cards to bnpl, there was no credit cards. And so it became ubiquitous very quickly. And so the things that we're sort of become familiar with are just instinctive. Um, and then there's certain applications, stuff like things like WhatsApp and others which just run everything as opposed to no one sends sms, which is another bizarre thing to wrap your head around.

Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes. Look, we could spend a whole episode on things like WhatsApp because that's revolutionized communications. But um, I'm appreciate it when you're next because you're flying around the world. So when you're next in Sydney, please get in touch. I'd love to do another episode on either the acquisitions, the growth, um, the nudge economics, I think that's fascinating but also what you're finding around what works in communications, whether uh, and I think that's a conversation around AI, around WhatsApp. But I'm fascinated also by your comment that um, UAE is the safest country because I know a lot of people in Singapore and, and that's the thing that they, they.

Speaker B: So they've lost apparently.

Speaker A: Oh dear, oh dear. They. They'll be. So shout out to the Singapore listeners.

Speaker B: Sure. It's number two or three.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. Um, But, Josh, thanks very much for being here.

Speaker B: Apprec.