Solving Documentation Issues of Carbon Emissions, Waste, and Security with docStribute

Oh welcome to gossip about gossip. Powered by Hedera Hashgraph. And each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip. The podcast where we talk about the actual use cases of distributed ledger technology in the real world. My name is Zenobia Gods talk and I'm the SVP of communications at theworld's labs, helping to drive the growth of the Hedera ecosystem. I am joined by Chris Ansari from tribute. Hi, Christopher, how are you? Yeah, I'm good, Thanks. Good, good. So tell us a little bit about Dr. tribute, how you started and your role there. Yeah, sure. Happy to. So my role is the founder and CEO of LTF and Dr. beauty is our flagship solution. It's a solution that helps financial institutions and adjacent sectors send regulated documents to their customers. I guess the clever bit is that we use distributed ledger technology to do this. Great And what sparked the idea for you? We talked to so many entrepreneurs who have faced a challenge in their own lives. This sounds like a very real world problem. Yeah I mean, my background is actually in advertising. And I was working for a WPP agency and I was seconded into one of the large UK retail banks as a joint venture between marketing and digital transformation. And the role was really to come in and digitalized customer correspondence and essentially there was two workstreams to that of the program and the first was really digitalizing the pre-sales literature. So if you think about this was in 2017. So if you think about walking into a UK retail bank or branch, you used to see a whole bunch of product leaflets on the, on the walls. And it was about digitizing those pre-sales literature or the product literature and that was quite straightforward and simple to do. But the second workstream was digitalizing the post-sales literature. So things like terms and conditions, notices of variations and and that was really difficult to do. And I guess what felt like the most obvious way to communicate with customers from a advertising background and communications background wasn't available to me because of the regulatory requirements set up by the UK regulator. And so that was kind of the start of it. My co-founders also work in the financial services sector and they'd seen firsthand how much there was an overreliance of paper in the sector. And I guess combining their experience and my experience was the start of both of should be the solution. It sounds like a very big problem space. So tell us exactly what jock's tribute is and what the benefits are for clients who use it. Yeah, sure. So so essentially, if you're a financial service provider and you want to send certain documents to your customers, so be that. Notice the variation and terms and conditions or even customer statements. It's a regulated activity. And what that means is you need to meet certain criteria. Now, one of those criteria is that documents need to be sent in a way that they can't be changed. Now, of course, the digital ways you can do that, but each digital way to do this has got some sort of operational downside or drawback. And that's essentially where we come in. We streamline the process. We make it a lot easier for financial institutions to send these documents to the customers and the benefits of that, or reducing the cost for that, streamlining or improving the customer journey and also reducing the risk around those that communication from a cybersecurity perspective. So there's a number of benefits that we offer our customers. And you mentioned the fact that it was important to build this on a DLT. Why is trust. So important for your customers? And specifically, why did you choose to go with haddara? Yeah, I mean, I guess as a business, our core values are around sustainability, around transparency, and then obviously trust. And I think trust is really important certainly in the financial services sector. It's a really important it's imperative for the success of any business really. But the trust is are really around the distribution of documents and that what you said you're going to do actually going to do as a financial service provider. And that's massively important. But having a secure record of that is equally important. And that's essentially what we do. And then I guess there's trust that you're doing right by the environment as well. So there's a lot of noise in this as well, a lot of emphasis on reducing our carbon emissions. So we have massive concerns around global warming and the impacts on our environment and our behaviour, how that impacts the environment. So there's a trust that organizations are doing their bit to, to, to, to really drive down those carbon emissions. And that was one of the key reasons for us to choose, choose choosing adara. There's no point in us replacing energy sapping solutions or of loads of paper and carbon emissions with an energy sapping solution. And so we had to find the most energy efficient solution that for us the obvious choice was, was. Adara so that was kind of the key reasons. I mean, obviously there's other things like the governance around your government council and. And transaction speeds and all those sorts of great things as well. But I think the start, the starting point for us was let's trust and trust around the carbon emissions and reducing those carbon emissions. Yeah, it would be hard to replace a paper solution with something that was less environmentally friendly, right? Yeah, of course. I mean, the industry in the UK is massively reliant on paper. As I said, I think they send out something like $5.2 billion documents on an annual basis at a massive cost, not just financially but also in terms of carbon emissions. So being able to reduce that reliance on paper, especially when it comes to those regulated documents from our experiences where the main use case for paper has been consumed was really important. Yeah I mean, we've had the internet for 20 plus years. It's still amazes me how much paper documentation I get. Yeah, absolutely. So you've now been at this for a little while. Can you share with us, both on the technical side and the business side what that journey has looked like and maybe any lessons learned for others who are starting to develop on the network? Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, we're obviously 2020 and 2021 through a fair bit of challenges for everybody. I think we're very fortunate in the fact that we were initially backed by the UK government, so we were recipients of Innovate UK smart grant, which is a government led initiative to drive innovation in our sector. And that was it came at the right time for us. Since then we've gone from strength to strength. We've onboarded our first few customers, which which is fantastic, and starting to see some positive results already for those customers. But then also I think sort of at a macro level, there's been some big changes in the sector, one which we've obviously spoken about sustainability. In the UK we have taxonomy regulation which is due to come in 2024. And that's quite an interesting regulation because what it means is that institutions will now need to start reporting on their carbon emissions versus offsetting them. And that's really important in terms of how do you reduce them. And our solution really offers customers a tangible way to reduce their carbon emissions, especially when there's an overreliance on paper. But even in some of the digital alternatives, we reduce carbon emissions. And so, so, so that's one of the key macro changes that is really driving forward our growth. The second thing that we're also seeing is that I think there's a broader acceptance of DLT. So we're seeing that in the financial services space, particularly, there's an understanding that is beyond just cryptoassets and and cryptocurrencies that is far more to this functional use cases for the technology beyond, beyond just those two use cases. And, and that's also opened up a number of doors for us. And the fact that there's a real interest in and hype around the technology, we call them cool currencies, but essentially they are kind of cool currencies that are really driving forward the growth. And from a technical perspective yet we've had a number of iterations and as we learn more and understand our customers requirements, we're able to adapt and iterate. And that's been part of the journey. But I think fundamentally the core of what we do in terms of the infrastructure and the immutability around our document storage is key is now adding functionality on top of that, essentially wonderful. Can you share with us what you have in store for the next 6 to 12 months? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think for us, it's moving just away from I guess where we started was just with public documents like terms and conditions and notice of variations. But what we're really seeing is the demand for those secured private documents. So the confidentiality around those documents. So adding additional layers of security on top of those and things like SMS verification or authentication, things like biometrics, all these sort of cool things that are sitting on top just to give that additional security to the access to our documents. And so that's one of the areas that we're focusing on. We also seeing a demand for the digital signature space. And so being able to offer a digital signature that is on the ledgers is obviously something that is massively exciting in a different way of looking at solving that problem. So that's another area that we're looking at developing and quite far down the road and very exciting. It sounds like a lot of different industries will be able to benefit from those solutions, starting with one, but certainly a massive opportunity there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, we it's one of those things that, you know, the trust elements are so important when it comes to financial institutions. And so being able to have that consensus mechanism on top of our documents is so valuable. And one that we're really seeing a demand for in the sector. Well, Thank you, Chris. I hope you will come back and keep us updated on your progress. It's so wonderful to hear all the things that you are doing and how far you've come so far. But we know there is much more ahead. So thank you so much. Thanks thanks, Adobe. And Thanks for having me on the show. Absolutely have a good one.