Olivier Lafontaine:
This season, I sat down with some of the most forward-thinking technology leaders in life insurance, CIOs, CTOs, heads of transformation at major carriers. And one team that kept coming up, there's too many systems and technology to evaluate and not enough of a framework to do it well. In this episode, we are going to hear about this process from the vendor's perspective, how different insurance companies approach vendor selection and what appears to be more effective. So I took the unique opportunity this time to interview my boss, Luis Romero, the CEO of Equisoft. Luis, welcome to Life Accelerated.
Olivier Lafontaine:
So as we usually do, if you've listened some of this podcast, is we ask personal questions to hear something a little different from each of the interviewees. So everyone at Ecuasoft knows you like the Rolling Stones. So let's start with how many times have you seen them in a show?
Luis Romero:
At least 10 times in many countries. I usually plan my vacations around the show, so I'm very disappointed that they canceled their tour last year.
Olivier Lafontaine:
When did that start? Actually, I should have asked you this before, but when did you start liking the Rolling Stones?
Luis Romero:
Probably 30 years ago. Actually, yeah, it was at university. A friend of mine gave me the best of the Rolling Stones, and from there, I've been a great fan.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Good stuff. All right. So onto their serious stuff, and this one is going to be easy. So can you tell us about Equisoft, the history, early days of the company, and what did the first 10 years look like?
Luis Romero:
Sure. The first project we got, we're in 1994, so that's the time where there was still a lot of custom development. And a mutual fund company hired us to develop an asset allocation software. So that fund company had great relationships and they wanted to help the advisor community. So we helped develop a software and it was a great experience because the day you had to ensure the quality assurance was top-notch as they pressed a thousand copies of the three floppy disk and distribute them. But the experience was very valuable for me and the three of us, well, two and then three and then four. But after developing the software, the company asked us if we could support the software for a few months. So we were on front row receiving the calls from the advisors. And it's a tough community because their client base is very different from one advisor to the other.
So it's developing the software and then supporting it and then making it evolve. So that was a great experience. That was a great way to start the company. And then we had other projects in the financial services we had in other industries, but as we were growing, we decided to focus in financial services, so investments and life insurance. Yeah. And that's ironic because when we started, there were two of us and said we can do anything. And as we grew, I realized that we could do very little, but we needed to be the best at what we were doing, particularly as we started expanding and realizing that our competitors were huge. So we needed to be the best at what we did. So in the '90s, we were doing custom development. That was very exciting because you sit down with a customer and then want to translate that business need into a real system.
And it was intellectually challenging, but more difficult to scale. We helped a company out of Philadelphia building a policy admin and they wanted to have more complex life insurance processing. And we helped them with that development and also in some integrations. And so that was our expansion in the US.
Olivier Lafontaine:
That's also how I joined the company 20 years ago.
Luis Romero:
Yeah, exactly. We've been arguing together for 20 years already. And that company, AdminServer got acquired by Oracle and that been a great relationship since that tool has become a framework that is still embedded in our solution. So as we start building more and more IP, we've become a vendor and not a system integrator, but I believe that DNA of services is very important. So how we approach the implementations is probably different than a software vendor that never had that all those scars during the implementations.
Olivier Lafontaine:
And you've seen different things change in the industry. How would you say data migrations, for example, and policy administration projects, how did that change between 20 years ago and let's say the last couple of years?
Luis Romero:
Well, I'd say that has changed quite a bit because 20 years ago, I thought that the systems were already old and legacy, but there weren't that many migrations. They were starting and I thought, well, that's going to accelerate. And it has accelerated, but more recently, there's always a new life to that system and executives are often challenged to find the ROI. But the reality is as those systems are getting older and older, it becoming a liability for the companies and it also becomes a bottleneck in product development. So that has dramatically accelerated. And I believe that now, once you can show the track record and the tools have evolved, AI is helping us accelerate in those migrations, reducing the costs and reducing the timeline. So yeah, that has become an important factor in these transformations.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah. One big thing I think that's changed is 20 years ago, there was no cloud, most of the software for policy admin was on premise and even the team was releasing and it was a big deal to release. Nowadays, to your point, there used to be burn on CDs, but nowadays you can release twice a day if you need to. So it's a lot more forgiving, I suppose, for the development team, but also a much better pace of innovation, I suppose.
Luis Romero:
Yeah, totally. You bring a good point. When you need to burn floppy desk, you're very careful. Then when you need to deploy on premise, you're still careful. Now on the web, that is accelerated. So you still need to be careful, but the process is much faster. And that's interesting, particularly in life insurance. It's taking a while for the insurers to become comfortable with the SaaS and handing the business differently and not building internally an empire of IT resources. And that happened in 2018, 19, a little bit later than the other industries, even in the financial services. And I think that is dramatically accelerating the innovation among companies. And it's also helping big companies become more efficient and large new products, but also small companies, they can keep up with the bigger companies in the innovation. So
Olivier Lafontaine:
You touched on AI. Obviously that's a big deal for our industry as well as any industry on the planet and almost everything. So life insurance has unique constraints. It's a heavily regulated industry. It's a cautious industry for good reasons. You buy life insurance because you want the company to be there when you actually need it in perhaps 20, 30 or 40 years from now. So there's a good reason to be prudent, but how do you see the industry taking AI? And there's obviously also a big advantage in using AI for the insurance industry because it's a heavily document oriented industry. So how do you think that these two things come together for these life insurance CIOs?
Luis Romero:
I think that every industry nowadays is challenged by the AI, but the insurance companies, particularly life insurance, again, they've taken a bit longer to accelerate. And for the reason you just mentioned, you have a policy in the system for 20, 30, 40 years and still active. So moving to another system is easier said than done because you need to bring all that history. But AI is helping, but more importantly, shareholders are questioning the executives, is the AI helping us? Then clients have higher expectations. We saw already after COVID, the expectation from the user experience, the self-serve, it got dramatically accelerated. Now with AI, where you have an agent that can help you do anything in your personal life, there's no reason why you don't have the same expectation from the insurer. So I think that the insurers will see product innovation, efficiencies, and the expectation from the customers will force everyone to move faster.
Olivier Lafontaine:
And do you get a sense that they are eager to implement the technology? Do you see a resistance? Do you see a lot of hurdles from a legal perspective? What do you feel in your customer base, let's put it, which is also my customer base obviously, but since I'm the interviewer, what do you feel is the perspective from our clients and from our prospects?
Luis Romero:
We have clients of all sizes and in many regions. I see the large companies, they see efficiencies, right? If you have thousands of employees, anything that improves your operations can be a dramatic generation of value. Then the smaller insurers are challenged for selling the same products through the same network of advisors to the same consumers. So how can they keep up? Well, there's the hope that AI is going to supercharge their technology capacity to match the ones from the bigger companies. So depending on the company, obviously it is different. And some companies are focusing on growing, so launching new products. So you can innovate faster and some other is catching up on operations. So I think there's a bit for everyone, but I think as you mentioned earlier, I think there's a desire for everyone to adopt and if they don't, there's no desire, there's a pressure to do it.
Olivier Lafontaine:
And honestly, everyone I've interviewed on the podcast, there's always a pressure. You can sense that. They all prepare good discussion points and you can tell they have conversations with their teams, but it's difficult to move. A lot of them are still trying to implement Copilot in the company, for example, which is, it seems very basic, but for an insurance company to be transferring very sensitive data, as soon as you open Copilot in the back office, people could be pasting underwriting information in there. For example, it's a very good use case, saves you a lot of work, but you got to ... How do you control that? If your people start pasting claims information in Copilot and ask it to make a decision, how do you deal with that? How do you even prevent it or how do you control it? So there's real challenges that they have to deal with that seem pretty basic for the rest of the population.
So that's why it feels like they're very prudent, but they also know, I think that it is a change that's coming and there's no getting the genie back into the bottle for sure.
Luis Romero:
Absolutely.
Olivier Lafontaine:
So we talked about the opportunities. Let's talk about being the CEO of a technology company in 2026. What does that look like? I know you talked about insurance CIOs getting pressure from their board and the stakeholders around using AI. You no doubt get a certain level of pressure as well or some questions around what you're doing as a software company. So what's your view on that?
Luis Romero:
That's interesting. And we've seen in the news all the layoffs and there's a bit like the COVID. In five years ago, it seemed like COVID was the good excuse to reduce the workforce. And now is the AI and the promise that with AI, you can do a lot more. And while that is true, I think that for technology companies, it's not only about reducing costs because ultimately all the software companies will produce more. There's going to be, again, more expectation from our customers. Therefore, I think that is a shift in expertise. But if I look at how I see it, because our board is constantly asking me, what are the benefits or is it a threat? So it's definitely not a threat, but how do we measure? And that's what's interesting in 2026 versus 2024, because now there's been a couple of years where we're heavily using AI either in our internal operations, in developing software, in the functions that the software has, or how we implement the software.
So everything is impacted, but what is different today is we're starting to measure. And I think that's the key to realize where are the gains, the short term and the midterm gains that we can have with AI. And I think that's what exciting to be able to report and better plan the budgets for the coming years. But I think it's an opportunity to grow the business more than reducing costs. It's how we use the AI that is changing on a monthly basis.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah. And my prediction is that we're going to have, I don't know if you agree with this, but I think it's going to increase the quality of software because as the world has been dealing with a certain level of quality and has learned to live with bugs and things like that. And it is true in the life insurance industry. I mean, I wish I could tell you all of our software is perfect the first time around, and it satisfies all customer needs and all that. I think we're going to see a lot more software, a lot more quality software coming from the existing teams for a similar cost that we used to deal with and that was the best we could do because that's the amount of engineers that were available in the market. So I think the whole world is going to get better software in the end, is my prediction around that.
Luis Romero:
And we're starting to see that in the implementations, we're seeing that to your earlier point, insurers have lots of documentation. So we're able to crunch so much information and generate test cases, run the test case, automating all of that. And now it's available, all size projects, and that makes a huge difference in the quality of what we deliver, but also at what pace you can evolve because regression testing is a high cost in this industry. So AI is dramatically helping in that category.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah. And all the nice to haves we hear and we never get to the nice to haves. Well, I think the future will show that we can do a lot more of the nice to haves and increase the scope. So that's looking good. If we pivot a little bit on the AI question, I think we've talked about Equisoft being or transforming, I would say. Obviously being there for 30 years, you didn't start as an AI company, but in the last couple of years, you've talked about us transforming to become an AI first company. So what does that mean in your view?
Luis Romero:
It means that everything we knew we do, we need to ask ourselves, how can we use AI? Not should we use AI? And again, it's every department. It goes from me to every one of the 860 employees we need to use AI. So the shared services, how we're more efficient running the business, how can we scale up with the same people and leverage the skills of the individual instead of the manual tasks. But obviously in your departments, you have a hundred of people building the best software, everyone is building a lot more software. And again, by measuring, I think we'll be able to decide, tweak the roadmap. So that's very, very important. And also, what is really useful for the end user? And that's what we launched new products recently that embed AI. And I think that's what's going to really accelerate and differentiate ourselves.
And to your earlier point, insurers are cautious about the use of AI, but at the same time, they're very excited. So I think we're going to see an acceleration of AI across the chain. And last, I think I mentioned earlier, implementations of some of our solutions are out of the box, some solutions like policy admin, it takes months, it can be years depending on the size of the company, the number of legacies, but now we see that we can dramatically reduce the timeline, reduce the cost, and have more predictability for the insurer. And if there's one thing that life insurers like is predictability. So I think that it's going to accelerate the transformation of the industry.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah. I think that's a really good point because in our space, even if we have the best product in the world, there is always going to have to be an implementation that's significant cost, the transforming for a life insurance company because of the nature of the contracts, which lasts for years and years, it's always going to be a professional services heavy endeavor. So I think that's what your point on. One of the aspects of being AI first is making this implementation a little easier for people. There's obviously in our products, so having features that support that embed AI in our products. And the other one you said I liked also, which is everyone basically that is not an engineer also needs to use AI in the company, marketing and HR. And I think we have a team that's helping the non-technical staff also. I think that's really interesting.
I don't see a lot of companies doing that.
Luis Romero:
I agree. And that made a big difference. Well, first, assigning an executive responsible for the AI adoption internally, then having an internal consultant. So every department has access to a consultant and we also monitor the request. So that way we're able to suggest use cases and that starts building up. And now we keep track of those and now we need to prioritize it. So it went from, I don't think AI can do what I do to, oh my God, can you help me? And now we're seeing an expansion there. So now it's the number of tools, but also having more and more help to help the internal person. But you're right, having a dashboard and providing the coaching to the internal staff made a huge difference internally.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah. Otherwise, I think people get lost in experimenting things and not getting the results they want. And then it gets a little frustrating. They put it on the side, but later on they pick it up, but then it becomes a little inefficient in working that way. But I think that's been very successful. So we talked in our preparation or you did that. You published a guide or a framework for selecting vendors, which is called 12 Questions Leaders Should Ask During Vendor Selection. And obviously that's made with a little bit of bias towards what we've heard in the market, but let's dig into that a little bit because I think that's really interesting. Give us a little bit of insights in terms of what you feel clients around the globe, because Equisoft has clients everywhere around the globe. In terms of how they look about or what types of clients choose vendor and have different ways to look at vendor selection, or how do you see the spectrum of variation?
Let's put it that way.
Luis Romero:
Yeah. And when I was asked about the question, I wanted to make it very difficult for everyone equally. So it was more the 12 questions, the 12 questions to ask vendors. And you're right, we have a lot of experience there from doing hundreds of implementations, but if I can summarize, there's companies that are looking to launch new products. They have legacy systems and every product they've developed in the last 30 years fit in that box. So there's very little innovation. So now they need to get out of that and launch new products. So they need end-to-ends from quoting to managing those policies. So it's, how can you do it quick and dirty so that we go to market and grow the business? And you have at the other spectrum, the company that has a legacy system where there's only one person left in the company that knows that the system, he's been threatening to retire for 10 years, so the business has a liability.
And then is every company in the middle. Obviously, anything that involves the commissioning a legacy system is a bigger project. And that's where clients often ask us, "Okay, what are the ROIs for every piece? How do you justify moving from a legacy system? How to run the project, the best practices in running the project? How much do we adopt? How much do we adapt?" Those our questions come continuously in the implementation and in the evaluation. And then the proximity, those projects that take months, well, we'll for sure create friction. And you need a bit of friction. If you don't have friction, there's something wrong in your project. It's going to take too long. You need a bit friction. You need to make sure that everyone is questioning, challenging everyone in, are we doing what needs to be done or we're recreating the old system? So things like that.
So how do we manage those projects? And I think that comes only through the experience. But again, and we have small and we have very, very large companies. So in one case, we have too many meetings. In other cases, we'll have not enough things. Some have
Olivier Lafontaine:
Taken years and years before doing the vendor selection. Sometimes it takes three or four years between the first meetings and between the times where we actually start a project. And sometimes it's actually quite quick, but even then the best ... What would be your call, your view on what's the best case scenario for how long it takes to go through a vendor selection process?
Luis Romero:
A year. I find that you need to build the requirements properly internally or use an external consultant to help you have at least a good set of requirements. Have those questions why you're doing that and have the support from the executives and your board in order to move forward. And then this is a project you're doing every 20 years. So you need to make sure that you select the right technology, that you have the right implementer, hopefully the same one, and then that you have the right governance.
Olivier Lafontaine:
You need a little bit of POC or test drive also as part of that one year, right?
Luis Romero:
Hard to skip that. Absolutely. Nothing like smelling the coffee on both sides, on both sides because it's important that the insurer gets to know a lot of the individuals, not the three people that are very good presenting, right? You need to meet part of the team and vice versa, because that's how we see how busy they are. Will they be able to give the subject matter experts enough time to participate in the project? So that will be determined during those few months of the vendor selection, the POCs, the discovery, and then you can have the right project plan and have a successful project. And anything you do upfront will be time you will save at the end.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah. In the end, I think we've even seen where the POC becomes ... The only way perhaps to shrink that, I would think, I don't know if you agree with that, would be if you combine the first phase, you see a first phase of your project with a simple product or something like that, then you almost combine that with your vendor selection and you sort of do a confirmation of the vendor after that first phase. That probably is the fastest way to do it.
Luis Romero:
I agree. But what we've seen in some cases is clients going a bit too fast into that. And then they end up with a system that, okay, can do the basic, but won't be able to decommission the legacy system because that doesn't have the full functionality or flexibility. So that proof of concept, which I agree, that minimum viable product has still to prove that you're not adding one, one business- As
Olivier Lafontaine:
Long as you're prepared to change vendors, I suppose, after that first MVP, then maybe that could work. I agree. I agree. Let's do a shameless plug a little bit and say, when does Equisoft win? In these processes, what do you feel is the winning conditions for us as a company? We don't win all of them, but which are the ones where the fit is good and we're usually the correct partner for this insurance company?
Luis Romero:
You asked me what's the typical time that the client can take? When it gets very long and painful, that's usually when we win because that means that we've had many meetings, they've met an extended team from Microsoft and they feel good about it. As one of our clients told me many years ago, these are career shaping projects. So we come in with the best technology, but it's even more important that the project is successful and that's what we take pride on. But how do you experience that is when the client is very thorough and you mentioned the POC is one step into that. But the broader the scope, the more we win. We're a privately owned company. We take management, owns the majority of the company. We take pride in not only delivering, but having happy customers and we understand the long-term value of a customer.
And I think that makes a difference. It transpires in the relationship we have with our customer base.
Olivier Lafontaine:
I agree. And I think also when it requires having the team directly on site or when the Insurance companies interact with our teams early on. That's usually a good sign that this is going to be. Versus if they're looking at the pure product feature by feature, and there's some companies that have thousands of these check boxes in how they survey. And this will be more side by side, but when they engage with our team, that's also a big positive for us.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Another thing that recently happened for Equisoft is the sellen report on insurance platforms. And we're all super excited that we had an award for being luminary. This is a recognition, I think, that Equisoft is doing something a little different. Sellent talks to all vendors in the industry. They see hundreds of demos. I'm sure they are bored to death in looking at software and it all looks the same. So once in a while, they see something interesting and it's great that this time it was what we showed them. So tell us a little bit about how you see this award.
Luis Romero:
Yeah, that's very exciting because there's two sides of the analyst report. I don't know that people realize, but you need references. You need to have real proof. So the industry analysts have access to real clients. So they will recommend Sexy Technology, but also they need to make sure that that Sexy demo translates into a real system. So we're obviously very proud of that recognition. And also a comment that we got from Sellent and other industry analysts is last two years, everyone is plugging the AI letters everywhere on websites and PowerPoints, but we're the first having something meaningful and that works. And that's very exciting. So again, we started investing a while ago where we allocated a chunk of budget to AI functionality, and now it's quite exciting to have it live and showing it to the customers. And the timing couldn't be better. Customers are experiencing with the Gentech AI and starting to figure out what they can do with AI.
And now we're showing them, well, this you can adapt and hit the ground running. So we have the end-to-end solution, but also we have the pieces. So you can transform at the pace you want, and those AI tools are helping your transformation to provide value immediately. And when you migrate, then it can be down the road, but have that flexibility. So yeah, we're very proud of that recognition.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah. And in particular, we do data migration, we do policy admin systems. This is not always the most exciting topic, I will say. And so it's great that here we've pushed the envelope quite a bit and it's been recognized. So this is great. And I think back to the vendor selection topic, even if we're neutral about it, it's probably a great source of information for insurance companies to see, again, who's doing something a little different, what they're bringing to the table. You can probably know what every vendor is doing the same. So listening to industry analysts, I think will save a lot of time for these insurance companies. Would you agree?
Luis Romero:
Yeah, absolutely. Because they're the best information brokers. They talk to vendors, they talk to customers, they hear the good and the ugly. So they can definitely help a customer starting the journey to have a feeling of what products, what vendors will fit better with them.
Olivier Lafontaine:
So if we switch to our future prediction crystal ball section of the show, let's start with, what do you think? I mean, obviously you've been doing financial services for a very long time. And I know you talked to a lot of people in the investment side of things, as well as in the insurance industry, wealth management industry. We have a team that does pensions in the UK. So you have a really broad view of the industry from a financial services perspective. What's the development you think will fundamentally change the economics or experience of life insurance?
Luis Romero:
The acceleration of the development, again, because of AI, AI brings the tools for the development team. You have the user experience, but more importantly is the expectation. Everyone is expecting a lot more automation, making everything easier. So the user experience will continue transforming, but at an accelerated pace. There's no doubt about it. And then the legacy systems will consolidate, reduce. And I think that there is a risk or an opportunity, depending on where you sit, that companies not moving fast enough will be left behind and there could be a consolidation in the market.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Out of curiosity, do you see that the same in all markets? We do business with Latin America, for example, in Europe and Asia. And so there's emerging markets, there's mature markets like the US and Canada. How do you see it would affect maybe more of these emerging markets in a different way than the mature markets might be affected by technology changes?
Luis Romero:
I think it's more ... Ultimately, products are very similar. There's, call it universal life, unit length, superannuation, but ultimately the products are very similar globally. I think that company sizes are a bigger factor on the transformation. Again, very large companies have labs, have thousands of employees. How can they optimize? In smaller companies, whether you're in the United States or in the Caribbean or Latin America, you need to do a lot more with less. Now, where there is variations in the US, you have 600 competitors. So you need to be competitive on the experience, but you need to innovate on your products because again, you have 600 competitors-
Olivier Lafontaine:
Especially as a small insurer in the US, you better have some creative ways to be profitable if you want to be competitive.
Luis Romero:
Absolutely. And then if you're in a smaller market, you don't have as much ... The talent pool is much smaller. Therefore, a legacy system, it can be a bigger burden in emergent markets, but a small company has the same challenge, but again, it's a challenge or an opportunity right now. It depends how you see it.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah. I think also we see a lot more in emerging markets. There's been less generations of these legacy system. They sometimes have a custom system or a system that's not even that old that they're replacing because they're growing faster. In the US, they're already at their third generation of systems sometimes, or their systems have been around for a really, really long time. So slightly different angle from that perspective, right?
Luis Romero:
Agreed. But I believe there were 2000 insurers, life insurers in the US and there's 800, but if you remove the holdings, there's 600 left. So there's already been a consolidation in the last 30, 40 years. And as what I was saying earlier, it could continue depending on the adoption or not of new technologies.
Olivier Lafontaine:
So if you were to say, what technology that is either just got here or just around the corner that would have the biggest impact in the industry, what would you say that is?
Luis Romero:
I think it's definitely agentic AI. I think it's on everyone's mouth, but the reality is starting to emerge in its practicality. Everyone sees, okay, yes, having a machine do my work has to make sense, but now we're starting to see the use cases and we need to solve or box the security challenges, but once you do that, there's no turning back. I mean, those agents can do a lot of work and automate so much work and I think it's very transformative in life insurance, maybe catching up compared to other industries that have been more technology savvy or less risk averse. And I think this is a huge opportunity in the industry.
Olivier Lafontaine:
I agree. I agree. And I think even last year when we started with the adding of AI in our products, I was telling our clients, "Oh, but don't use Agentic AI to do underwriting or claims adjudication. Use it to do things that are less controversial and easier to manage from a risk and compliance perspective." But recently I realized we made a few experiments and realized I don't think that's going to hold true for a very long time. There is a point where Agentic AI is uniquely placed to do underwriting and that doesn't mean the underwriters are going away, but it means that the work is going to transform drastically in terms of supervising these agents and configuring those agents and monitoring and finding ways to ensure that they're doing the work properly. But these technologies are coming up to monitor, monitor drift, for example, monitor, be able to understand what types of responses agents are giving and what types of circumstances and monitoring and auditing.
So all of these technologies together with Agentic AI, I think will have a profound transformation in how we run life insurance. And that'll be a positive impact for customers. So perhaps it will bridge a little bit of that gap in coverage that people always talk about.
Luis Romero:
So you think life insurance will become sexy among young people?
Olivier Lafontaine:
I don't know. Maybe we'll see about that. But I think if it gets a little easier to buy, we're already seeing some of that with the simplified issue products getting a little higher face, minimum face amounts. So it's exciting in a certain way. A couple rapid fire closing questions then. One piece of advice, there's less now because there's been a change in the issue, but there's less insuretech companies that we have been around for a long time and we've seen different phases and stuff. And a couple of years ago, there was a lot of insurtechs, a lot of them failed. What would be your advice to a young CEO starting a company in this space?
Luis Romero:
You need to be resilient. You need to be prepared for a two-year cycle. The world is spinning faster, but building pipeline, building the trust, convincing your first customer, contracting, having all the security in place will take time. But if you're resilient, this is a great industry. And then you need a sponsor. You need a client that believes in you. And then you have that first reference that is so important to get the second one. So the resilience is important in this space.
Olivier Lafontaine:
You need a way to be able to build that reputation over a long period of time because having the right widget at the right time isn't the only thing that's going to work in this space, I think, right?
Luis Romero:
I mentioned that on the analyst report. You need clients, otherwise you don't show up there.
Olivier Lafontaine:
So anything that keeps you up at night in the industry or around the company, what's your most important or one of the concerns you have about what's happening in the industry?
Luis Romero:
I think it's skipping up with the pace. I think it's very exciting. I see our clients are eager to meet us and see the new technologies, so it's keeping up with that. But I think since the '90s, we've seen the web, that was a huge transformation. We've suffered all the financial crisis. Now it's very positive, so it's keeping me up at night, but in a very positive way.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Well, I guess that's the other rapid fire question. If we turn that on a positive side, what gets you out of bed in the morning? What motivates to continue after so many years to do this? And despite the ups and downs and the difficult people like myself sometimes, what makes you continue to do it?
Luis Romero:
Well, I've been saying for 10 years that legacy systems are very old, so clients, companies will migrate and have been off right. I think that now I'm right that because those systems are 10 years older than they were 10 years ago. And I think that's where it's going to be very exciting. There's just too much of that legacy or that legacy is boxed in a way that you cannot leverage. So whether you move out or you use AI to extract the value of those legacies and still offer a great experience. So I think that now everything's just going to go faster and everyone in technology likes the things that go fast and I think now the whole industry will go faster. So it's an exciting moment to be in this space.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Great to hear. Luis, this was a pleasure. Thank you for joining me for this exercise. It was great and I think it was genuinely useful. Thank you for your time. I think our listeners will find it particularly useful and there's real actionable insights in there. So thank you a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts.
Luis Romero:
Thank you, Olivier.
Olivier Lafontaine:
To everyone listening, download the 12 questions ebook. Look up the silent report and use the frameworks we talked about today. The carers who choose their partners wisely are the ones who lead this industry into the next chapter. Thank you for listening.
