 From Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. You're a startup growing. You're working with like big banks. This is not easy, normally they don't work with startups at all, and fintech is exploding as a very big growth area. So cloud kind of enables us to take us through some of the key points in your journey. A CTO, you've nailed some big wins with some big established financial institutions. How'd you pull it off? What's the formula? Yeah, actually you can come and see my talk on Wednesday, actually do that in detail, but I could give you a quick summary. So there's really all along the way from the initial pre-sales to the pitch sessions with the customers to the pilots, there are kind of learnings all along the way of the process, and I think the number one thing is white glove service. Typically, from a scalability perspective, startups have been trained to make itself service, API, there's a developer portal, people can go in and break stuff. But actually, especially for the first set of customers, the white glove service is absolutely essential and really establishing the relationships at the ground level, so not just on the business side that's a given, but also with the technical folks, the people at the banks that are doing the integrations, they can kill your project. And so really giving them a bit of a taste of our culture, I think actually really excites them. But white glove service though, if I hear this correctly, it's not just being kind and being holding their hand, there's some technical table stakes. Absolutely. What are those table stakes? Because that seems to be the enterprise readiness matrix. That's a great question, so I think the key is making tools that are very simple for developers to use, have developers love using your product, because ultimately it's a technical integration. And so one of the things that we did is we created an SDK, both for iOS and Android, and it's not just service connectivity, but it's also the full user experience around receipt capture. And what that did is it precluded the need for the banks to go and build their own, build all the screens and all the workflows. We could come in and say right away, here we have it for you, you can customize it or configure it to make it look like your banking application, to add your brand elements to it. But ultimately it allowed them in a very short period of time to bring on that new feature, because the end user has no idea about sensible, there might be a logo at the bottom of the receipt that says it's powered by sensible, but other than that, it very much fits in with the existing banking application. And that's really important because receipts aren't their space, we want them to right out of the gate to have the receipt capture application that's intuitive for end users, and this allows us to put it in their hand and just make it work for them. So that's really a big part of the success. And you've overcome that startup fear, right? How have you done that? So, I mean, I think the advantage for me is I did spend my early career with IBM, so I spent about the first 13 years. You were trained by IBM, so you kind of know. Yeah, and so I was both in software groups, so working on e-commerce implementations, but sort of the middle part after that was in global services, where I got to work with people in enterprise, but across various sectors. And so that sort of gave me the confidence and really allows me to think in the same way that enterprise folks think. And so, because we're not, you know, a startup that's selling, that has a platform where people are sharing pictures of sneakers, I mean, this is serious business. And not to belittle other- And they're brand, your customer's brand is on the line here. Absolutely, and so it really impacts everything we do, who we hire, the culture we try to build, how we present ourselves to our customers. I mean, it's sort of across the board, you know, many considerations. But I think also, like me personally, I've always had that entrepreneurial spirit. So I've always been hacking things together on the side and actually in around 2010, when I left IBM, it was, I had a previous startup. So this is number two for me. But it was, in fact, at IBM, I tried to actually do something entrepreneurial. But for me, actually, you know, B2B, especially, you know, business to enterprise is, for me is really the sweet spot in terms of my skills and it's hard. So I like that, like I like a hard problem and I would prefer that there's more barriers. And you know, it shows sort of in the interest from our investors as well, as you want a business with moats around it and certainly, you know, financial institutions like banks can take two years to close a deal. I mean, it's a really long sales cycle. So you're after the challenge. Absolutely. So other than your past with IBM, you're also, what's the other IBM connection? You're running this on Bluemix and IBM Cloud? Yeah, so we're running the solution on Bluemix. So we chose IBM for a number of reasons. I mean, one was their global footprint in terms of their data centers. Our customers have certain SLAs, they expect us to uphold. They required that we have disaster recovery in place. And so in software was very early in terms of bringing their data centers into Canada. So they recognize the opportunity there. And so we're both in Toronto and Montreal data centers. On top of that as well, we've been part of the IBM Global Entrepreneurship Program. And so that's given us some mentoring around how to scale our business. Gave us some financial incentives as well. On top of that, there are other relationships that we've explored with the services business and IBM. So could theoretically IBM be a preferred vendor for or integrator for our technology? And so there's a number of fronts that we're working with IBM. And I think also partly because my former relationship is I was an employee at IBM. In Canada or in the US? In Canada, so even our COO for example, she was also at IBM. So kind of bringing the best talent that I can find. People that are want to change in their kind of career and move from a large enterprise to a small company. We look for those. Are you in the software labs up there? And then in the services group, you got the financial services domain expertise. That's right. Got the software and FS together. And I certainly would not have predicted all the excitement around Fintet when I started. I'm really pleased that I magically, like through horseshoes and luck ended up in the right kind of the right place at the right time. But even from three years. When you tackle hard problems, usually you end up in a good spot. Absolutely, yeah. So the hardest question, hard question I want to ask is the tough question. So be ready. Canadians or the Maple Leafs? I'd have to say the Maple Leafs to be honest from Toronto, so. Unless the Maple Leafs lose and then the Canadians over the Bruins, obviously. Hey, as long as if there's a Canadian team, I'll be rooting for them. Of course, love the hockey in Canada being from the Boston area. All right, now I want to ask you something more sentimental around the culture. You mentioned culture, which you were talking about your company culture. What's the cultural shift that you're seeing in the marketplace because you're talking about, you're a startup that has cracked the code on a very hard problem with banks getting a customer. And kudos and props for that. But also there's a whole DevOps movement that's going now to data, where we heard some of the IBM execs pointing out the kind of counterculture that's developing. The younger generation are like, they don't want things the old way. They're doing things much different. Can you comment about what your observations are around this cultural shift? Yeah, for sure. I think we've spent a bit too long in general paying lip service to the word innovation. And I think finally it's really coming to fruition, like real innovation, not innovation just for the sake of marketing, but really being able to innovate. And because the subset of the millennials that are coming up, they really have like, I guess the culture of innovation has really been infused into their entire upbringing. And then they're really showing that in the workplace. So you see over the last say five, six years, the rise of hack days and these kind of things. And people that are also interested in solving problems that don't just have a commercial outcomes to them. And but what you find is that if you can align people's sort of passions and interests, and have them understand that if you go after this thing, your career will be set. And that's sort of some of the things that we try to do with our more junior resources, let them know that if there's something that they're interested in a problem they want to tackle, and it's aligned with where we're going from corporate objectives, go after that because you will get what you want at sensible. We want those kind of people that don't just pay lip service to innovation, but really see something and are self-starting and can go after things on their own. I mean, I think there's also a big aspect of social awareness and there's people on our team and rightly so that are concerned about ethical use of data. And so we're at sensible kind of drafting up a policy, just so internally we know and we can agree collectively on how we intend to use our data. So certainly not malicious purposes. We're not selling individual user data. Now the banks do have access, the data collected through their systems is theirs, but ultimately in terms of how we plan to monetize the insights, which is the next really interesting thing and things that I'm working on in 2017 really making sure it's done in an ethical way and so that you have to- Just your next moonshot is to really kind of crack the code on the governance and the management of the data. But I think to get the right people, you also have to consider the social implications of using the data. People have to feel good about the work they do and there can be a lot of sensitivity around the type of data that we collect. Well Jamie, congratulations on the financing, your startup, Jamie Alexander, who's the co-founder and CTO of Sensebill. Check them out. If you're a big bank, not many of them, so you have a small set of potential customers. Congratulations on winning the big deals as a startup. That's great news. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing the startup story. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Keep watching it here. Stay with us for more coverage from Las Vegas after this short break.