 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase Marketing Technology, Emerging Cloud Scale Customer Experiences. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem to talk about all the top trends and also featuring the key customers. I'm your host, John Furrier. Today we're joined by Louise Fernandez, Vice President of PeakPay Social and John Kim, the CEO of Sendbird to learn about the future of what's going on in fostering deeper customer relationships. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us in theCUBE's showcase. You're excited to be here. So John, talk about Sendbird real quick. Set the table for us. What you guys do, you got a customer here to highlight some of the key things you're doing with customers, the value proposition. What's Sendbird and what's the showcase about? Yeah, really excited to be here. I'm John founder CEO of Sendbird. So Sendbird is the world's leading conversations platform for mobile applications. We can power user to user conversations in mobile applications as well as the brand to user conversations such as marketing sales and support. So today we power over a quarter of billion users on a monthly basis. We have over 300 employees across seven different countries around the world. We work with some of the world's leading customers such as PeakPay, that we are going to showcase today along with other wonderful customers like DoorDash, Reddit, YawFitnessSports and so forth. We have collectively raised over $200 million in funding. So that's kind of where we are today. Well, it's always great to have great success, good funding. More important is the customers. And I love showcases where the customers do the talking because that means you got some success stories. Luis, talk about, are you happy customer? What's it like with Sendbird? Give us the scoop. So Sendbird is being a great partner with us. So PeakPay is a Brazilian payment app. We are a FinTech here with more than 30 million active users using everyday PeakPay to pay everything. So the majority of the payments are between peers, between people. So Sendbird is helping us to improve a lot this journey to make it more pleasant between everyone who are using PeakPay. So we are here, let's talk and it's a pleasure. Yeah, it's awesome. Well, I'm great to have you guys on. Great, great relationship. And one of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE, if the folks watching that know our audience know that we've been banging the drum hard on this new world, this new patterns of user expectations and building relationships in this new digital world is not about the old way, the old Martech way. There are new use cases, new expectations by the consumers, John, that are bringing up new opportunities, but also expectations. It's not about, I mean, if someone's using Discord, for example, because they're gamers, they're done Discord. If they want to communicate with Slack, they're going to do Slack, SMS kind of old hat. You got WhatsApp, you got all these now peer to peer organic connections, multiple channels. This is all the new world. What's your vision on this new relationship, building digital communication world? Yeah, so I think you brought a really good point there. One of the most frequently used applications in the world today are messaging applications across any countries, any region, any culture. If you look at the most frequently used and most longest used applications are usually some form of a messaging application. Now the end users or the customers in the world are so used to using such a, you know, frictionless, very responsive modern experience on those messaging applications. What we want to help with the business around the world, the 99.9% of the business around the world don't have those really tech knowledge or user experience expertise in messaging. So we want to help our businesses help our customers be able to harness the power of modern messaging capabilities and to be able to embed it in their own business so that they can retain their users on their platform, engage with them in the context that what their business is about so that they can not only control or provide a better user experience, but also be able to understand their users better, understand what they're doing on their businesses, be able to own and control the data in a more secure and safe way. So really it's, we're like the Robin Hood of the world trying to give super power back to the businesses. Yeah, steal from the rich idea, the messaging scale and bring that to everybody else. I love that. And you got kind of the double entendre of Robin Hood, kind of new for the new generation finance. This is about taking the advantage of scalable platform monopolies, right? And giving the entrepreneur an opportunity to have that same capability feature rich. Louise, PicPay, you guys used Sendbird together. You have to level up. You got to compete with those big monopolies to pride scalable conversations. Okay, how did you engage this? What was your success path? Look, what was it look like? Yeah, when we look to this majority, the bigger chat apps that we have nowadays in the market, we're looking to them and then Brazilians are using for their daily course. But Brazilians are paying everyday millions and millions of payments. And these chat apps are not able to deal with this payments. So what we are doing here is that providing a solution where every conversation that are going to happen before, during, or after a payment between the people, they would have a nice platform that could afford all of their emotions and discussions that they have to do before or after the payment. So we are putting together the chat platform and with the payment platform. So that's what we are doing now. So just so I get this right, you're using Sendbird essentially integrated your mobile payment experience. Okay, this is your app. You're using Sendbird to bring that scalability into the social application, into the app itself. Is that right? Yes, perfect. Integrated with the payment journey. So everybody who is going to pay, they need to find the one they want to pay and then they can chat and conclude the payment through the platform. I mean, why not have it right there at point of transaction, right? Why did you decide to use conversations in your mobile wallet? Just curious. So it's important to say that we were born social. We born in 2012. So our main product was peer-to-peer payments. So everybody was sending money to a friend, requesting or charging their family. So a service provider. And once we started as a social platform, in that period, in that moment, we are just focusing in likes, comments and like public interactions and the world become more private. And as soon we understood the situation, we decided to move from a public feed to a private interaction. So that's, then the conversation of the space was the solution for that. Moving from a public interaction to a private interaction. So between the peers, which are involved in the transaction. So that's why we are providing the chat solution integrated with payments. That's a great call. John, just give some context here. Again, for the folks watching, this is now expected, this integrated experience. What's your, how would you talk to folks out there? I mean, first of all, I see it clearly. You've got an app, you got to have all this integration and you need it scaling to reach features. Talk about your view on that. Is that what's happening here? What's the real dynamic here? What's the big demand? One thing that's super interesting about like messaging experience in general, if you think about any kind of conversations that's happening digitally between human beings, more and more conversations, just like what Lewis mentioned earlier, are happening between in a private setting. Even on applications, whether it be Slack or other forms of communication, more conversations happen through either one-on-one conversations or in a private small group settings. And because people feel more secure, safe to have a more intimate conversations. So even when you're making transactions, it's more, there's a higher trust and people tend to engage a far better on platforms through these kind of private conversations. That's where we kind of come in, whether it be you want to set a one-on-one conversations or with a group conversation. And then ultimately, if you want to take it public in a large group setting, you can also support thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people engaging a public forum as well. So all of those capabilities can be implemented using something like Sembird. But again, the world is right now the businesses and how the users are interacting with each other is all happening through these conversations. And we're seeing more and more of that happening throughout the life cycle of our company. Yeah, just as a sidebar, I was just talking to a venture capitalist in San Francisco the other day. And we're talking about the future of security and SaaS and cloud scale. And the conversation went to more of, is it SaaS, is it platform as a service? Luis, I want to get your thoughts, because you're seeing more and more needs for customization, low code, no code. You're seeing these trends. You got to build insecurity. So the old SaaS model was software as a service, but now that's everything in the cloud is software as a service. But you need to have that platform kind of vibe for scale, customization, maybe some developer integration because apps are becoming the touch point. So can you walk us through what your vision was when you decided to integrate Chat into your app? And how did you see that Chat changing the customer experience for payments and across your user journey? Because I mean, it's obvious now looking at it, but you might not have been for some. What was your vision when you had to do that? When we look to Brazilian reality, we can see those in payment apps. All of them are focused on the transactional moment. And as soon as we started to think, how could our journey be better, more pleasing than the others and make people want to be here and to use and to open our app every day is just about making the interaction with the peers easier, even with a merchant or even with my friend. So the main point that our first step was just to connect all the users between themselves to payments. The second step we are providing now is using the Chat platform, the Sandbird platform as a platform for peak pay. So we are going to provide more past information. We're going to provide a better customer experience through the support and everything. So this interaction or this connection, this partnership with Sandbird are going to unlock a new level of service for our users. And at the same time, a much more pleasant or a more pleasant journey for them while they are using the app for a simple payment or if they are going to look for a group objective or maybe a crowdfunding in the future or a group to decide or just to pay something. So we are unlocking a new level of interaction between the peers, between the people and the users that are involved into this payment or this simple transaction. We are making it more conversational. Yeah, you're making the application more valuable. We're going to get to that in the next segment about the future of apps, one and done. You see a lot of sports apps. Oh, the big tournament, and then you use it and then you never use it again till next year. You have very time specific apps, but now you guys are smart to kind of build this in. But I got to ask you a question because a lot of developers and companies out there always have this buy versus build decision. Why did you decide to use Sandbird versus building it in-house? It's always kind of like the big trade-off. Yeah, first of all, it would take a long, long time for us to achieve a major platform as Sandbird. And we are not a chat platform. So we are going to use the social interaction to improve the payment platform that we have. So when we look to the market and we found Sandbird, then we thought, okay, these guys, they are a real platform. And through the conversations, we are seeing that they are roadmap, we're in synergy with our roadmap. And then we could start to deliver value to our users in the fastest way. Could you imagine spending two, three, four years to develop something like Sandbird? And even when we achieve this point, probably our solution would be weaker than Sandbird. So it was like no brainer to do that. Because we want to improve the payment journey, not to do a chat, only a chat platform. So that's why we are working together to prove this. It's really a start to see these plugins, look at Stripe for payments, for instance, right? And here in the success they've had, you know, people want to plug in services. So John, I got to ask you about the complexity that goes into it, the trust required that they have for you. You have to do this heavy lifting. You got to provide the confidence that your service is going to have the scale, the compliance. Talk about that. What do you guys do under the covers that make this easy? Again, great business model, heavy lifting done by you, seamless integration and provide that value. That's why business is good, but there's a lot going on. Share what's happening under the covers. Yeah. Before going to the technical intricacy of what we do, just to provide a little background context on why we even started this business is, we, this is my second startup. My first company was a gaming company. We had built like chat three, four times just for our own game. So we were basically, we felt like we were reinventing the wheel and then we actually went on a buyer's journey when we were building a social application for building our own community. We tried to actually beat a buyer to see if we can actually find a solution we want to use. Turns out that there weren't a lot of like sophisticated, top-notch, modern chat experience that we can build using some other third-party solutions. So we had to build all of that ourselves, which became the foundation for Semberg today. And what we realized is that for most companies, like using a building the most sophisticated chat is probably not going to be their highest priority. In case of PickPay will be financial transactions and all the other business that can be built and hosted by platform like PickPay. But building the most top-notch chat experience would be a priority for a company like, let's say, WhatsApp or Telegram. But it will probably not be the priority for major gaming companies, food delivery companies, finance companies. Chat is not the highest priority. That's kind of where we're coming because chat is the highest priority for us. And we also have a privilege of working with some of the other world industry leaders. So by having this collective experience working with the industry leaders, we get technological superiority being of this scale to hundreds of millions of users on a monthly basis. Also the security and the compliances by working with some of the largest commercial banks on some of the largest fintech applications across the globe. So we have security compliances, all the industry best practices that are built in and all the new top-notch user experience that we're building with other customers can be also be utilized by a customer like PickPay. So you get this collective almost evolutionary benefit by working with a company like us. Okay, a lot of economies of scale. Could you mind just sharing the URL for the company so folks watching can go get through a deep dive because you guys got a lot of certifications under the covers, a lot of things you guys do. So you mind just sharing the URL real quick. Yeah, so our company, you can find everything about our company on sendbird.com, like Kerri Pigeon. So you're sending a bird to send a message. So yeah, it's sendbird.com. All right, so let's get into the application because this is really interesting because chat is table stakes now, but things are evolving beyond chat. You got to integrate that user experience. It's data now, you got to have scale. I mean, you know, people who want to roll their own chat will find out there's a lot of client side and backend scale issues, right? You can have a tsunami, a river, like on Twitch, you can see the chat. I mean, that could, you got client side issues at a scale, right? You got backend. Luis, talk about that dynamic because, you know, as you start to scale, you want to have rely on that. Talk about this dynamic, how apps now are integrating all these new features. So is it, are apps going to go like more multifunctional do you see apps one and done? What's the, how do you guys see this app world playing out and where does the sendbird fit in? Just let me know better, John, about the performance or about the, just let me know. Both, both performance. Performance is huge, right? No one wants to have lag on chat. Okay, so big pay when we look to the payments have millions, thousands of payments happening every second. So what we are doing now is moving all the payments through a conversation. So it always happened inside the conversation. So since from the first moment, every second counts to convert this client. And since from the first moment, we never saw on sendbird any issue about that. And even when we have a question or something that we need to improve, the team were working together. So that's, those are the points that are making us to work together and to make things going pretty fast. When we look to the users who are going to use chat, they are, their intention is three times better than the users who are not using payments through the chat. Their average spend is three times higher too. So they are making more connections. They are chatting with their friends. They are friends are here. So the network effect is stronger. So if they are going to pay and they need to wait one more second, two seconds to conclude the payment, probably they will not going to choose paying through the chat again. They will use only the wallet, only the code, only the allies of the user. So that's, it's so important for us to perform really, really fast. And then this is what we are finding and this is what is happening with the integration with sendbird. What's interesting is that the by build chat we just had a minute ago kind of plays in here. You get the benefits of sendbird but now your transactional fidelity is in the chat that you don't build, that you rely on them on. So again, that's an interesting dynamic. This is the future of apps John. This is where it matters the engagement. This is what you talk about as the new, the new digital experience. Who would have thought that five, 10 years ago? I mean, chat was just like, hey, what's going around? Direct message. Now it's integral part of the app. What's your reaction? I mean, we're seeing that across to Luis's point, not just transactions, but like marketing messages are now being sent through a chat. So the marketing is no longer just about like giving discount codes, but you can actually re-engage with the brand. Also support is becoming more real time through a chat. So you're actually building a relationship. The support agents have a better context about the previous conversations and the transactions. The sales conversations, even like billing, billing alerts, notification, all those things are now happening through conversations. And that's a better way for customers to engage with the brand because you're actually building a better relationship and also being able to trust the brand more because there is a channel for you to communicate and be seen and be heard by the brand. So we do believe that that's the future of the business and how more and more brands will be building relationships with their customers. Yeah, I love your business model. I think it's really critical. And I think that stickiness is a real call out point there and the co-branding and the branding capability. But also really quickly in the last minute we have John and Luis, if you don't mind talking about security, I mean, I can't go a day now without getting an SMS scam text. You see it now on WhatsApp. I mean, I don't even use Telegram anymore. I mean, come on. So like this is now a problem. The old way has been infiltrated with spam and security issues. Security has to be there, the trust and security. Real quick, John, we'll start with you. And we? All right, Luis, go ahead. Just to say how important is that we are not only a chatting platform, we are a payment platform. So we have money, you know, the transaction. So here in Brazil, we have all the safe, the layers, the security layers that we have on our app. And then we have the security layers provided from Sandbird. So, and when we look to the features, Sandbird are providing to us a lot of features that help users to feel safer, like purified profiles, like announcements where it's a profile from pick pay where the users can recognize. So this is pick pay talking with me. It's not a user trying to pass, trying to use pick pay's name to talk with me. So these issues is something that we really care about here because we are not only a chat platform. As I said before, we are a payment platform. We are a fintech, we are a digital bank. So we need to take care of a lot. And we don't have any complain about it because Sandbird understood it and then they are providing since the first moment with the perfect solutions and the user interface to make it simpler for the users to recognize that it's pick pay who is chatting with them, not a user with bad intentions. Great insight, Luis. Thanks for sharing that, John. I really appreciate you guys coming on. Great showcase, real final word. John, I'll give you the final word. Folks watching out there, how do they engage with Sandbird? I want to integrate, I want to use your chat service. What do I do? Do I have to connect in as a managed service, as a line of code? What do I do to get Sandbird? Yeah, so if you're a developer building a mobile application, simply come visit our website. We have an open documentation and SDK. You can download and simply plug in your application. You can have a chat experience up and running matter of minutes if not hours using our UI kit. So we want to make it as easy as possible for all the builders in the world to be able to harness the superpower of digital conversations. All right, great. Congratulations, John, on your success and all the growth. And Luis, thanks for coming in and sharing the customer perspective and great insight. Thanks for coming on the showcase. Really appreciate it. Thanks for your time. Yeah, thank you for having me. Okay, the AWS startup showcase. Season two, episode three here. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.