The Real Impacts of AI in Practice || App News + AdvanceTrack

[00:00:00] You have GPT, you have Gemini, you have Claude, all of these models, but they haven't been applied in a way which is useful for accountants yet.

[00:00:06] A third or a quarter of all the code written at Google is now written by AI.

[00:00:10] If you take law, you have legal techs transforming the workflows of professionals, but if you take accounting, it's still more or less the same as it was five years ago.

[00:00:18] These LLMs weren't available commercially just two years ago, so nobody is an expert.

[00:00:23] Like everyone's at the start line, the race starts now.

[00:00:26] We've got something from Xero. They've extended the availability of classic invoicing to the end of February 2025.

[00:00:35] Aducap announced a €45 million Series C funding round.

[00:00:39] The new study showed that there was a 21% reduction in demand for freelance jobs that are automation prone and don't require consistent human attention.

[00:00:48] Xero released their small business insights for the quarter ended September.

[00:00:52] TaxCal took a multi-million pound investment from Symphony Technology Group's Allegro Fund.

[00:00:59] Reveal and join in. Have announced a partnership.

[00:01:02] Moss has partnered with Air Wallex to enhance and streamline their global payments.

[00:01:07] It's really difficult to hire junior staff. It's very difficult to maintain them. Costs are increasing.

[00:01:11] The only way of really building a scalable business, especially if you're going to be offering bookkeeping services, is through outsourcing.

[00:01:17] The biggest challenge that people have had is the sheer increase in the demand for services.

[00:01:24] Not enough new talent coming in and lots of talent leaving. It does put pressure on the people that are left.

[00:01:30] There were stories of salary bumps in excess of 30% and generally salary increases were going up by around about 15%.

[00:01:37] What would you say to an accountant who is listening now and thinking, I want to try and dip my toe into this, but I really don't understand what it is that I should even begin to think about to get started?

[00:01:53] I think now is probably the most exciting time. Definitely in the past 10 years to be an accountant.

[00:01:58] The first step for anyone interested in AI is to...

[00:02:01] Hello and welcome to today's DigiTools in a Crawl World episode.

[00:02:05] We are delighted to talk to you today a little bit about AI.

[00:02:08] It's not just us monologuing or adlibbing on.

[00:02:12] We've got some research that was conducted by Harvard Business Review.

[00:02:16] We're also talking to Ruben Steenkamp of briefcase.io who is building his own LLM and to talk about the complexities and nuance around that and how AI in general could be used in your business to help improve the efficiency as the different use cases where it has been proven and the research around it to show that it's actually different value now.

[00:02:45] And perhaps could form part of your 2025 roadmap or plan in terms of how your business could continue to make the same gains that some of the other businesses that we will explore with Ruben are doing.

[00:02:58] We're also going to be joined by Advanced Tracks and we'll also have a whole host of other app news that is there to keep your pace on what's going on in the industry.

[00:03:07] So I look forward to getting your feedback on this episode before we go any further.

[00:03:12] I'm going to talk to Mike and host John Toon a little bit just to find out how he's doing, whether he has got everything sorted on his Christmas list, what's going to be on his roadmap for 2025.

[00:03:25] John, have you thought about that?

[00:03:27] Wow indeed.

[00:03:28] That's a very loaded question.

[00:03:30] I'm not sure I've got everything sorted on my Christmas list.

[00:03:32] It's quite short, so it shouldn't be too much of a challenge, hopefully.

[00:03:37] And a roadmap for 2025.

[00:03:39] Well, I am starting 2025 with three weeks of holiday if that counts.

[00:03:43] So it shouldn't be too bad.

[00:03:45] I'm going to the other side of the world to enjoy a bit of time in New Zealand before going skiing back to back.

[00:03:52] So that would be interesting.

[00:03:54] What's your self then at the start of 2025?

[00:03:56] Is my connection to self then?

[00:03:59] Well, I'll be connecting to the beach probably, possibly the sea.

[00:04:03] So yeah, we'll see.

[00:04:04] Oh, so you're connecting to nature.

[00:04:05] That's even better.

[00:04:07] Yeah, and a bit of culture, but a different culture as well.

[00:04:10] That would be nice, wouldn't it?

[00:04:10] I'd enjoy that.

[00:04:11] Yeah.

[00:04:12] So yeah, but after, I think 2025 is going to bring more travel and more work excitement for me

[00:04:20] because I know that I'm going to have quite a busy year with HLB.

[00:04:23] And I've already got a conference in Mexico lined up and another one in Slovenia.

[00:04:27] So yeah.

[00:04:28] Don't stop with your Greg rights on your jet.

[00:04:30] Get your tiny violin out.

[00:04:33] Don't need to hear about it.

[00:04:35] How about you, Ryan?

[00:04:41] That sounds really interesting, Ryan.

[00:04:43] I'm delighted to hear that you're taking on new challenges.

[00:04:45] Tell us more about ice dipping in, ice skinny dipping in your mankini.

[00:04:53] I can't wait to hear how that does for your health.

[00:04:56] It must explain why his voice is so high pitched as well at the moment, Sam.

[00:05:00] Yeah, he's had too long in the water.

[00:05:03] Yeah.

[00:05:07] So I've got something from Xero.

[00:05:09] Probably not that unexpected.

[00:05:12] They've extended the availability of classic invoicing to the end of February, 2025, or at

[00:05:18] least close to the end of February, 2025.

[00:05:20] This comes on the back of many of the updates we've given so far in the app news and the fact

[00:05:25] that they just had not got the functionality there for the new invoicing to replace all

[00:05:29] of the classic invoicing functionality for when it was supposed to end.

[00:05:33] And so they've extended it.

[00:05:34] And I believe that their intention is to completely replace all the functionality so that all those

[00:05:40] that were struggling with the new invoicing will be, well, satisfied, I guess, once the

[00:05:46] once it's taken away, the classic invoices taken away in the end of February, 2025.

[00:05:51] I've also got something else from Xero, which is that they released their small business insights

[00:05:55] for the quarter ended September.

[00:05:58] And we've got some useful information around the UK on how things have changed.

[00:06:03] So sales have been up just under 2% year on year in that quarter with, I believe the northeast

[00:06:11] of England being the best performing region, with sales growing 4.5% year on year for that

[00:06:18] region.

[00:06:18] So the biggest decline was in retail trade by looks of it, which is probably not that surprising

[00:06:24] with what we've seen going on throughout the economy over the last year and especially

[00:06:29] the last three months.

[00:06:31] We've also got time to be paid, which has fluctuated up and down throughout that quarter,

[00:06:36] but gone up, I guess, at the end of it.

[00:06:39] It's averaging around 28 days.

[00:06:41] It's now at 28.6 days at the end of September.

[00:06:43] But if you look back at September 23, it was 28.4.

[00:06:47] So not a significant change.

[00:06:49] And small business jobs, that's around 0.6%.

[00:06:52] It's been flat lining.

[00:06:54] It's been just between 0 and 2% for the last 12 months.

[00:06:59] But by the end of September, gone down to 0.6% from a peak, which was around August time.

[00:07:07] So we're seeing quite a bit of change, but a lot of it's not that surprising given the

[00:07:13] state of the UK economy.

[00:07:14] The employee hourly earnings is the bit that has probably seen the biggest dip over the

[00:07:20] last three years, where you saw a spike in 2022 up to about 4.5% year on year, but it's

[00:07:27] been slowly growing on a downward trend.

[00:07:30] It's now at 2.8% growth at the end of September 24.

[00:07:34] So the biggest factors I took from it, I don't know what you guys think about how the UK economy's

[00:07:42] been going and I guess the impact that Xero have uncovered from the data from every business

[00:07:48] they see going through the platform.

[00:07:49] I'm curious about the fact that the budget is going to probably have some impact on small

[00:07:54] businesses here because we've got something where, you know, small businesses are in effect

[00:08:01] struggling to employ and to keep pace with wage changes, according to this report, especially

[00:08:11] in certain sectors or areas.

[00:08:15] But then on top of that, you've got something where the national insurance contribution is

[00:08:19] going to increase for employers.

[00:08:21] So I see that actually there's like, there's two more monetary committees as you, I think

[00:08:27] that we really need to listen closely on and the impact because I think this dramatically

[00:08:32] impacts the small businesses.

[00:08:33] If this is the metrics that we're seeing now and they can't, they're not even able to

[00:08:39] keep a pace with the current pay and employing those, then by adding more to the bill, I

[00:08:46] think, you know, it will dramatically impact even those who are employed.

[00:08:50] That's my worry, actually.

[00:08:52] I saw a combination of things more recently.

[00:08:57] I think Dan Needle put something out about the national insurance changes in particular fairly

[00:09:02] recently.

[00:09:03] And then there's been some industry research and sort of some general commentary from accountants,

[00:09:07] I think, and other people who work in business about the fact that they feel that, you know,

[00:09:12] the challenges of all these changes are going to be around the low paid worker sectors of

[00:09:18] which food and beverage typically is one.

[00:09:20] Care is another one.

[00:09:22] Agriculture is another one.

[00:09:23] And it's those sort of two or three industries.

[00:09:25] There's probably a few others that have not gotten the list there, but those industries

[00:09:28] that are going to be particularly challenged around, you know, recruitment and the impact of these

[00:09:33] changes going forward, which obviously has a knock on effect with those people who would normally

[00:09:38] potentially be employed in that space.

[00:09:40] I guess also some of those industries do operate zero hours contracts and things like that.

[00:09:46] And that's another thing that label have said they want to look to to abolish or to minimize

[00:09:49] practices around that as well.

[00:09:52] So there's going to be more changes around there.

[00:09:54] I guess there's a compensation compensatory effect of things like minimum wage and living wage going up as well.

[00:10:00] But equally, that's just going to pile more pressure on in terms of, you know, where do you, you know,

[00:10:05] how or where do you recruit from in that kind of bracket of the market?

[00:10:08] So, yeah, it can be interesting to see that.

[00:10:10] I mean, I would say, though, that those sectors certainly care anyway at the very least.

[00:10:16] And food and beverage to a degree has been able to pass on price rises reasonably easily in the past.

[00:10:21] I've been able to adjust the compensation as a consequence.

[00:10:25] Agriculture is clearly a bit of a different beast, but, you know, maybe maybe this is where, you know,

[00:10:30] the NFU could be particularly useful instead of like, you know, getting farmers on the streets complaining about inheritance tax issues,

[00:10:36] which seem to be pretty much non-existent.

[00:10:37] They could be thinking about how they, you know, strategize with with farmers about, you know,

[00:10:42] getting some collective agreements and bargaining power over pricing to counteract the impacts that that the supermarkets and others have on their market.

[00:10:51] Hmm.

[00:10:53] Very good.

[00:10:53] And I suppose actually one part of that is around late payments or at least certainly is treasury management.

[00:10:59] And so it's a little bit of a pivot, but I, Agicap, Agicap, Agicap, I don't even know how to say that.

[00:11:05] Agicap. Let's call it Agicap.

[00:11:07] Yeah.

[00:11:07] And all in one treasury management platform announced a 45 million euro series C funding round.

[00:11:15] Agicap, for those who don't know, is a treasury management platform for SMEs and mid market companies.

[00:11:20] And they tend to offer things around cash management and to do with the advancement, I guess, of lending and credit, but also around the cash cycles.

[00:11:33] And the serious fund that they've taken is really to consolidate the leadership that they have by expanding the sales and customer success teams outside of France.

[00:11:43] And then to double down on the product depth and capabilities to address those mid market firms in particular around FX risk and credit management modules.

[00:11:53] And then to also strengthen its go to market through expanding indirect channels.

[00:11:59] I am quite excited to see that they are really starting to turn the needle here on making it a priority for CFOs so that they understand that actually there's a lot of manual tracking and time consuming tasks around treasury management across the company.

[00:12:20] And instead that they can use the data and the bank connectivity to then extend what is like a lending proposition.

[00:12:31] Nothing new. Obviously, there's been many that have gone into this space.

[00:12:35] But what I think they do a really good job of is not is removing the friction in all of this by then at least having all of it connected.

[00:12:43] So you get some sort of real time view of how it can manage your liquidity.

[00:12:48] I just think that it's really great to see it being listed as a priority for CFOs, especially where we're seeing that late payments.

[00:12:56] OK, it's only a nominal increase for small businesses, but you've got to follow that all the way through the chain.

[00:13:01] In the end, you know, the larger companies who are not paying their smaller companies on time has that network effect.

[00:13:09] So it's really great to see that there's some solutions out there that can help address those payment cycles a little bit better.

[00:13:16] Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? That kind of thing.

[00:13:18] And as you say, that idea of underwriting this kind of potentially, well, I guess, was it a new type of credit or a new type of credit line?

[00:13:27] I mean, yeah, interesting to see how businesses could potentially incorporate that into their organizations, right?

[00:13:34] It's not exactly a new type of credit line, but I think that a lot of these things are to do with cash management in a real time way where it's not necessarily attached to when you've got something that's lending.

[00:13:48] You either have something that can be a loan, which then when it's a loan, you're advancing it, hoping that the business is using it for a particular purpose.

[00:13:57] Then you've got other solutions that will say, OK, well, you have got to have the right type of commercial paper to advance the money.

[00:14:04] But what seems to be a shift is the ability to have a lending instrument that understands the affordability of your business relative to all the other credit arrangements that you have.

[00:14:18] Also, based on your history and your relationships with other systems like ERPs or banking, etc.

[00:14:29] So you take all of that data and then you don't necessarily need to find this supplier or this customer as the paper that you're selling.

[00:14:38] But instead, it looks at your holistic view of how you operate, how affordable you are, and then is able to attach some sort of revenue based financing.

[00:14:48] We've seen loads of those revenue based financing models come out, but most of them only apply for SaaS businesses.

[00:14:54] What ends up happening is if you're not, then if you don't have that type of model, you fall outside of their scope.

[00:15:00] I think these guys are at least trying to find those people who fall outside of that.

[00:15:06] ERP in particular is around purchasing behaviors.

[00:15:09] So there'll be, I think, a rise in the different types of lending instruments that will come onto the market.

[00:15:16] And I think it's quite exciting if they, you know, if there's investors willing to back this to the tune of 45 million.

[00:15:23] I think it shows you that they've got something that could really work for a big portion of the market that perhaps fall outside of some of the alternative lenders that we've seen at the moment that have, you know, had some success.

[00:15:34] Yeah.

[00:15:35] Yeah.

[00:15:35] No, I find that.

[00:15:36] I find all, like I say, I find all this fascinating.

[00:15:38] I mean, I was at a free agent event the other day and, you know, just talking about their relationship with NatWest and the metal and, you know, and the amount of data that they've got there potentially to be able to leverage that to offer some kind of additional funding lines or enhanced funding lines or even, you know, lower cost funding lines as a consequence of just being able to see that data in real time going through an account system.

[00:16:00] I think there's a real, I think there's a real missed opportunity there for whether it's NatWest or for free agent or a combination of both.

[00:16:06] And I'd be interested in seeing something like that come to market as a consequence.

[00:16:12] True.

[00:16:12] It's also though how it's scored.

[00:16:16] I could talk about this subject for too long.

[00:16:19] And so maybe that's time for a different episode altogether where we talk to the guys at the Hap Supplies because they work on scoring.

[00:16:26] And it's how recognized some of that is in terms of like the banks to our last interview that we did, that you did with Sophie Hossack from Alica.

[00:16:37] We know that there's a bit of a gap there where it comes to understanding how to present the data so that a bank understands it better.

[00:16:44] And there's lessons that could be learned in terms of how those banks are leveraging data to do the scoring themselves versus taking into account other scores that are recognized in the industry.

[00:16:57] But let's move quickly because we've got some news from TaxCalc as well who took a multi-million pound investment from Symphony Technology Group's Allegro Fund.

[00:17:09] It's a private equity firm based in London and California.

[00:17:15] And TaxCalc has been hailed as like a good opportunity for them to continue expanding out and develop more in the form of charity accounts.

[00:17:27] Sorry, release of charity format and a company secretarial product, which I wonder if that is triggered by the fact that we saw a Geyser Inform Direct acquired and whether there's some need to then try and move away from relying on other third party providers.

[00:17:48] Question mark.

[00:17:50] Either which way, that's an undisclosed sum of money.

[00:17:54] And it was like that investment was made this year so that it should help them to continue on their 40-year journey in the tax software space.

[00:18:05] Yeah, and this came out a little bit out of the blue because do we know how much they've sold?

[00:18:11] I know there's no detail about the amounts, but is there any idea what level of investment has been taken?

[00:18:16] Because I would guess it would be more than 50%, but it doesn't really say, does it?

[00:18:20] Nada.

[00:18:21] Not a thing.

[00:18:22] I mean, recorded revenues to date of $13 million with an operating profit of $1.85 million and $11,000 accounting firms who use the product.

[00:18:35] So not sure.

[00:18:37] It must be enough that it's made a news headline.

[00:18:41] So I imagine it's not a small amount of cash, but it's also, yeah, I guess there's, you know, they didn't really go into a lot of that depth that I'd see on some of the typical raises that we see.

[00:18:54] What do we see?

[00:18:55] They raise the money.

[00:18:56] And why do they raise money, John?

[00:18:58] Because they want to invest in AI.

[00:19:00] There's some sort of edge to do with, okay, we're going to use this and we're going to build blah, new form of tech.

[00:19:07] And they're building and they're taking this investment for something that I think is a staple item.

[00:19:13] I spoke to some of the senior tax card guys a reasonable while ago, probably before the summer.

[00:19:19] Gosh, I can't remember.

[00:19:19] Yeah, definitely before the summer.

[00:19:20] And, you know, there was talk then about, you know, how they were potentially looking to, you know, position the business maybe for a sale.

[00:19:28] Not, you know, investment wasn't really being talked about, but a sale was being sort of, you know, discussed.

[00:19:35] It definitely wasn't necessarily, you know, nailed on.

[00:19:37] It wasn't like the business was looking for an exit per se.

[00:19:40] But you're right.

[00:19:41] It hasn't really changed their roadmap this.

[00:19:43] I mean, maybe apart from the COSEC requirements, because, you know, like you say, the informed direct change, you know, might have influenced that, if I can get my words out.

[00:19:53] But, you know, building out charity accounts was definitely on the roadmap and is expected to be launched in the summer of next year.

[00:20:00] I think they're going to, you know, maybe with this investment that allows them to invest and go a little bit more quicker to market.

[00:20:05] And that will definitely be of interest because, you know, TaxCalc in particular were picking up a huge amount of work from Iris, you know, as a consequence of their botched launch of Elements.

[00:20:16] Talking about Iris Elements and the launch of that, did you see that Keytime is going to retire?

[00:20:25] I like talking about software as if it's like a person.

[00:20:29] Keytime is going to retire.

[00:20:31] It's so lovely, isn't it?

[00:20:32] In 2025.

[00:20:34] Yeah.

[00:20:35] Well, I mean, I guess I think it's not just Keytime, but it was something else as well, wasn't it, that Iris had mentioned?

[00:20:40] And these are both products that they acquired a long, long time ago.

[00:20:45] One of the probably one of the earliest acquisitions I can remember anyway, at least.

[00:20:49] And yeah, they just decided to mothball these products as they're not going to keep them up to date with legislative changes, have they?

[00:20:55] And I guess they would argue again that they've got better, more modern, more recent acquisitions or products that they've built that will be going out on the Elements platform for customers.

[00:21:07] And yeah, it's really a matter of whether or not Iris can demonstrate that their replacement products are as good as the ones that they're getting rid of.

[00:21:15] And I think that's the challenge that they continually tend to face.

[00:21:20] I've got some other news, which is all about AI.

[00:21:23] I can't believe we haven't spoken about AI for so long on this, but there's some news that came out about the use of generative AI tools and how they are impacting their job market.

[00:21:33] And a new study showed that there's a 21% reduction in demand for freelance jobs that are automation prone and don't require consistent human attention.

[00:21:42] Now, the research was done by the Harvard Business School, the German Institute for Economic Research and Imperial College London Business School.

[00:21:48] And they studied almost 1.4 million job posts on a major but undisclosed freelance work marketplace from July 2021 to July 2023.

[00:21:56] So it overlaps really neatly with the launch of ChatGPT and everything else.

[00:22:01] And yeah, they found that the demand for those kind of roles had dropped by 21% in just eight months after the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.

[00:22:12] So hopefully they've adjusted, and I'm sure they will have done, but they've adjusted for economic conditions and other factors that will have gone into this.

[00:22:18] And the jobs that were most significantly affected were writing jobs, then ones that are built, you know, ones for software, app development, web development work, as well as engineering type jobs.

[00:22:27] I actually feel like most of my team who I recruit or anyone that I speak to, I often ask them, what do they go to use AI for?

[00:22:38] And if they don't really have a great answer for it, I generally tend to use that as a litmus test for how well they're prepared for the future of work that we're going into.

[00:22:47] I personally use it for multiple use cases, absolutely.

[00:22:53] You know, when it comes to production of content, when it comes to verification, even in terms of like, whether you're looking at documents, errors that you don't understand, processes that need to be redefined, better defined.

[00:23:10] I think that there's multiple use cases for it.

[00:23:13] And I just think that one of the things that we should all look into is how we can enroll into more prompt, prompt engineering, or at least prompt academies.

[00:23:25] I think that's something that we should all take as homework for the Christmas period.

[00:23:30] Anyway, moving on from there, we'll go completely out of left field with this and go to something totally different.

[00:23:36] And Reveal and JoinIn, or JoyIn, I'm never quite sure how to describe this business, have announced a partnership or a collaboration between their two products.

[00:23:45] So just a bit of background for anyone not familiar.

[00:23:48] Reveal is a reporting software that's originally started out life as being built for Sage products, so Sage 50, Sage 200.

[00:23:55] And recently, in the last three or four months, I think it was, integrated into Xero and formally launched their Xero products from that side and will launch into some of the other cloud-based products as well.

[00:24:06] And they're really a kind of a dashboarding tool that allows you to pull the data out of Sage products, report on it in a better way than you can do within Sage, because they've obviously played around with multiple different ways of trying to present it, and they've given up on quite a lot of those.

[00:24:19] And it gives you drillable data as well, so it's not just a standalone Excel report, which you then lose all interconnectivity with.

[00:24:28] JoinIn, or JoyIn, is a reporting tool that's quite popular.

[00:24:31] A lot of people allows you to do all of the usual financial reporting stuff that you'd be familiar with, so P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, et cetera.

[00:24:38] But it also allows you to do consolidations as well.

[00:24:41] And this is the real power of being able to connect these two products together, is that you're going to be able to take data out of Sage 50, Sage 200, which you can't really connect too easily into other reporting products.

[00:24:51] And you're going to be able to start to do some of those things that's available to everyone else on the market, basically.

[00:24:55] So this is kind of like a backwards compatibility approach, I see it as.

[00:25:00] And we've seen these being quite successful, particularly where you've got businesses that are on a Sage 50 or a Sage 200 and really don't have too many great options about moving into better, more equivalent cloud products to kind of move their business forward because of a particular...

[00:25:14] They might be in a particular industry or they might have particular integration elsewhere.

[00:25:18] So this gives them the ability to do this.

[00:25:20] And this is off the back of Reveal integrating with Complete Software, which is another reporting package that we've touched on in the past as well.

[00:25:27] So, you know, I think Reveal have kind of got the secret sauce here of how do you make things work, you know, in terms of, you know, providing almost like a data layer for these other products in the market to then build what they can do over the top, which is the more complex reporting that maybe Reveal don't want to go after or don't have the time and resources to develop at the moment in time.

[00:25:49] And partnership in this way is a pretty neat way of doing it.

[00:25:53] I got one more partnership that I might top trump you on just to see if that's a little bit better.

[00:26:00] You can tell me what you think.

[00:26:02] GetMoss.

[00:26:02] Moss has partnered with Airwallet, Airwallex to enhance and streamline their global payments.

[00:26:08] So Moss is a spend management platform that has different solutions, like his card payments,

[00:26:16] that then allows you to manage like the payment of employees or procurement.

[00:26:22] And Airwallet is obviously a global payments and financial platform.

[00:26:28] And they've partnered together so that they can enhance the bill pay product that Moss currently offers, which gives it more coverage and covers the additional currencies.

[00:26:38] So they're able to initiate payments fairly quickly via the Moss user interface and have something that enables the end-to-end procure to pay and employee reimbursement workflow to operate a little bit better.

[00:26:54] It allows it to service businesses in nine European markets.

[00:26:58] And I guess the collaboration works to both of their advantages because one, you know, the underlying infrastructure that Airwallex provides helps speed up at least the currency conversion from one jurisdiction to another.

[00:27:16] And Moss has obviously appealed to lots of different businesses.

[00:27:19] And something very atypical in that spend management space is the need to have like cross-domain use of the payments platform, especially with a card product.

[00:27:35] It's not that easy to solve.

[00:27:37] Airwallex seems to have covered multiple jurisdictions.

[00:27:40] And it's great that the partnership extends Moss's product coverage a little bit better because it's quite complex to then manage what could be multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction.

[00:27:53] So, yeah, I'm hoping that trumps yours, but we'll see.

[00:27:59] Remains to be seen.

[00:28:00] I still believe there's a gap in that market that falls under spend management and what they all currently fulfill.

[00:28:09] You've got your, you know, you've got Plio, you've got your spend desk who made and announced a series of different cuts to their team a couple of weeks back.

[00:28:21] And then you've got, what's the other one?

[00:28:23] Payhawk as well, right?

[00:28:25] Payhawk, yeah.

[00:28:26] But then you've also got all of the other stuff around the periphery, right?

[00:28:30] Like Wise and, you know, I guess Revolut as well to a degree and a whole bunch of others.

[00:28:34] Right, right.

[00:28:35] And we had Xpend actually who we spoke about as well.

[00:28:37] So, yeah, I'm still not sure which horse to back yet.

[00:28:44] Yeah, I'm not sure if this does trump my news, but I think it's a good play from Airwallex because I think Moss have got good coverage across quite a lot of mainland Europe.

[00:28:52] And I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Airwallex might have struggled to penetrate that market a little bit.

[00:28:57] And so they can kind of piggyback off the success of Moss and Moss vice versa can piggyback off the success of Airwallex, where they've probably been more successful sort of intercontinentally, if you like, in terms of being able to sort of penetrate Australian markets, some of the Far East and a little bit of the North American market as well.

[00:29:15] So I think it's got the potential to benefit both of them really well.

[00:29:24] Okay, well, I'm delighted to say I'm joined by Vipal from Advanced Track.

[00:29:28] And we're going to cover a few things with him today, really just off the back of a report that's been around for a little while and it's available for anyone that's interested in getting hold of it.

[00:29:39] And we'll share the links in all of the podcast data and bits and pieces.

[00:29:44] But one of the highlights that we've found from there is that there's this section on talent shortage and its impact on service quality.

[00:29:52] And we've seen 46% of firms have reported struggles with client deliverables due to staffing shortages.

[00:29:59] I mean, this is a fascinating insight, right?

[00:30:01] And I'm quite surprised by the number in terms of 46% saying this.

[00:30:06] But what do you think firms are going to have to do or what are they doing presently to mitigate service quality issues that are caused by talent shortages?

[00:30:16] The biggest challenge that people have had is the sheer increase in the demand for services.

[00:30:26] I think what COVID did was actually it made so many accountants step up in terms of what they were able to deliver.

[00:30:37] And perhaps because people were busy anyway, they didn't offer these multitude of services.

[00:30:46] I mean, how many times have you heard the line, I dare not go and speak to a client because they might give me some more work.

[00:30:51] And I don't know how to do it.

[00:30:53] And there's an element of that.

[00:30:56] But I think what COVID clearly showed clients is actually if I do talk to my accountant, they can help me.

[00:31:05] And I think what that's done is exacerbated the problem that actually there's fewer and fewer young people coming into the profession.

[00:31:14] There's more people leaving the profession.

[00:31:17] And COVID accelerated that.

[00:31:18] So if you look at the data that's in the report, there's about 300,000 left the US profession between 2019 and 2022.

[00:31:28] And in proportion, there's similar numbers for the UK.

[00:31:32] And so what you've got is not enough new talent coming in and lots of talent leaving.

[00:31:39] So as a consequence, whilst clients are demanding more, there's fewer people to deliver it.

[00:31:45] And we all know technology is there and it's helping, but it does put pressure on the people that are left.

[00:31:53] I guess, you know, we kind of have this view sometimes that technology can be a bit of a silver bullet.

[00:31:59] And yet, you know, quite often firms don't always recognize efficiency savings necessarily as a consequence of implementing new technology.

[00:32:07] But do you think that technology implemented well can improve efficiency or even improve, you know,

[00:32:14] and do that without compromising client relations or help with this quality issue that we're experiencing?

[00:32:19] Oh, 100 percent.

[00:32:21] 100 percent.

[00:32:22] I think, you know, technology used well.

[00:32:25] And look, there'll be very few firms that can say they implemented everything successfully.

[00:32:30] And if they say that, it's probably not true.

[00:32:34] So it's fair.

[00:32:36] But, you know, we work in a collaborative world.

[00:32:40] People share good practice.

[00:32:43] And it's learning from those that have done it, implemented things, and then applying those in your firm.

[00:32:51] And it's trying to, and your client base.

[00:32:53] Because depending on your client base will determine how successful we collectively are at delivering a better level of client service.

[00:33:05] Yeah.

[00:33:06] Yeah, interesting.

[00:33:06] And I mean, I think during some of the interviews that you guys did as a consequence of pulling together this survey,

[00:33:13] there were stories of salary bumps in excess of 30 percent.

[00:33:17] And generally, salary increases were going up by around about 15 percent.

[00:33:23] So by dint of that, right, the staff resourcing that you've got, even if it is diminishing, you know, is costing you more.

[00:33:31] But are they potentially then working on sort of lower value work as a consequence?

[00:33:35] Or is this, are the expectations of clients coming to firms, you know, much more broad in their expectations?

[00:33:43] And what's the consequence of that?

[00:33:45] Is it clients that are driving this?

[00:33:47] Or is it accounting practices that are driving this expectation?

[00:33:50] I think the clients certainly have understood that an accountant is an incredibly valuable resource.

[00:34:01] And the consequence of that is like, well, you did it for me four years ago when I'm, you know, in the pandemic.

[00:34:09] You helped me do a cash flow forecast.

[00:34:11] You helped me raise money.

[00:34:13] Yeah.

[00:34:13] And, you know, we're not going to go into politics, but there are challenging circumstances that we all operate in as businesses.

[00:34:23] Yeah.

[00:34:23] And the consequence of that is businesses will need more help to actually get through the next few years.

[00:34:32] And it's, I guess, our responsibility as a profession to make sure that we're in that place that allows us to be that friend, if you like, that professional friend who supports our clients to make them, one, get through and two, be successful.

[00:34:53] Because, you know, let's be clear.

[00:34:56] Successful businesses are what grow the economy.

[00:34:59] Yeah.

[00:35:00] No, I completely agree.

[00:35:01] I agree.

[00:35:01] I think, well, I think that's a great place just to sort of wrap up there.

[00:35:05] And I guess I'd throw this out to our audience who might be listening and just sort of say, you know, we'd love to hear from you.

[00:35:11] You know, what are you experiencing in terms of talent shortages and the effects on your firms?

[00:35:16] You know, tell us about your war stories.

[00:35:17] Tell us about what you're doing to try and fix these problems.

[00:35:19] Be great to hear from you.

[00:35:21] But thanks very much, Vipal.

[00:35:22] Thank you.

[00:36:01] Briefcase.

[00:36:04] It's about making accounting sexy again.

[00:36:07] Is that fair to say, Ruben?

[00:36:09] What do you think?

[00:36:11] It's actually so funny.

[00:36:12] I sent that to Jan earlier today.

[00:36:14] Like, honestly, like I said, we're going to make accounting great again.

[00:36:16] But he wasn't a fan.

[00:36:19] It's got the same initials as well as MAGA too.

[00:36:21] So it was great.

[00:36:22] So what is it that Briefcase actually does?

[00:36:25] What do you cover, Ruben?

[00:36:28] Briefcase is a bookkeeping and accounting automation platform.

[00:36:31] Right now we have built out our bookkeeping module, which means that we automate not just data extraction,

[00:36:37] but also reasoning-based tasks like categorization, VAT, making sure that every single transaction,

[00:36:44] all you do is upload it, everything else is done for you and it's posted to the ledger.

[00:36:48] And then what we're building next and what we're really excited about is our month end piece.

[00:36:52] So imagine that the invoice that you uploaded was an insurance bill for the next 12 months.

[00:36:57] Briefcase will recognize that that's a prepayment.

[00:37:00] Schedule up those journals for you and all you have to do is hit publish.

[00:37:03] And that's your month end journaling done for you.

[00:37:05] So that's Briefcase.

[00:37:06] That's the platform we have now.

[00:37:08] And that's what we're building with this funding round we just closed.

[00:37:11] We want to move into all other accounting workflows as well in the future.

[00:37:14] Anything that takes a huge amount of time that's manual is up for grabs.

[00:37:18] I am curious to know more about how you're working in this space because we've spoken about LLMs.

[00:37:27] We've spoken about AI agents.

[00:37:29] We've spoken about bots that can be configured.

[00:37:32] Tell me again what it is that makes Briefcase unique in this space where it comes to accounting automation

[00:37:41] and what you see the size of the problem being for accountants in this space today and how you guys are broaching it.

[00:37:48] Really, the whole premise of Briefcase is that we recognize that there's really powerful technology available today.

[00:37:55] You have GPT, you have Gemini, you have Claude.

[00:37:58] All of these models which have amazing reasoning capabilities are available and can be used.

[00:38:04] But they haven't been applied in a way which is useful for accountants yet.

[00:38:07] And this is at odds to many other industries.

[00:38:10] If you take software engineering, for example, a third or a quarter of all the code written at Google is now written by AI.

[00:38:17] If you take law, you have legal techs like Harvey and Robin AI transforming the workflows of professionals for the better.

[00:38:24] But if you take accounting, it's still more or less the same as it was five years ago.

[00:38:29] And what we're doing at Briefcase is we're taking that technology and applying it in a way that's actually useful for accountants.

[00:38:34] What that means is it's not a chatbot.

[00:38:36] What that means is that it's not a co-pilot.

[00:38:38] It's actually embedded in your existing workflows and using the reasoning capability and the contextual understanding of these models to do tasks,

[00:38:47] which at the moment are happening between various tools and with a lot of human input.

[00:38:52] And how do you go about then teaching those models?

[00:38:57] How do you go about being able to improve?

[00:39:00] Because that's the thing that most of the technologies that come into the accounting space have really got to build is that level of trust and visibility.

[00:39:12] And that trust usually comes from human intervention of the accountant themselves.

[00:39:16] So how are you going about making sure that that is there for the businesses or for the accountants or the bookkeepers that are using the software?

[00:39:25] Yeah, trust is incredibly important.

[00:39:27] I would say, especially if you're looking at adopting AI in your practice, you shouldn't adopt it unless you know what it's doing.

[00:39:34] And the way that we deliver that for Briefcase is that every single decision that our AI makes is explainable.

[00:39:41] So even the smallest decision, like you've uploaded an invoice and the AI interprets the date as a like whatever, you can justify that.

[00:39:50] You can hover over this little icon in Briefcase and it will tell you why we said that the date was extracted that way.

[00:39:55] So you're never left in the dark and it's not a black box.

[00:39:58] We always make sure that you can justify for yourself why the AI has made the decisions we have.

[00:40:04] And that way, even if it's wrong, you can figure out why I did that.

[00:40:08] You can correct it and you can know for next time why I made that mistake.

[00:40:11] And we can also then improve the product off the back of that.

[00:40:13] But it's really about having that explainability.

[00:40:16] Without explainability, you don't have any trust.

[00:40:17] How do you compare to the other products that are available?

[00:40:23] Where does Briefcase sit in relation to them?

[00:40:26] Just so that you can make it easier for people to kind of process or think about when they're looking at a particular piece of software.

[00:40:34] And again, because at the moment, Briefcase having launched last year, three million in seed funding.

[00:40:43] And so I guess it's good to know where your roadmap is for growth and how you see yourself differentiating from some of the other softwares that are out there, like Genesis, for instance.

[00:40:55] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:40:56] So we launched this year.

[00:40:57] So we've actually only been going for nine months and just secured our first funding round.

[00:41:05] And we're building incredibly quickly and growing very quickly off the back of that as well.

[00:41:09] Awesome.

[00:41:10] What I'd say around what makes Briefcase different, and I'll give a technical answer first, and then I'll go into what I think is actually relevant to the people who might be listening to this.

[00:41:19] The technical answer is that people have tried to automate accounting before by building their own models.

[00:41:25] That has been tried before.

[00:41:27] A great example of that is a company called Pilot in the US, which tried to basically deliver bookkeeping automation.

[00:41:32] But then they end up being an accounting firm themselves, and they built these fine-tuned ML models to automate categorization, for example.

[00:41:40] This doesn't work.

[00:41:42] People who have tried this before have realized that you cannot automate bookkeeping and accounting by fine-tuning models because it's so context-dependent.

[00:41:51] Every single client that you have will have a unique chart of accounts, and every single client will have different preferences in the way that they want to process things.

[00:41:58] You might get exactly the same transaction that gets processed differently by two different clients.

[00:42:02] Like, you know, a coffee shop buys paint.

[00:42:04] That's a cost of goods sold.

[00:42:06] No, probably not.

[00:42:08] But like a construction company buys paint.

[00:42:10] That's probably a cost of goods sold.

[00:42:11] A coffee shop, that's probably repairs and maintenance.

[00:42:13] The point being that traditional ML approaches here, where they basically fine-tune a model overfit to a specific client type and won't be generalizable across all customers.

[00:42:24] So the technical approach to our differential briefcase is that we understand that we cannot fine-tune models here.

[00:42:29] We use the reasoning capability of the model, and then we feed it fine-tuned data.

[00:42:35] So every single client, we store their data independently.

[00:42:38] We look at their unique chart of accounts.

[00:42:40] We look at their historical transactions.

[00:42:42] And then we feed the relevant pieces of information to a large language model, which is able to process that and feed back the correct answer.

[00:42:49] That enables you to build a scalable system that works across completely different clients in different industries.

[00:42:57] That's the technical answer of what differentiates us.

[00:42:59] Now, I think the more interesting answer of what differentiates us is that we're product-obsessed.

[00:43:02] And perhaps to a fault, we haven't invested much in marketing.

[00:43:06] You can probably tell.

[00:43:07] We haven't invested much in sales.

[00:43:09] We're really heads-down building.

[00:43:11] And we're really fortunate to be working with several accounting firms now who are helping build alongside us as part of our early adopter program.

[00:43:19] But everything we do is about building the best product possible.

[00:43:24] That's what motivates us.

[00:43:25] That's why we started Briefcase, because we looked at the market and we felt like there wasn't any stand-up product, at least not in the past decade.

[00:43:31] And we want to build the stand-up product for the next decade.

[00:43:34] And every single decision we make is reflected in that.

[00:43:37] We're looking at the small things that other people miss.

[00:43:39] You can add a ledger code in Briefcase while you're doing your bookkeeping.

[00:43:44] That syncs directly with Xero.

[00:43:45] You don't have to go back to Xero and then add the ledger code, then come back to Briefcase and refresh, because that's a bad user experience.

[00:43:51] Little things like that, that's what sets Briefcase apart.

[00:43:53] You mentioned Xero there.

[00:43:55] So is that the first ledger that you'll be working with, or what's the intention for building that out as well?

[00:44:03] Yeah, so we're integrated with Xero at the moment.

[00:44:05] We also have a two-way sync with Xero.

[00:44:07] Again, pretty unique, but in the sense that you can update your transactions in Briefcase.

[00:44:10] They update in Xero.

[00:44:11] You can update them in Xero.

[00:44:13] They also update in Briefcase.

[00:44:15] We're building integration with QuickBooks, which we should be live by early next year.

[00:44:20] And then we'll also be building integration with Sage and eventually any kind of general ledger, which we believe could benefit from the automation that we're providing.

[00:44:28] Brilliant.

[00:44:29] And what's the intention now for also the raise, I guess?

[00:44:32] How are you spending your pennies?

[00:44:34] Hopefully not on too much marketing, but yeah, just trying out the team and what their specialisms will be.

[00:44:41] Yeah, I mean, we could enjoy, indulge ourselves a little bit.

[00:44:46] We are attending Fab, Daz and AccountEx next year.

[00:44:49] But beyond that, we're looking to really spend the money on product, which means that we're hiring a team of killer engineers.

[00:44:55] We're hiring product experts, people who really understand in and out both the technology and hopefully the domain as well of what we're trying to build.

[00:45:04] And we're going to use them to essentially build other platform, both to support our existing customers and to onboard new customers.

[00:45:11] It's really interesting that you talk about product because that's the domain, but I am quite curious.

[00:45:17] And we spoke a little bit about this, but how do you get experts for AI?

[00:45:23] It's like having Facebook created a year ago and then saying you want to hire a social media guru, which to me is still, we're so new in that.

[00:45:33] So how do you recruit?

[00:45:35] Yeah, this is such a good question.

[00:45:39] I think people forget because so much has happened.

[00:45:42] But like two years ago, there wasn't like, you know, these LLMs.

[00:45:46] They weren't available commercially just two years ago.

[00:45:49] So nobody is an expert.

[00:45:50] And in some ways, that's a blessing.

[00:45:52] Because what it means is that you've had this universal leveler where everybody is reset to the same playing field.

[00:45:58] And that's exactly why companies like Briefcase can exist.

[00:46:01] And that's why we're not worried about people like Xero or QuickBooks or all of these kind of incumbents doing something similar to what we're doing.

[00:46:07] Because we know that everyone's reset to Xero.

[00:46:10] Like everyone's at the start line.

[00:46:11] The race starts now.

[00:46:12] What does it mean when hiring?

[00:46:14] Well, it means that there's no benefit to hiring somebody who's got 10 years of experience.

[00:46:18] Because they don't have 10 years of experience in building on top of LLMs.

[00:46:21] So really what we tend to look for, especially for the rules, which are rules that wouldn't have existed a couple of years ago.

[00:46:28] Things like prompt engineering, building evaluation functions.

[00:46:32] We're hiring kind of like a product ops position, which encompasses both of those things.

[00:46:37] That role, I think, is best suited to young people who are hungry and have incredible growth trajectory.

[00:46:42] Because they're kind of taking a bet that they're going to become the experts.

[00:46:45] In 10 years time, they will be the person that Xero will look at when they decide they want to build their own AI.

[00:46:52] That's kind of how typically these cycles work.

[00:46:56] Wow.

[00:46:56] Do you think that that is a reality?

[00:47:00] I mean, you have investment from one of the founders of Penny Lane, as an example.

[00:47:06] Penny Lane being an accounting software in France, which I personally think is bucking a trend there.

[00:47:14] Because they have introduced all sorts of different functions that we just don't have in some of the accounting softwares here.

[00:47:21] Notably, like I bang on about financing a lot of the time.

[00:47:25] But I love the fact that they really understand cash flow.

[00:47:28] And they've therefore built something like lending into their product.

[00:47:31] But they're clearly seeing something in value as well here in AI.

[00:47:36] And the fact that they've already made an investment into briefcase in and amongst many others, obviously.

[00:47:42] But from your perspective, is there a real intention for some of these accounting softwares to rival one day what you've built?

[00:47:52] Or how does that fit with the nature of who owns the data?

[00:47:58] And therefore, how do you risk yourself from the fact that that data could be taken away?

[00:48:05] Or that link could be broken in some way?

[00:48:09] Yeah.

[00:48:09] I think what brings us all together, which is probably more important here, is that we're all solving problems for accounting firms.

[00:48:18] And the accounting firm that briefcase solves is very different to the problem that zero penny Lane or another one of these ledgers solve.

[00:48:28] One of the things that we're seeing in the industry is that, you know, it's really difficult to hire junior staff.

[00:48:33] It's very difficult to maintain them.

[00:48:36] Costs are increasing.

[00:48:37] The only solution or the only way of really building a scalable business, especially if you're going to be offering like bookkeeping services, is through outsourcing.

[00:48:45] And that comes with all sorts of other problems around the cost of it, around the management oversight required.

[00:48:50] That's our competition.

[00:48:52] That's where briefcase comes in.

[00:48:54] And it's replacing these manual workflows that sit on top of these existing general ledgers.

[00:48:59] So I think there's actually a lot of synergy between us.

[00:49:03] And I think that's what we're seeing at the moment with the relationship that we're building with zero.

[00:49:07] Another thing to bear in mind is that, like, these ledgers are also building AI.

[00:49:12] Zero is building JAX, for example.

[00:49:13] But they're building a conversational AI.

[00:49:15] So not the same kind of embedded solution that we're going for.

[00:49:18] They're building a system so you can message zero and say, hey, how much did I spend last week?

[00:49:22] And it tells you, which is helpful for different reasons and different purposes.

[00:49:25] But for that to work, it needs good data going into zero.

[00:49:30] So for that to be a success, you need a much smarter data entry, bookkeeping automation solution to exist in order to make sure that all the data that's being fed into these platforms is super high quality and has the correct categorization, the correct VAT applied, or without a human even looking at it.

[00:49:47] Brilliant.

[00:49:48] Brilliant.

[00:49:48] And that's where I think, like, there's a lot of interest from the incumbents to kind of work with, with Platforms like ourselves.

[00:49:55] What types of firms are you looking at, actually, notably in terms of what softwares they work with or perhaps, you know, what current client profile they have?

[00:50:06] Yeah, we're working.

[00:50:07] We have an early adopters club right now, which is really exciting.

[00:50:10] So we have some amazing accounting firms that are part of that.

[00:50:13] And we are onboarding new accounting firms every single week to join us.

[00:50:16] Really looking for those first movers, the people who are willing to take a risk, the people who are excited by what AI can bring to the industry and want to be part of that journey.

[00:50:26] What it means to be an early adopter is that, I mean, you do get early access to the technology, you do get a discount, but beyond that, you get to shape the future of the industry.

[00:50:36] You get to input and say, look, I want this feature, I want that feature, and we can actually build it.

[00:50:41] Because when you say something as an early adopter right now, your message is going directly to me and my co-founder.

[00:50:48] There's nobody else that's going in between.

[00:50:50] There's no way for that communication to drop off.

[00:50:52] And that's a very unique thing that we can provide because we're still a small company and we're still growing very quickly.

[00:50:57] And I think the people who are energized that and excited by that opportunity are the kind of people that we want to onboard in the next few months.

[00:51:04] And then, of course, we are going to be hitting milestones and objectives that are going to cross to scale beyond that.

[00:51:12] But right now, the focus is to serve that existing early adopter base and grow it with other like-minded individuals.

[00:51:18] When I first came into the accounting industry, it was so common to have a cloud software.

[00:51:24] It was so the norm to have like a CRM system or to have various different SaaS products that you use that were all in the cloud.

[00:51:34] And I remember thinking it was so interesting that the accounting space had just, they were just coming to the fore of that about five years ago, as you said.

[00:51:45] And so it does feel like the pace of innovation for the next five years is going to be on rocket fuel.

[00:51:52] So it does feel like, you know, people are taking steps to, yes, understand how they should work with AI.

[00:52:01] But what would you say to an accountant who is listening now and thinking, I want to try and dip my toe into this, but I really don't understand what it is that I should even begin to think about to get started tomorrow?

[00:52:17] I think now is probably the most exciting time, definitely in the past 10 years to be an accountant.

[00:52:23] Like what's going to happen in the next three to five years is going to completely transform the industry in ways which are going to have to be for the better.

[00:52:32] So I think it's a super exciting time to be in the industry.

[00:52:35] And I think if I were an accountant right now, I'd be very eager to learn more and see what's out there and see ways I can adopt it in my practice.

[00:52:42] That doesn't necessarily mean changing vendors or using new software.

[00:52:47] Like you can use AI in plenty of ways in your existing practice as it stands.

[00:52:51] I mean, I use AI in loads of ways outside of briefcase.

[00:52:54] Like I use it to write emails.

[00:52:55] I use it to proofread articles that I post.

[00:52:58] I use it for all sorts of things as part of my daily workflow is as important to me as Google Docs or Slack.

[00:53:05] It's literally like on my toolbar and I use it as interchangeably as all these other tools.

[00:53:10] And I think the first step for anyone interested in AI is to use these kind of like language models out of the box just to get a feel for what they like,

[00:53:18] just to understand how they work and at the same time benefit from their efficiencies in areas which aren't your core bookkeeping and accounting workflows.

[00:53:28] And then once you've done that and come to terms with it, what you'll realize is that, okay, well, chat interface doesn't help me at all with my core bookkeeping and accounting workflows.

[00:53:34] And that's when you can come to someone like Briefcase where we've taken the time to understand, okay, to apply this technology into these core bookkeeping and accounting workflows,

[00:53:43] you really need to build this AI agent and this infrastructure and guardrails to make it actually work consistently.

[00:53:48] And that's where it becomes helpful to onboard a vendor.

[00:53:51] But if you're just interested in AI generally, there's so much you can do in your practice outside of the core bookkeeping and accounting to level up.

[00:53:59] I would say if your focus is core bookkeeping and accounting, if you're struggling to hire, if you're struggling to do client work on time,

[00:54:07] then you might want to look to a software vendor that can help with that.

[00:54:10] So if anyone wants to find out more about Briefcase, where should we come to?

[00:54:16] You can go to www.briefcase.so. That's S for Sierra, O for October. That's our website.

[00:54:23] You can also connect with me, Ruben Stinkamp, on LinkedIn and I'll get in touch.

[00:54:29] And he buys a really nice coffee for those of you that are interested.

[00:54:34] Yes, we're moving to new offices, actually. Our own space in Barbican. So if anyone is in London, message me.

[00:54:42] Well, thank you, Ruben. And we look forward to seeing all of the events next year.

[00:54:46] I'm really pleased that you've managed to close our seed round and it's a good amount of cash that hopefully gets you to the point where you can hit your next major milestones.

[00:54:56] And we're really excited that you came on the podcast as well. So thanks for joining us, Ruben.

[00:55:00] Thank you so much for having me.

[00:55:03] Thanks for joining us on today's episode. Don't be a Grinch. Leave us a review. We have been good this year. We've been on the nice list. We would appreciate it if you give us the five stars.

[00:55:20] I can't believe you could make a limerick out of the Grinch, surely. Come on. Get a Grinch. I don't know. Let's have a think about this.

[00:55:28] Don't be a Grinch. Don't be a Grinch. Leave us a review. It's really a cinch and all you could do.

[00:55:38] I don't know if that's a limerick or just some pathetic attempt at poetry.

[00:55:44] It's probably not a limerick because Mary had a little lamb.

[00:55:49] His feet were right.

[00:55:52] Yeah.

[00:55:57] They're going to be so wasting time now, John.

[00:56:00] Bye.

[00:56:02] Bye.

[00:56:03] Bye.

[00:56:04] Bye.

[00:56:04] Bye.

[00:56:05] Bye.