 Good morning, everyone. What a lovely day to have this wonderful conversation, which is all about relationships, love, emotions, you know. As we've seen, this pandemic might have become a reality of our times, but it has not stopped us from forming new connections, looking out for emotional support or potential partners, you know. And in all of this, what has, who has been playing the cupid here? Any guesses? Yes, the tech guys, the tech guys are the ones who are keeping us virtually engaged. Our dates and our giving of flowers and our coffee with a movie watching with our beloved ones, all has moved to online, all has moved to virtual space. And it has become close to real. And thanks to those tech guys who are making and adding new features every time. What has also been happening is that in the last 90 days especially, a lot of people, since they are at home, they prefer to be at home, though the unlock one is there, but they still don't venture out, they prefer to be at home. And it has resulted in spike in traffic on online platforms like dating and matrimony sites. So these are some of the facts. And today, we have a wonderful conversation that we're going to do. And the topic of the discussion is technology playing cupid in times of COVID-19. So I mean, nothing can stop the emotion of love and the need, the quest to find a partner. I think people go to any levels. I think tech is enabling it and is playing a huge role. So I would like to welcome, I have an esteemed panel in front of me. Virtually, of course, I would start with my first speaker, Mr. Chandasekhar R. Chief Technology Operation and Infrastructure Officer, Bharat Matrimony. So welcome to this conversation. I have with me Mr. Ravi Mittal, CEO, Quack Quack. I have here Mr. Rohanish Kaur, Presaids Leader, India Media, Akamai Technologies, and our esteemed speaker Mr. Ravi, sorry, Mr. Ranjit Paul, Deputy General Manager IT, Manorama Online. Welcome all of you. All of you have a part to play in this cupid game. I mean, you all kind of are the enablers of it. So let me start with Mr. Sekhar. I want to start with you. My first question is, give me a sense of what the last 90 days have been like for your platform. If you could give me a kind of background to it. Okay. Last 90 days, what we see is immediately after one is internal, another one is external from the customer point of view. What we see is on the website side, we see a 30% increase in the number of registrations. Young professionals who are currently working from home, since they don't have to commute and they can't go out for shopping or for socializing, they spend more time. One is we see a 30% increase in the registration is what we see in the last 90 days. Right. Ravi, your thoughts, I mean, I have seen dating platforms curating something like innovative stuff, like you can go cook and go watch binge watch. What has been like for you? So the last 90 days have been a roller coaster for us as well. In terms of registrations, as Mr. Chandrasekhar said, we were adding about 10,000 users pre-lockdown per day, which has increased to 18,000 users on a daily basis. Yeah. So what we are seeing again, that those numbers have fluctuated as the lockdown has opened up. I think people were going to their hometown or, you know, maybe looking for a job or something. So as the lockdown increased, we saw increasing registrations and the as the unlock started, you know, we started seeing again, a gradual drop in the people who are signing up. And certainly, we have seen a huge spike in the number of chats which are happening on the platform, almost 60% spike in the daily chats. So we still have about 300k chats a day, which increased to about, you know, 500k chats per day. So that's what we have observed. Right. Before I come to you, Rohanish, I'll go to Ranjit. What has it been like for your platform, Ranjit? Yeah. Good morning, everyone. And thanks to Exchange for Media and Akamai for inviting me to this panel. Unlike what we heard from Chandrasekhar and Ravi, what we have seen is a different story. In fact, we are not seeing a significant increase in the traffic in the last 90 days. So there was an initial drop in terms of traffic is because people were actually probably getting used to the lockdown and getting settled down. But it actually came up and it was back to the pre COVID state. But what we have seen an interesting factor is there has been an increased engagement matrix in the last 90 days. That was the key factor. Because we have been analyzing the user journey throughout. And when you say engagement matrix, the number of contacts made, the number of messages people have sent, the chat operations, the subscriptions, the conversion. So these are the engagement matrix we track normally. So there we have seen a huge increase in the last 90 days. So that's what our observation is. Thank you, Mr. Paul. Mr. Kaur, to you, I mean, end of the day, I mean, somewhere, this unprecedented spike demands a quick adjustment, both in terms of manpower, I mean, working from home plus the tech part of it. Tell me, how are tech companies like yours, helping them tide over this unprecedented hike, if they had not forced me? I mean, thank you for that question. So look, at least on Akamai as a delivery platform, we've never honestly had the need to scale beforehand or actually focus what the growth's going to be. That's the beauty of the platform we scale on demand. And the amount of planning that actually goes into the deployments that we do for our platforms, the optimizations, they're always six to 12 months ahead of that growth. So for us, honestly, we were in good shape for us to be able to handle this traffic increase or this spike in traffic for a lot of the tech platforms that leverage Akamai today. Having said that, I feel we've seen a steady increase in traffic across most verticals, barring a few known ones, obviously travel and hospitality are down. But I still maintain that there's a steady increase, unlike what let's say some of the other channels are reporting that they're talking about exponential increase in traffic across segments. We've not really seen that. We've definitely seen a steady increase in traffic though. But the other piece that we've also noticed and realized is the fact that while that increase in traffic has happened, it has not really resulted in increase in revenue for a lot of these tech platforms because if you think about it, because of COVID-19, ad spending was completely cut. Companies stopped spending on advertising and a lot of platforms or companies that are dependent on ad revenues for their digital platforms obviously started to notice the squeeze. Having said that, I mean, this is the time of opportunity. A lot of organizations and startups actually have used this period to pivot into more interesting models and focus on user engagement like even Ranjit pointed out to ensure that they reduce their dependency on advertising and actually get more footfalls, get more first-hand users signed up on their platform so that they reduce their dependency there and increase user engagement metrics. So that's the perception we have of what we've noticed in the last 90 days. Right. I want to go a little bit back and come through this entire online matrimony and dating question. There was a little cultural barrier. If I am right, that's what I gather from my research that especially in dating platforms like matrimony is now accepted online, but there used to be a cultural barrier. Mr. Chandrasekhar, I want to come to you. People have this aversion to visit, work, a little work. Should we make our profiles online? Has that cultural shift happened? Are we still witnessing that mindset in your space, matrimony space, Mr. Chandrasekhar? The ours, if you look at Pratheel, our platform is built with keeping our tradition in mind. For example, what we ask for is like our platform which can be used by the parents, like brothers, like the family, as well as the individual. Both of them can use the platform. Some other thing is what you look at is we ask for the horoscope. We ask for the stars. Even we ask for what do you call that. Even the matching happens in our thing is we provide a future whereby people can match the profile based on the horoscope. And also what we have seen over the years, what we have seen is people do according to their community they belong to. So what we have done is in 2009 or so, we launched 350 plus community websites like from Agarwal to Yadav. We have community-based sites today. What we see is more and more traction to the community-based website also. What do you see here? So over the period of time, yes, if you look at today, if you overall, if you look at parents and family-created profile is somewhere around 30% still when compared to the individuals of 70%. Mr. Mithil, is this, I mean dating is still, I think there are a lot of concerns here culturally as well. Are you seeing any shift? Are we seeing any behavioral customer shift? Coming to dating as such, what we have seen over the years, I mean we started almost 10 years back and we started with the desktop website and today it's all about mobile applications. So what we have seen is number one, more people are getting adapted to the concept of dating in India. And we are seeing that the average age of users is dropping. So earlier if in a given year, the average age of users was 29 or 30. Today that has dropped to about 25 or 26. So the clear indication is that more youngsters are trying out dating apps. They're very curious about what happens, how can they make new friends, how can they find a date. And a majority of our traffic comes from people who are in the age group of 18 to 20. So this is like a curious audience. They are looking to figure out how dating works, how online dating works. So this is an interesting data point which we have. More youngsters are trying out dating apps. This is what I would like to see. Mr. Paul, what is your observation? Yeah, what I feel is there is a clear distinction in the people mindset between a dating app and a matchmaking or a matrimony lab. So what we have seen from our experience is that our users prefer a more curated space, especially when it comes from a credible 132 year old organization like ours, like Media House, like ours. And credibility or trust is a key factor from our audience point of view. And we are talking about serious users who would like to find a perfect match in a short period of time. Whereas dating apps cater to a more casual younger audience who want to do a fun loving, you want to connect each other. So they would encourage functionality like messaging, chat, video, and those things. Whereas in a matrimony lab, these activities are usually metered and closely monitored in a matrimony lab. So but also in my opinion, I think both dating and matrimony labs have a distinct space in the market. Mr. Gauri, it all comes again to tech, for example. Why people are a versus one is, is it secure? Can it be trusted, for example? So a lot of it, that cultural barrier is also to do with that trust factor. As a tech expert and a leader, tell me what can be done? What is your advice to people who are in this space? How can you make it more secure for them to come online and use it very often? Well, that's a great question. And actually, that's a broad question. There are lots of aspects to security that, you know, we can sort of talk about here. And in the past, you've had a lot of those conversations with Renjit and Chandrasekhar as well. If you think about it, like you broadly classify that into, if I could say, two main spaces. One, you know, you secure the entire user experience for the consumer. And second, it's all about protecting that information that's stored on these websites, because unlike a banking application where you do have very sensitive information, payment related information, but on online apps or, you know, matrimonial apps or online dating apps, there's a wealth of personal information that's being stored, right? So I think securing that information becomes very important. So protecting customer identity is I think the single most important focus area for most of these websites. And I'm sure the gentleman in the panel here will agree with me on that. From an ARCMI perspective, look, I think we're doing, we're doing a lot of work to help such platforms, you know, protect, secure and govern this data. And while doing that, also allow the organizations the capability to actually have fine grained controls and fine grained information at a user level, so that they can provide a personalized experience to the end user, right? So that's one part of it, where you're protecting and you're securing like the user information. The other part is your more traditional cloud security conversation, right? So how do you ensure that you are, you know, your websites are optimized? So, you know, the performance is good end users. Today, don't have the patience to wait if a website takes a lot of time to load, right? So while you're ensuring performance, you're also then ensuring that, you know, your websites are not prone to any sort of attacks from hackers or any attacks on potential stuffing because most of these websites work on logins. So you wouldn't really want that login to be compromised and somebody else use that login, right? Any sort of breach of user information or user login credentials in today's world leads to a lot of brand damage if nothing else, right? So there's a lot of work that Akamai is doing with respect to that, you know, to ensure that your applications are also protected. And, you know, with respect to online dating and matrimonial websites, few use cases stand out, right? So how can Akamai help prevent fake profiles from being created or the fact that somebody else is actually crawling all the information and posting it on their websites, right? And the other piece is how do you identify that someone who's using your platform is actually not a bot but an actual human. These are some of the areas that Akamai has been investing in heavily and we've actually built up solutions to protect or enable tech platforms from some of these use cases. I think dating a bot would be another level of dating now. You're preventing from that happening. Mrs. Chandrasekhar, tell me in the last 90 days when no weddings are happening, and even if some are happening, I've seen a couple of them happening virtually, taking place. What new features or, you know, what are the kind of engagement scenarios that you've created in the last 90 days for your users? How could they take us through that? You know, what new has been added in the 90 days? Yes. One in the last 90 days, what we have done is we launched, recently launched the video call feature whereby the families of the prospective bride and groom can talk to each other without revealing their number. That is the video call feature integrated with their app. That's one. And this is from the matchmaking business. We also into the services business in that we launched a product called home weddings. What it allows us is we help the customers to identify the partners who can offer services at the doorstep, including pro-hit. Like now we'll follow the standard protocol given by the government who follow. That's another product what we have launched in the 90 days. Mr. Mittal, what has been the engagement like in the last 90 days? What new additions? So, as I said, the number of chats on our platform have increased to a great extent and each chat length has increased. So, you know, naturally more people are opting to chat, you know, and obviously not meet up in person. As a dating platform, we have been very apprehensive about launching any video call facility because we have seen that a lot of, you know, scams happen on dating apps and it is in which we deal on a daily basis. We have a lot of people who try to create, you know, fake profiles and try to scam other people. So, you know, we are currently in a stage where matrimony was probably 10 years back, you know, people are valuable on dating apps. So, we tried not to engage people via video calls, but, you know, let them chat. We opened a platform so that people can match with other users all over India, not only in their area. So, they get a chance to match with more people and interact and chat with more people. We also launched a feature called a random chat. So, instead of just finding a profile and initiating a chat, you randomly connect to people and they start chatting, you know, because you are at home and you don't have much work. So, this is a point of, you know, contact where we could increase engagement for our users. Mr. Paul, how do you make this engagement more sticky, you know? Yeah. In terms of activities, we have been doing in the last 90 days. In fact, our main action item was empowering our team to give remote assistance because suddenly people are all locked down and there is no physical service centers or help us where people come and we actually handhold them to create a profile, find the right match and all. So, that's all gone. So, we have to empower our team to give remote assistance. So, that was the primary activity we have been doing. On the technical, on the tech front, I think we have been working, even the pre-COVID times, we have been working on containerizing their applications and fully automating the deployment process. And that has really helped in the last, during the COVID because we did not need a bar room set up kind of thing for new releases of product updates and enhancements. Everything can happen at home from the respective workstations at home in a distributed environment and fully automated and containerized. So, that was one of the tech activity which we have successfully found working during the last 90 days. In terms of engagement, we have been working on an analytics platform, completely in-house analytics platform on lens. And we have also a small recommendation engine based on AI, on intelligence, collecting behavioral statistics from the users on what kind of searches, what kind of profiles, interest and all and based on that, recommending the right kind of matches to them. And it has been found working perfectly well and we have been consistently, continuously training the engine to make the match more perfect. Right. Mr. Karan, you know, if, I mean, the way the cases are rising and we don't see the socially, you know, the kind of world opening the way it was, I think a lot is going to happen online itself, you know. One is that how do you create that close to real experience now because people don't just want to go on a dating site, how they used to go before COVID, you know, on a matrimony site. I think they expect more now. Their expectations are growing because their offline world is also shifting to online. From a tech point of view, use of AI and big data and all of those, you know, big tech terms, tell me what all is possible? How close can we get to reality and how are you leading the way? Sure. So, well, if you think about it, ARCMA as a platform is basically there to enable a lot of the experiences that, you know, companies like Ampamery, Quack Quack or BharatMatrimony.com are designing for the end users. Right. Mr. Chandrasekhar actually brought out a brilliant use case about video. And if you think about it, I think the video option on the matrimonial websites, I feel is going to be key in the coming years. We all know how, you know, audiences in India love to consume video. And if you can make video as a use case, you know, to be a personal use case in something like a matrimonial website, I think there is a lot of potential there. And as a tech platform, as a delivery platform for ARCMA, delivering videos are bread butter. Right. We've been doing that for OTT companies. We've been doing that for publishing companies. So for us, we have a fairly robust and a mature platform and it comes to video delivery. Right. So our entire focus would be ensuring that one, that entire video interaction happens with the best possible quality with absolutely, you know, no disruptions or no rebuffering because people hate rebuffering during a video conversation. So our focus would be to provide you that quality of service, especially to end users, so that the entire experience becomes enjoyable. Having said that, the other piece that we have started focusing on is to help automate workflows as much as possible. Right. Like Mr. Ranjit spoke about continue rising that entire infrastructure. ARCMA is actually focusing on automating your image and video workflows so that your teams don't have to actually focus on some of those mundane things and focus on more business driven use cases, more revenue driven use cases. So from an ARCMA perspective, the entire focus would be for you guys to actually limit on any amount of manual work. So if I could, you know, take an example, currently, if you think about it, image workflows take a lot of time. So you take a pristine image, so you're taking a measure of an end user. And like Ravi said, since the users are now actually accessing all that information across the different devices, you need to ensure that the image that shows up on that particular device is in the right size. And all of that depends on the size of the device. Right. Now, one way to do that is to manually ensure that you have all the images in different sizes for each of this device, and then use intelligence to ensure that you're sending the right image to the right device. ARCMA's point is ARCMA can do that thing today. You don't have to spend time, one, storing so many different, you know, sizes of storing different images of different sizes. And to also using intelligence at your end to define, you know, device which image to be sent to that particular device. ARCMA can do that at the edge. So, you know, that'll ease up a lot of work at your end. And off late in the last two to 18 months, you've actually extended that to videos itself. So as long as you have a pristine video, ARCMA can use the entire same logic to extend that workflow for videos as well. So our focus one has always been scale and quality of service, which is our bread and butter. But the last 12 to 18 months, a lot more focused has been on helping tech platforms automate these workflows so that they can cut down on manual effort for some of these tasks and focus on more business tasks, you know, that will serve their organization better. Right. I want to make a small announcement that we are taking questions. We have started getting questions. We are live on Facebook, as well on other social media platforms. So you can send in your question on this ARCMA eForum special panel that we're discussing, the role of tech in COVID. Mrs. Chandasekhar, I want to understand from you that right now we have the spike that we are witnessing unprecedented on online, but it will sustain to some extent. And once it opens up, it may be different, you know, while you're investing and preparing, how are you coming to terms with a long-term strategy when the traffic kind of, you know, becomes even, you know, how would tech play a role in creating that engagement that you have, you're trying to create right now? Okay. As Ranjit mentioned, what we are working on is one is investing on the AIML kind of initiative. One is to bring in, improving the recommendation engine what we have so that it brings in more and more engagement among our members. That's one. Internally, also what we are using AI is to bring in overall efficiency. We are looking at by saying that to identify customers who are likely to subscribe to our service. And it's also, we are using the, these kind of technologies, AI to identify the fake profile, which Ro mentioned about identifying the fake profiles. And it's also a daily, we get around 30,000 profiles per day, going through them and identifying even duplicate photographs, duplicate profiles, all those things like, you know, we use the technology to bring in efficiency. Right, right, right. Mr. Mithul, tell me, are there concerns that this traffic may not stay the 18,000 that you're witnessing and how are you preparing for it? How would you create that immersive tech and backend? So as I said earlier, I mean, the traffic is dwindling down to pre-lockdown days. That is certainly going to happen. The only point being, you know, how do you keep the users engaged despite the lockdown, you know, opening up, but still people are not, you know, able to go out. So, you know, you launch new features, which keep them engaged. And I think with dating apps, again, as security is very important, we use machine learning and AI to make sure that we read out as many fake profiles as possible. So as a dating app, the primary concern for us is to build trust among users and to make sure that they are not engaging with any fake user or spam user or a bot user. So the main concern right now, you know, to increase trust among users. And certainly, you know, we have seen that during the lockdown, more women have started to sign up. So this is a, you know, promising sign for dating apps because if I go back for the last three to four years, getting female users on board has been a challenge for dating apps. And as more women start to use it, you know, the onus is on us, how do we protect them more so that we keep them engaged? You know, so this is somewhere, this is starting point for us to, you know, to get more users on board by word of mouth and, you know, where people share, you know, creating apps work. This is where you can find new people, you can, you know, match and chat with them. So this is where we stand right now. Right. Mr. Paul, how are you looking at a post pandemic, which we don't know the timeline, but how are you looking at, you know, adjusting to that world as well as what the spike you've been witnessing now? Yeah. So digital adoption or empowerment, I think would be much faster post COVID in the coming months. And we have built our technology stack, considering all this in a completely scalable fashion. And it's, it's every, every different stack is originally scalable, as well as vertically scalable. So the scalability factor is taken care, we can accommodate more traffic. Now it's going to be a focus on engagement. That's what the focus has to be the next coming months. So what we have seen is instead of just having a matchmaking platform, we might, we can, we are also thinking about a 360 degree solution in terms of serving the requirements of the user related to a marriage, like stage arrangements and other things. So we are, we already come out with a package from our print matrimonial division on a 360 degree package to engage our audience, not only just for matchmaking, but to cater to their other needs for arranging a marriage, physical marriage also. So that's one. Second part definitely is the users, the enlightening our users in terms of data security and protection. So since we are actually working on a remote place and traffic is going to be huge, there is always a significant concern among the users on the data privacy and security. So, so that's where actually we are giving focus right now to enlighten the team, both the tech products, telemarketing everyone to, about the security, data security and how they should manage data in the process, in the proper way. So that's something actually we are going to focus in the coming months. Right. Mr. Kar, what would be your suggestion to these people, you know, these players to make a wholesome mix of tech that goes beyond this period and also last, for example, when the world opens up and they have to deal with an offline side of it, the engagement continues, it does not discontinue. How do we make that seamless wholesome engagement possible? Sure. Well, so I think I did bring it up in one of the initial questions. I think there has to be a lot more focus on protecting user identities and the overall security of your platform. If you've noticed, like in the last 90 days, the trends that we've seen is cyber attacks have increased exponentially. Like, obviously, your hackers and your unscrupulous elements are taking this opportunity to exploit whatever holes in the system that they can find. So focusing on security rightly, like how Mr. Renz had said, has to be the number one priority. And once you've sort of ensured that you have the right security posture in place, the other vital angle is also ensuring that you have a proper business continuity plan in place. I'm sure a lot of organizations had to sort of move to it overnight because of the COVID-19 lockdown, ensuring that that continues to scale for you, because I think initially how organizations adapted to that is to ensure that they put all the critical applications on that. But now that has to scale and it has to be rolled out to a lot more applications so that from an employee perspective, within that organization, you make it as seamless as possible for them to work remotely versus how they were working before. Right? And one way to doing that is ensuring that access to these applications are controlled better than how you were doing in the pre-COVID world. Like, in the pre-COVID world, if you spoke to anyone from the IT team in terms of what was their preferred way of ensuring that you were providing remote access, the answer would be VPN. But we've realized over a period of time that VPNs are not the most secure way of providing secure access to users, to your applications. Akma has followed a zero trust model for the last 12 to 18 months. Our entire organization is on that model and that's a model that we've been talking to our customers about in terms of adopting and there are multiple reasons for that. One of the main reasons is because you now actually ensure that every user who's actually getting into your corporate network doesn't have access to all applications. You are only giving them access based on their role and based on whatever privileges the organization assigns. And while you do that, you ensure that you're also providing the right amount of performance for those applications. So the entire piece around enterprise solutions and how seamless you make it for your employees is also going to be another focus area. So these are two key focus areas that I feel that most of the organizations have to sort of focus on. The third point, very specific to these dating sites or matrimonial sites, ensuring how you keep bots away, having the intelligence to be able to identify whether the user who's accessing your website is actually a human or a bot. Now at Akma, we've been able to actually build on that technology for almost three years now. We've been able to very effectively defend against bots, whether it's for crawling use cases or credential stuffing, which means someone stolen your credentials and is accessing the website or just in with respect to this fake profile creation. So focusing on that as well ensures that you're giving a very clean and a good end user experience. So that will be my take on the third pillar in terms of focus areas in a post COVID-19 world. Brilliant. Thanks for explaining it that way. Mr. John Seeker, tell me if I had to ask you what have been the biggest takeaways in the last 90 days for you, both from an overall consumer behavior side as well as the tech part of it, what have been the key takeaways for you? One takeaway is that we as a company never practiced work from home as a policy and most of the work used to happen in office. Now post lockdown, now all 4,000 associates are working from home. That's a major shift. In fact, now we are thinking of surrendering a few of the office spaces what we are occupying correctly and probably continue the work from home concept. It will overall, as I said, point of view, they don't have to travel especially like people in like places in Mumbai. They travel more than a couple of hours to reach our office. Now they can with that kind of application what we have provided, they can work from home and service our customer. That is a big biggest takeaway. Internal, as far as internal, that is one big mindset change as far as the way we work. From the customer point of view, what we are looking at, as I told you earlier, come up with more such product like the video call feature what I mentioned earlier. To look at more and more and the home weddings, more and more product we are working on. Third thing is what we are working on is while working on the video feature, we are also working on the privacy of our privacy and the safety of our customers what we are focusing. Like for example, what we are thinking more and more is how to protect the women from our platform. Basically what we are saying is one, we have a feature by saying that even though the data information whatever they put in our site is meant for sharing with the opposite member just to avoid abuse. One, we provide a feature by saying that they can protect their phone number, they can protect their horoscope, they can protect who can see also. That is a new feature what we have launched in the last 90 days by saying that any female, any women member can decide like you know said by saying that who can view their profile itself they can do. Now even in the video call, now we launched one more feature by saying that who can contact through a video call. Only people who have interacted in the past only can initiate a video chat. We have more and more thinking from the customer safety and privacy point of view. Right. Mr. Mittal tell me about your learnings from the last 90 days that the key takeaways for you that are going to stay as part of your future policy as well. I think what we realized is there is a lot of more potential for dating in India. Right from the fact that we were able to double our daily user base post lockdown. The other learning is that India is a price sensitive country and as the lockdown extended, a lot of people lost their jobs. We eventually saw an increase in traffic but a drop in revenue which is very interesting takeaway for us. It's very interesting because people don't want to spend money though they want to engage on your platform. They are not ready to spend the money because most of our users reside in tier two cities and you know people are price sensitive and you know the economy can affect even apps like us though people say that dating is a perennial game but that's the main takeaway for us. So you know we have to be prepared for all eventualities going forward and make sure we provide enough easy accessibility options for users to continue engaging on a dating app. And you said the traffic a lot of chunk of it comes from tier two cities right? Yeah a lot of almost 60 percent of our users come from tier two cities even smaller towns as well. So I mean that had been before the lockdown also but after lockdown also the main learning has been that you know the revenue what we expected to see a jump did not happen again because of the prolonged lockdown you know probably a lot of people lost their jobs and they didn't want to spend money on our dating apps. Right Mr Paul tell me what are your learnings from this 90 days and what would stay with you? The key takeaway what I would say is we should expect with unexpected and the last 90 days tech has played a key role in ensuring that the business goes on as usual so business continuity is the key and COVID just reminds us of it. So as Ravi was mentioning we also have a significant audience who are from remote and rural areas not very digital savvy not well connected people who need sort of hand holding and using a digital mass matchmaking app like ours. So this is going to change in the coming days so digital so we should be prepared for more people subscribing to it keeping them engaged and giving them the right product and right services. So that would be the key focus and that has been particularly reminded us of your, reminded of it because of the COVID that's what we feel the takeaway from the last 90 days. Now Mr Gar from a tech point of view as an observer of what's going around tell me what do you think what have been your observations in the last 90 days especially what are the key learnings and takeaways for the tech experts, for the tech leaders? I think one key transformation that we all noticed was the fact that I think a lot of organizations had business continuity as an item on their to-do list but it was never a priority and that sort of changed overnight right and I think and that is going to be the trend in the foreseeable future as well business continuity will become the primary driver for a lot of organizations right and in the post-COVID-19 world or the post-COVID-19 world is going to look very different from you know from what we are used to right so ensuring that having the same amount of seamless experience while working remotely will be one key focus area Akamai is already helping a lot of organizations in that space and we'll continue to innovate further to make that overall experience as seamless as possible. The other piece and that's not just during COVID-19 we've always seen cloud security or security of your applications as another priority and the COVID-19 period has only reinforced that because you know your hackers are always one or two steps ahead of you and they're always looking to exploit vulnerabilities in your entire infrastructure so ensuring that you maintain the right security posture whether it's having you know your web application tab was updated or ensuring that you're not leaving any ports open or unprotected your basic security hygiene has to be maintained and on top of that there are partners like Akamai or other cloud security partners that can reinforce that entire value prop and it comes to security and the final piece will actually come down to how you manage your end users right we spoke about protecting end user identities we spoke about ensuring that you know there is no data breach but at the end of the day if you if you realize like even Ravi spoke about the fact that even though they saw traffic increasing it didn't really lead to increase in revenue right because your end user right now is not probably willing to spend because of what has happened in COVID-19 now you all of these tech platforms have a ton of user data you know there are proof of user information now how do we harness that information to ensure that we're providing a personalized experience we are curating that experience for the end user because unless you are able to drive user engagement it's unlikely that your dependency on ad-driven models for revenue will come down right so that focus on how do you harness the potential of the user information that you have providing like an omnichannel experience across different platforms and then based on that being able to you know integrate with marketing text tags or other text tags downstream to have or to leverage that entire consumer journey will become super important perfect thank you so much I'll take some audience questions we are getting a lot of audience questions so I'll start the first one is for Mr. Chandrasekhar and Mr. Kaur so I'll start with Mr. Chandrasekhar the question is from Krishnan we how safe is the VTO platform what are the points considered that someone does not misuse it okay thank you Krishnan for asking that thanks Raghun what we have done is to protect the members interest the members can receive call video call from only from the members from whom they interacted in the past so it ensured that that whatever Raghun has mentioned also the identity gets established before the video call gets allowed so that's the kind of protection what we have right right you would would you like to add something Mr. Kaur yeah I mean look like I said delivering videos are bread and butter right now if you're delivering video it's also your rocket to ensure that you're securing the videos as well so Akama has done a ton of work in that area and you know in the last 24 to 30 months just extending to what Mr. Chandrasekhar said right one way to just completely close that entire experience would be to ensure that you're already able to identify the two people are having the video conversation now Akama can also help you know provide you capabilities where if you feel that one of the users is not the right user who's on the video we've actually been able to provide APIs that will allow you to actually take you know just revoke access for that user and bring down that video right so as long as you are able to identify if a user is valid you will be able to revoke access and Akama has actually also been building you know algorithms and the technology stack to identify whether an end user who's watching the screen or an end user who's interacting with the other person if they're legit or not if they're not legitimate we will provide you with the capability to actually bring down the stream so again we can go in depth in terms of how you're able to do that but that's just an extension of how you could secure the entire video experience right uh mr paul for you the question is this name is not given from a user engagement point of view what's your take on gamification technique gamification thanks for the question so we are not uh thought about that the gamification aspect uh in our matrimonial application uh because what i as i said before we have seen that from our audience behavior and audience need base they primarily prefer a very private curated space uh from a company from media house makers especially on the matrimonial we have other other applications and verticals where gamification was definitely possible and we are doing it but when it comes to the matrimonial space we actually do a complete curated space which is fully moderated and fully all the privacy concerns everything has been taken care just like healthcare and financial data this matrimonial data is also very highly sensitive so we are actually getting to the requirements from the major audience from our primary audience in terms of uh uh making it a very curated and closed space so that's what we are doing right now we are not thought about that right uh for you mr mithul the question is uh how did you manage the sudden spike in traffic because of covid did it impact performance yeah so i i don't think it really impacted us because uh you know you have load balancers in place uh coming to the technical side of it um you know you have load balancing which takes care of all the stuff uh since we have machine learning and ai in place all the new profiles which we get are automatically moderated 90 of them uh you cannot be 100 accurate with that uh we have a strong back-end team which helps us moderate the remaining set of profiles uh so you know we have got used to the scale earlier we have had hiccups you know if you if i would have spoken to you five years down the line uh but you know uh now we are used to the scale so it has not been a problem at all right and this is such a discussion that we're getting tons of questions so i one more uh it again is for mr car and mr chandasekhar uh the video that you spoke about can that be recorded by the users there's one concern raised by uh christian and again has this question uh yes uh roguel uh to answer to this question like uh as far as the end user is concerned when the video reaches the person's device yes erc should be able to record but since we are giving the control to the end user from whom to get a video call uh we feel that it should be secure but uh probably we'll uh welcome to roguel organize also and see like you know what else can be done to secure this kind of right uh you want to add anything to it mr car uh true like i think like i mentioned there are various ways to ensure that you're securing the the video whether it's a live interaction or if it's a non-demand file um and those are basically extensions to how we do that for a notity customer today right like a like a hot star or z the files that they have users can stream it users can download it if they wanted to right but there are controls put in place to ensure that that doesn't happen right so a lot of that could actually be extended to the video use cases that you would see on an online online dating site or a mathematical site right right i'm mr nimital for you uh question from rk sena is there space for lgbtq community on your app if yes what has been the response uh to be honest we haven't focused on that aspect till now uh to be very frank we haven't done it but of course there are other apps which are dedicated to the lgbtqt you know audience and uh i'm sure they they cater much better to that audience uh we haven't honestly got the time to uh you know focus on that audience that's all i have to say right uh mr paul and mr chandasekhar this is for both of you how are you planning to enter new markets uh how are you going to comply with gdpr another regulation yeah outside i can start yeah i'll start on that uh see last year we have expanded we were primarily kerala focused uh even right from 2008 and last year we decided to expand to four more states in south india you know in tamil nadu and karnataka so now um uh that that that that market is expanding and we are actually uh giving good traction among those markets coming to the the gdpr and other laws i think that's one of the key aspect i think we should actually uh be taking care in the coming months because since most of the matrimonial and dating sites are globally accessible and not georastricted we are supposed to comply to the respective international laws and privacy laws at various parts of the world so we already have as you know gdpr which is uh uh in the applicable to the u citizens and the u region there is also this california consumer privacy act and thailand personal protection bill which has come up recently and which is also being taken uh taken up seriously by uh most of the internet providers and the application providers we also have the privacy personal data protection bill from india so which is going to be uh anytime uh coming soon so this is these are some of the things actually the protection part we should all the journey all the all the data journey the journey of the data should be taken care of we have collection of data we are processing of data we have analysis of data everything has to be um compliant with all these privacy laws so what we have done in our platforms is uh we have developed in-house tools and platforms on all these stages of data generation right from collection to processing analysis is done through in-house tools and platforms custom development they're not using any third party software to handle this sensitive and personally identifiable information that was our keep uh policy and uh in plan to take care of data but definitely we need to look into the finer aspects of all these privacy laws and take care of that the long run right uh mr. turnsecker i'll come with another question to you because this user has specifically mentioned your name how do you deal with fake profiles as you have said but i just want to reiterate it when fake profile is being created to scam others in terms of money photo modeling uh uh what we have one as i told you earlier even when the profile uh like you know 30 000 profile we scan through identify the fake profile uh if it goes to if it gets identified we suspend the profile that's on the day one and is also subsequently also what we monitor the communication what they do with the other members that is that is number two what we do and in case we find because all these people with the uh intent of cheating others they try to take the user away from our platform we monitor uh all such activities and is also we alert user in case we find anything uh suspicious we alert all members whom they contacted earlier by saying that to be uh little careful with uh any kind of thing what they do third thing is what we do is we have a specially to educate the users about uh users about the kind of activities what all these people fake people do we have a photo called safe matrimony that we educate the user uh uh in a regular basis these are the three things what we do right right um mr. mittel i want to come to you uh uh the the question is uh what is the definition of a successful match for a dating app i mean i'm a lot of um we measure the success in terms of uh how many people have mutually matched on a daily basis and uh how many people are chatting so uh we certainly have no control of who meets offline and uh what they do offline for successes uh how many matches happen on a daily basis and how many people are actually chatting so the more uh people chat and the more people are connected that's a certain you know success indicator for us right right um yes uh mr paul and mr chandasekhar and to all of you to all three quick one minute answer i need for this is uh how do we create a world class uh you know matrimony and uh dating app that is based out of india do we see that happening anytime soon anyone mr chandasekhar yes uh yes to girl uh like uh i think we do have necessary talent available in india and as far as uh technology is concerned a ml adoption is concerned we are at par with most of the uh other advanced countries uh with that a ml uh with more adoption we can build a world class platform right quick words from you mr paul yeah i think we already have one of the very matured matrimonial and uh platform uh across the globe so we are already uh leading in that space especially when increased use of data analytics is the key because data definitely is the key because we need to slice and dice the data getting get the right sequence and micro target those segments and make conversions possible and that's that's going to be the key so we are right on target right on the park mr mr metham quick words from you yeah so as mr renjit said data is important if if i'm i have to be a leader in india i need to understand what users in india really want and if i have to fly if i google players like tinder or you know happen or any other app uh you know data is the key and how we match users how fast we match them and how securely we match them that is the key to you know uh you know making uh quack quack or any other dating app from india uh to be the number one uh you know customer focus is the key uh to win the game mr car i want quick last words from you about what can happen what is your suggestion your advice to all of these players what they're today uh i think i'll i'll just end by saying that i think all three of them spoke about the importance of data uh and i think that's the most essential or the most critical element for them to become even more successful you know than where they are today because all three of these platforms are the leading platforms in the country and for them to be even more successful i think the right focus area is data and the second part is around security security of your end user information security of your own infrastructure and for you to be successful globally uh to ensure that you're complying with their privacy guidelines and frameworks right now you could choose to either do that on your own right or you could work with third party cloud providers or solutions like akamai or somebody else to ensure that you're complying with those regulations so those will be my two quick uh pointers in terms of how can we get even better right this one last question quickly i'll put you to you mr withle that uh what are you doing to protect the insecure user profile so something like like you know ashley madison doesn't happen again yeah so uh what happened to ashley madison is a simple data breach uh where all the user email addresses and you know uh their chat messages everything got exposed again it's the same answer you know you you do regular audits and you ensure that you know you have the right encryptions in place uh you know uh you make sure that uh there is no data leakage you know you keep the all the ports you know the relevant ports closed you keep auditing uh from time to time so you know that's how you keep your platform secure and i want to ask mr car the same question yeah your thoughts on this so um with respect to the ashley madison piece where like ravi service a simple user data breach right now user data breach can happen in multiple different ways it could be through uh you know a social engineering attack wherein the hacker got access to the admin database you know or it could just be the fact that they've exploited uh a whole in in your infrastructure through various application layer attacks that are very common today right now the point is like ravi mentioned ensuring that you tighten your security posture and also ensuring that you're not just looking at your infrastructure from outside which means you're ensuring that your applications are protected also ensuring that your own employees who are working or who have access to these remote applications that entire access is also protected so like i said uh the world needs to move to a zero trust model where you're not allowing users access to anything and everything just because they're on vpn allowing them finer get uh finer grain controls on what they have access to is also key to ensuring that breaches like these don't happen and the third part is basically ensuring that what's going out of your corporate network is also being looked at because that's a key element that a lot of attacker a lot of hackers in the past have exploited there's a lot of work going on to ensure that you're plugging that whole as well as long as you're looking into these three different aspects i feel you are safe and you won't get into a situation that has that aside like ashley madison got it i would like to add this more i will just to add to that in in addition to all the secure tools and applications it would always advisable to have a dedicated team to monitor the traffic and find anomalies that will there's no replacement for that perfect and we are just out of time i have to end it here thank you mr chandasekhar mr car mr paul and mr methal for joining us it has been a great conversation some key takeaways as well and i i know that the lockdown is not the lockdown but i mean the social distance world it's here and the people are pinning their hopes on the online platforms and we hope you will continue serving them well the way you are and of course powered by mr car and and experts like him who provide you seamless solution thank you everyone for joining us it's been great talking to you thank you thank you thank you thank you everyone