Beyond the origin story: How AROBS Built a global tech brand from a Cluj-Napoca garage

Speaker A: The origin story did a lot of work. We are from Plushnapoca. We have the engineering culture, the academic tradition, the course quality, balance of Eastern Europe, things like that. Those value point, unique selling point were legible, uh, to a Western European buyer. They still are. They are not gone, but, uh, they are not, they are no longer sufficient because as you cross toward a certain level of complexity and size, of course we know that the origin story becomes too small a container for the actual story that is happening right now. So if the brand would stay just a story about Romania, you would, I mean the organization would have a credibility problem with the uh, 70% of our revenue that come from outside Romania. So uh, that's one very important aspect. And also we are talking about the sense of belonging, a problem related to the sense of belonging from every college who joined us later on. And they had nothing to do with Kluznapoca or Romania. So we have to expand our story to involve everything that was actually happening. And um, what we wanted was to, we wanted to reframe the identity toward a value based and business outcome, outcome based approach. Practically we took our origin, original values and uh, talked about them. And of course we took the outcome based story and we are talking about it. When we say European by birth, international by culture, we are very proud from where we started and now we are global. So practically we are now working on a brand brand architecture that has local, locally inflected execution. So that's important for every one of our offices and all our colleagues.

Speaker B: Welcome to a new episode of Value Driven Marketing Podcast. In this episode we are following the journey of arops, from a small Romanian outsourcing shop to a global technology group. What made this possible, what was hard, and what other companies can learn from it. My guest today is Andrea um Marco, Chief marketing, communication and Sustainability Officer at arobs, the largest technology company publicly traded in Romania with over 1300 employees across 10 countries. Since joining Arobs in UH, 2018, Andreea has been at the center of one of the most ambitious growth stories in Romanian tech. She leads strategic marketing across 27 business units in seven countries, supported the company's growth from 500 to over 1300 people, and orchestrated more than 10 company and product rebranding initiatives. She's also taken on ESG and sustainability as part of her mandate, which as we'll discuss, is increasingly central to how global technology companies earn um trust. Andrea is an Esaid Executive MBA and someone who thinks seriously about the intersection of brand, business outcomes and long term growth. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope you take as much value from it as possible. I'll catch you on the next one. Hey Andrea, good morning. So good to see you and welcome to the Value Driven Marketing podcast.

Speaker A: Good morning. Thank you so much for, uh, for your invitation. Very, very pleased and, and honored to, to join you in your uh, podcast.

Speaker B: And it's my honor and my pleasure to discover your story and Arab story. So maybe let's start from the beginning. Arobs has started as a small company. We can say the true Romanian IT story. 10 people in an apartment in Cluj back in 1998. I think we can say it was a boom period for the IT industry as a whole in Romania. Many companies started around those times, but what happened is that lots of them grew up to a certain size, maybe 100 people, 200 people, and then they plateaued. However, this is not your story. Arabs continue to grow. You are now an international company. And so I'm very curious to learn what is the reason behind.

Speaker A: Yes, it started 27 years ago and it started like, almost like a group of friends, the technology version of uh, Rock Group in a garage. Uh, what I think is the most interesting, uh, aspect included in your question is in fact what happened? Was there a, ah, point of inflection, which was the moment that helped Arof to grow further the other company that were launched at the pretty much same time. So practically, I would add another question to your question. Okay, so the question would be what type of organization do you need to become in order to make an inflection point like that structurally repeatable? So practically what we or everyone must do to make this happening over and over again. Looking at arops from the inside, from my experience with them since I joined, there was not a, uh, single dramatic point or pivot. There were many of them. One silver lining among this inflection point is, uh, how the company prioritize depth of value creation over breadth of service delivery. What I think made, uh, Arabs different very early was, uh, their willingness to pursue industries with higher barrier to entry and even harder problem to solve. And they managed to achieve long term partnership that matters most. And, um, that means our teams are competing on trust, on rigorous accumulated institutional knowledge that will come only after years and years of deep partnership we built.

Speaker B: And I love that you said what sort of organization you have to become to actually overcome that barrier, because maybe a lot of people would assume, you know, you are that company from day one, but you actually evolve, as I understand from your story. And I think that's an interesting point you're making

Speaker A: is a succession of challenges, of dramatic moment if we want to use that word and the way the organization overcome them and make the most of those challenges.

Speaker B: And you have a very interesting history, a lot of uh, important milestones. Uh, I want to stop to one of them. In 2003 you went the route of uh also developing your own software products, which is something not many uh software outsourcing companies venture into or when they do they found out it's a very different model that they cannot sustain. However your story is different and so I want to know more about how running uh a software development business and running products at the same time has influenced the organization and what this has required uh of marketing altogether.

Speaker A: This is one of the questions that go directly to the heart of out of strategic DNA. Their decision to build own products like optimal first in 2003 then track GPS and later on UCH MSA which have UM has UH Truha share and DP payroll as products alongside the service line was more than just a diversification move. At that time ARUP decided practically to verticalize to integrate their learning from different industries. Because when you build your own product you face all the problems your clients face. The go to market risk, user adoption, um, competitive positioning, everything that one client need to overcome, you have to learn how to overcome it yourself because you have your own product. I'm convinced, everyone is convinced that we are a better engineering partner just because of that. Because we are all the time on the other side too. So practically uh, right now we have software products that deliver repeatable value to over 11,000 customers in uh, Europe and Asia. I think this strengthens our brands as a company that ships things that works in real life. For marketing this is a uh, dual architecture that is both uh, complexity, challenge complexity and the gift. The complexity is in the fact that we serve different types of client. Buyer journey the enterprise procurement cycle is for software services for custom project takes a lot like maybe over a year at the same time the software as a service style acquisition journey for telematics, uh shorter is fastest, is one of the fastest. But the gift is the fact that we have a much richer narrative. We are not just a body shop. We are a technology group that understand the full arc from bespoke engineering to our own product. And finally now the narrative is even richer uh because we have three business lines now. We added integrated systems a few years ago which is practically an B2E project. And we have clients as the national pension house ministries of Romania and Several others. I think this is another, another great narrative angle. Our engineering excellence supports now digitalization with a very important end goal to improve the lives of tens of millions of people. Which bring us the story of a greater scope with bigger responsibilities. And that's very interesting for us for marketing.

Speaker B: I'm sure this is an interesting journey. I do want to ask about your positioning and in particular uh, not only are you in a competitive industry but you're also serving very demanding customers in the most compliant intensive uh, sectors such as aerospace, medical, finance. And I'm wondering was this a uh, deliberate positioning choice from the beginning or has this been Arabs adapting to what the market was demanding?

Speaker A: It's about both. Their journey is a uh, proper bookcase for uh, demand side theories of uh, competitive advantage that said that the firms are shaped by the quality of the client need or demands. So practically demanding clients ask for more rigorous engineering. Stronger engineering attracted more demanding clients. So particularly in the last decade this came, became a deliberate competitive choice. But at the first was like you know, the demand from the market. Why, why now it's a deliberate competitive choice. Because regulated industries from my perspective are the most sustainable industries. For example medical, medical device software is not going to be disrupted by a new social media platform or financial infrastructure is not going to be replaced or strongly disrupted, disrupted by hackathon or you know, so it's, it's going, I'm talking about the structure, the weight of those industry in whatever is happening in this world. That's why they will sustain practically forever with sustained growth in their ecosystem. So from my point of view, company that anchor uh, the business in a domain where safety, security, compliance are non negotiable, that company is building a client base that is not going to disappear overnight that has structural uh, continuity. What this means for marketing is that our communication has to be about proof of excellence, but proof of responsibility. Because we work with trust signals. Not just trust signals but also capability signals. Of course. But we have to show trust. We have to show that we are to be trusted. And we have to show that through evidence, certification, delivery, track record, governance framework, our commitment to cybersecurity, our commitment to responsible AI. So practically what I see as a um, value driven marketing approach in a regulated industry is about trust, not just technical proficiency. Our job in marketing is to translate this into the language of business risk reduction of business outcomes to create the long term partnership confidence. Mhm.

Speaker B: And this is a long term play. You cannot win trust, especially in the aerospace. So working with the European um, aerospace agency doesn't happen overnight.

Speaker A: That also. Yes.

Speaker B: So Andrea, you spoke about Arabs positioning. Now I'm wondering in terms of differentiation, uh, Arabs plays in a very competitive market. There's intense competition from countries surrounding Romania. So a lot of uh, talent in CE in Poland, Ukraine, in the Baltics. I'm wondering what has helped Arabs differentiate and also how that differentiation has evolved from the beginning until now.

Speaker A: That's a very good question because you know, when, when we thought about our beginning story that framing was a little bit limiting because um, we are not just Romanian ah, company coming from uh, Eastern Europe. Now we are competing as a global technology group with deep roots in Eastern Europe, which is different. What I'm trying to say here is that the fact that a Romanian software company competes on geography, on proximity, cost, time zone, alignment with Europe, let's say like that. Meanwhile, global technology group competes on the quality of its intellectual capital, the resilience, delivery model, domain expertise, depth, credibility of the governance. So what I see now is the fact that AROP's differentiators are structural, not geographic. Uh, first one would be the depth of the sector knowledge and technology excellence. The second one is the duality we spoke before services and product models which give us fluency with full software products ecosystem, um, for many, many industries and the life cycle itself of the software product. Third, and this is what I care is something that I care deeply about our commitment to responsible growth. What that means. We are uh, in 11 countries but we are the same everywhere we are. So practically our sustainability reporting and our sustainability posture shows it demonstrate that we behave the same. We have the same structure, the same government everywhere we are. And this is a structural value point for Arods.

Speaker B: Also let's speak about 2021 when you decided to become a public company. So you are now listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange. This is not just about financing. This is also about um, a power play let's say this is about positioning. How has this change the way you do business and what does it require of the marketing department as well?

Speaker A: Public listing, Our public listing was, is one of the best stories ever from my point of view since working in Arox. Because capital market are not just the finance are a financing mechanism of course mainly, but uh, also a discipline mechanism, reputation mechanism. And in our case when we listed as the largest technology group on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, it became a uh, sort of representation mechanism for the entire category. Of course there are several other technology companies publicly listed in Romania but somehow we represent the technology sector now because we are the biggest. So our narrative let's get back to. Narratives change a lot. It's much more complex and very interesting of course from my perspective. So of course the financial dimension of what changed in arops is the, the obvious one. We had the ipo, we had the largest capital increase for a technology company. And we brought uh, many, many institutional investors plus European um, Bank for Reconstruction and Development. That unlocked a lot of resources to accelerate growth for M. And as it creates a pace of growth that couldn't have been reached just by cash flow and bank financing. So that's the first structural change that happened more than more. Moreover, uh, becoming a listed company bring discipline to governments, to reporting and of course investor relation. They become strategic function. So practically what is happening I see, I see changes building every day a new architecture of sustainable scale. So practically what is the mandate of us in marketing? Let's go back to marketing. And the communication team was a deep transformation because when we are a listed company, your brand is not just a commercial asset. It becomes more than anything a financial asset. Because we are talking about analyst perception, investor communication, ESG reporting. Again that's very important. Everything has to create credibility. Everything has to build together with uh, the new governance standards. That's why this credibility, the quality of our narrative in the capital market ecosystem, these are embedded, embedded in our marketing function in ways that require new skills and new frameworks. Which is for me is captivating and I love uh, a challenge. So yes. So practically alongside our financial reporting we have our communication, investor relations, npr, everything changed, I mean upgraded a lot. And we have our sustainability report that is also a compliance document, an investor communication uh, document and the brave statement.

Speaker B: Mhm. And it feels as if being now a public company has gone or has enabled I guess bigger players to trust Arabs even more. Because being a public company is not something that everyone can achieve. It requires uh, yeah, doing things a certain way, being a certain type of company, having certain capabilities.

Speaker A: Of course we are talking about transparency here. So from a company local, it doesn't matter, local, national, international, you become public, therefore transparent. Any client could just look for very detailed information about how we are financially, how we do in sustainability, how we communicate to the market. So we are very transparent. Therefore I think we gain another great perspective where we can continue to build even more on the trust. We talked before. So yes, this is a wonderful opportunity for us.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So speaking about becoming an international company, I know this is a, has been a complex journey. You're, you're on this journey still. But if you were to isolate uh, a few success Factors like the actual mechanism that has propelled Arabs into becoming this international company that is today. What would you say those factors are?

Speaker A: Yes, when we started to grow internationally. I mean I remember in my first week of work here, I needed to send uh, a press release about our first international acquisition. That was the one in the Netherlands. And of course I was extremely nervous. But that was the first moment, the first, first announcement that show to the world, to the people watching us, we, a uh, Romanian company bought something, um, um, I mean a company in Western Europe that was a very. One of the main inflection points following all those acquisitions. I think it comes here, um, to our success factor. Coming back to your question, I think we have local depth, not just local present in the country we are working. There are different between just opening an office in a country and becoming embedded in the business system ecosystem. So from my marketing perspective, we treat our offices as uh, intelligent nodes, places when you learn how the market see the client see how decision I make made, which are the general demand, you know, regulation or not. The cultural expectations from us practically around partnership about this, around decision making. So that's extremely valuable for us. Another aspect of the, another success factor is the fact that we have a portfolio, A portfolio resilience through diversification across sectors, but also geographies. So practically our client being distributed uh, across Europe, North America and Asia in many industries from financial services to life sciences, clinical trials, telematics and so on. Aerospace, if you mentioned that, because you mentioned that earlier. So this is a success factor because we had a uh, deliberate de. Risking of the businesses of the business model against the volatility of any single sector, but also any geography. The practice is not just the risking of the diversification between software, services, products and B2G. We have also diversification across geography which is a huge success factor and a good value point for our financial sustainability and ah, our growth. And I would add something important from my perspective, we have cultural humility as a competitive asset. We call ourselves European by birth, national by culture. Because we are not just a Romanian company trying to look global. You know, we are a global company with roots in Romania. But uh, what I'm meaning about this genuine cultural sensitivity is I think we have the ability to communicate differently, to adapt proportions, to adapt our uh, rhythm in relationship in the process of decision making. We have different expectations because we are eager to learn how culture bring us together or keep up separate. We have different expectations and communication to different markets. And that is a discipline that is actively built and maintained in my team but group wide also.

Speaker B: And because you've mentioned acquisitions, so you've been through quite a few acquisitions, uh, 13 more specifically, you've basically doubled in size. And so I'm wondering how do you integrate different companies, each with its own culture, way of doing things, identity and how do you keep the brand harmonious and consistent?

Speaker A: Of course that's a very good question and a very complex one. I mean when I, when I'm thinking of this uh, this question I'm thinking about the, the cost and the risks of uh, cultural fragmentation. I mean I like to, I like to analyze, analyze, uh, when I'm coming to a new challenge or problem to be solved. And I'm trying to also analyze the cost and the risk practically in everything. So that's why I'm looking at culture as um, uh, involving also cast and rips. So starting with the very first acquisition, Arup's approach has been to anchor integration in value commitments, in value alignment, connected to business synergy. Practically. We acquired a company that in one way or another reminded us of ourselves. Similar goals, similar culture and people profile. Similar, similar people profiles. Practically all those acquisitions complete us business wise but they also match us more or less culturally. Therefore right now arof brand is an enabling architecture. So practically a shared commitment, a set of shared commitment. We, my team and not and us uh, that we are involved in the integration process. We do hope that our colleges feel that the Aro's brand is something that they want to belong to. So I think this is something more ambition, that ambitious um, than just the brand consistency in the old school way. Like everyone should use these colors and do this. You know this is important. But what about growing together as one arrows like one culture. But there is a lot of work is not done. You know we have uh, companies coming in Arab group every year. So this one or two or three. So there is a continuous effort to try to achieve this goal.

Speaker B: Mhm, mhm. And of course the brand is not just about as you said, what it looks like, the colors and the fonts and what it looks from exterior, but also about the values that support the brand and those values live as long as people believe in it. So I love the fact that you mentioned your buying companies that not only complement your business but also you buy companies with similar uh, kind of personalities and profiles. So it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker A: That's the plan. That's the big plan.

Speaker B: So if we are to focus a little bit on marketing, what would you say you as an organization Arabs had to fundamentally do different from you know, being a local company to now being an international companies with European roots, as you said. So how has that changed in the way you do marketing, in the resources you have to deploy, in how the marketing is structured.

Speaker A: So yes it was a huge change, but somehow it was natural. You know, when uh, when I thought about your question, I had to think about it because for me it seemed like it was natural. So I had to go back and think about it. And what I think it was, the main change was we had to stop thinking of the brand of us as a story about our origin, about necessary, you know, we are coming from somewhere. We are from somewhere. When Aaron was younger and a uh, Romanian company with essentially a Romanian company with international client, the origin story did a lot of work. We are from Plushnapoca. We have the engineering culture, uh, the academic tradition, the course quality, balance of Eastern Europe, things like that. Those value point, unique selling point were legible to a Western European buyer. They still are. They are not gone. But uh, they are not, they are no longer sufficient because as you cross toward a certain level of complexity and size, we know that the origin story becomes too small a container for the actual story that is happening right now. So if the brand would stay just a story about Romania, you would, I mean the organization would have a credibility problem with the uh, 70% of our revenue that come from outside Romania. So uh, that's one very important aspect. And also we are talking about the sense of belonging, a problem related to the sense of belonging from every college who joined us later on and they had nothing to do with Krusnapoca or Romania. So we have to expand our story to involve everything that was actually happening. And um, what we wanted was to, we wanted to reframe the identity toward a value based and business outcome based approach. Uh, practically we took our origin original values and uh, talked about them. And of course we took the outcome based story and we are talking about it. When we say European by birth, international by culture, we are very proud from where we started. And now we are global. So practically we are now working on a brand, uh, brand architecture that has local, locally inflected execution. So that's important for every one of our, our offices and all our colleges. Because consistency, I don't see consistency meaning necessarily meaning complete, complete uniformity, Consistency, not uniformity. So because, I mean it's pretty easy, a tone of voice that could sound trustworthy in Germany, sound sounds cold in Italy. So practically we have to stay consistent to our value, uh, visual identity, of course Quality, standard positioning. But we have to talk with everyone that is Arabs or partners of Arabs separately, finely tuned. So the communication and the brand is perceived following our value and following our real really life delivery business outcome.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Okay, so I have one more thing to add here, maybe a surprise for our listener and I'm going back to sustainability again. As I said before, our sustainability framework has become one of the instrument, the power of Israel for brand coherence. Just because everyone can see that we are pretty much the same everywhere we are. So it's a document that talks about everything we do regarding our own workforce environments in all our locations. But that's coming back to governance, which I love. This is uh, this shows our commitments and I hope it will help us uh, gain trust with clients, investors and colleges and maybe our future colleges.

Speaker B: And that takes I think someone who has strategically look at those things and then I'll be able to lead the team to execute them. Which takes me to my next question which is in your role, which seems like a very complex one because you manage marketing, you oversee marketing, comms, sustainability in many companies those are very different functions with separate teams probably. So what is your integrated theory of value creation through marketing? How does marketing create value and how is this evolving now, particularly with the AI disrupting the way we do things?

Speaker A: I'm much more than ever convinced of the fact that um, the marketing model that will sustain competitive advantage in the next decade are value creation models behind the question of how do we get people in our funnel. We have the question how do we create genuine uh, sustainable value for every stakeholder who encounters our brand one way or another, before, during, after any commercial relationship, commercial or investment relationship. What it, what I think it means is um, we can do this. I mean we can create durable value if we invest in continuous learning and education internally, but also externally. We have to try, teach and educate communities and markets. We have to build thought leadership. We will have to communicate things that makes Arabs relevant to everyone around us. That Arabs will be perceived as trustworthy and a leader in its own. We, we can create uh, this uh, value by treating sustainability and governments as marketing assets and communication. And I said, they will say before, I said before we talk before because those and the conformity and all the, all the system because these are the signals of the kind of partner we can be or our clients, investors, our colleagues and so on. So I think this is from my perspective would be the main. I have another one we have to ensure, but that's pretty basic. I think everyone have to ensure that the brand promise we make will be actually delivered and actually create value in our value chain. So uh, we have to, I mean companies have to see, they have to drop the narrow view of I am here and I need to survive or to grow some revenue. And we have to see our organization as part of ecosystem of value chain and having many stakeholders uh, that each and every one of them can bring us uh, value because we also create value for them.

Speaker B: I feel that recently where it's been more of a topic conversation topic of how we create value rather than how we just acquire clients. Because if you, the latter will definitely follow.

Speaker A: And uh, you also asked me about how AI fit into this whole story of creating value. I mean I will start with some uh, uh, sobering data.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: We marketing we have to consider it to be aware of. So I found out that uh, only 23% of the client, the consumers currently trust brand to use AI responsibly. And uh, the consumer comfort with AI in market has fallen from let's say 57% 20, 23 to 46% the following year. So what everyone is talking about is also is a new concept called AI booing. The phenomenon where some part of consumer actively penalize uh brands for AI use which feels not okay, inauthentic, you know. So we have to be considerate of that and we have to be grounded in principles and we have to take everything with a uh, grain of salt. At arops our position is grounded in the same principle uh we use for, for actually working with AI with our clients in our project, our uh, products. So AI is not the goal but the business performances. So us being the first company that uh was awarded uh the ISO ESO standard for Artificial Intelligence Management System last February by Bureau Veritas Romania. We as a whole we have the standards certified that we know how to use AI in our day to day work and of course in building projects software project for the clients for our clients. In the marketing context of course we use AI many tasks of productivity mostly. Optimization mostly or um, analytics sometimes it depends. Translation of course of complex technical uh messaging, higher Persona messaging, whatever. So as pretty much everyone is doing I guess uh, we do not use AI where authenticity and human expertise are the actual value proposition coming back to value. So all we marketer have to be aware about the goods and the best of everything. All the new technology will bring in our work. So if we are aware of the risk and we know how to mitigate them, we are fine. We are going to be just. I personally Believe that in AI, regarding AI or any other technology that will uh, will just come up, you know, I think we have to have discipline and we have to have governance, uh, to protect the ethical standards and the reputational assets. Let's not forget about the reputation. That's enormously important.

Speaker B: And we've had some examples of AI slow, but I'm curious to learn. Andrea. So in B2B we discuss a lot about. So you've been mentioning brand and the power of brand and the narrative and how to speak has evolved at Arabs. And I know in B2B there's a lot of focus on the short term demand gen and then the debate of whether you know, you invest more in demand gen, you invest more in brand is an old one. And I'm curious to learn what is the right mix, how you see things of Arabs, what is the case with you?

Speaker A: That's the whole controversy. So practically looking at our business, we have, we marketing and communication. We serve three fundamentally different commercial models at the same time.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: We have the software services. We talked about the dynamic long sales cycle, relationship mediated, uh, decision. Brand is just, I mean just brand is the prime primary is for permission to enter. It's a thing. Here we are talking about reputation architecture. So conference presence, industry feasibility, priority, technical publication, partner, etc. So that pretty much what we do more or less. Not just that, but yeah. Uh, the second business line software product, we have thousands and thousands of customers is very much closer to our software as a service model. Short cycle digital, many digital touch points, stronger return of investment, pressure on individual campaign and B2G. This is another different, completely different story. We have to build a trust, uh, compliance, long term relationship here for integrated Systems. So for B2G the cycles are the longest.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Every business line has a different market investment model so you cannot apply the same, the same template for everything. It's very, very sophisticated. And of course we have also the global dimension, so the internationalization dimension which is another important layer. We cannot operate with a single template, uh, the same step everywhere. So as I said before, we have a uh, global asset texture with locally inflected execution. And yes, the tools are the same with everyone. We have the same tool but the approach is very much different. Tone of voice is different, the channels are different, the funnels are building different. Mhm. We try to do the best for each and every business line.

Speaker B: Andrea, I do have one final question. Uh, so you've sustainability, uh, a few times. I know this is a topic close to your heart and you look at it as being a strategic function. And I'm wondering what do you believe marketing and growth leaders in Romania, but also Europe, who large marketing and growth leaders in tech companies need to understand about building for the long term. So. Building.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: What are those things?

Speaker A: Yes, thank you for asking that. I mean most of the people I talk to, they think there is a uh, dichotomy between sustainability and growth. Uh, they think that those two are somewhat in some sort of tension that you can either grow fast or grow responsibly, not both at the same time. I think it's because most people see sustainability as built on only three pillars. It's the environment, social and government. With the uh, old school esg, when we talk sustainability we have to include something very important and this is the finance driven core of sustainability. Sustainable growth. Growth means money practically when you sustain the revenue streams it's also sustainable growth is sustainable growth. So that's why I think, you know, I mean it's a learning uh, it's a new experience for everyone in our society or beyond. So it just needed to be, to be talked more about it. Why do I include uh, the finest part in the system sustainability? Because we are talking about risk mitigation. You identify and price all the risk and reputational of course, why not to protect asset and capital you, you create value optimization like from a uh, short term profit strategy toward resilient long term wealth generation. That's a huge, very interesting aspect. You, you create capital allocation like channeling private and public fund into businesses and project that will sustain sustainable economic transformation and growth for the company and from, for, for the community. Compliance. Another favorite part of mine that's also lead to transparency, that will lead to trust, that will lead to more clients. And one very interesting aspect I want to talk about for me it's interesting, I hope it's, it's going to be interesting for you also and for your, for listener. So I want to talk a little bit about the social return of investment. This is the KPI.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Technically the financial KPI. It's not very much used like public discussion or private discussion. Ah, this one measured how much social and environmental value is creative for every euro invested. So practically they translate non financial outcome to monetary terms. So let me give you an example. So let's say Arabs, hopefully Arabs build another national platform that facilitates some sort of national uh, system, welfare, well being, whatever. Now after the end of the project, several million of uh, people in Romania can check, update, manage their rights. They have rights in this platform. Okay. Instead they'll go into an office and waiting for hours to solve problems. Practically the payment go without errors, uh, fraud is caught early. Public servants have time to focus on other things. People are generally doing much better than to this platform. Okay, what this means the hours saved by the people, the hours saved by the worker in that institution. The social return um, of investment of this project means that you compare the cost of the platform with the social benefit the platform brings. So uh, maybe the answer would be for €1 spend we created €9 value for society, not for Arabs. But the entire project will create a lot of valuable, even transform into monetary, into euros a lot of value. So that's uh, very interesting for me. The social return of investment. Practically any company that grow will keep on creating social return of investment. Not just doing. Not arrows by doing a national platform, but arrow. But by investing in some uh, program from for student or uh, just creating job a company will create social return of investment.

Speaker B: So this is. It almost feels as if as you're growing you're also helping the environment grow with you. In a way, yes.

Speaker A: Society. Society as a whole, or uh, at least local community, I mean me from Arabic we can say we want to be a responsible citizen in the community we are a part of. Now we are bigger. So maybe we can positively impact larger community, you know, wider community. So that is one of the values of Arabs that I was very pleased to find, uh, to find when I came joined them eight years ago is about helping community growth one way or another.

Speaker B: Mhm. Yeah. Makes total sense. Andrea, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for going so in depth. I super appreciate you being here and learning about your journey and I'm you know, cheering from the sidelines for yourself and for Arabs. So thank you very much.

Speaker A: Thank you so m much. My pleasure.