 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Lawrence Fang, General Manager Information Technology at Cathay Pacific, Peter Yan, Managing Director Hong Kong Accenture, and Masimo Moran, head worldwide business development travel at AWS. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you. So we're going to be talking about applying blockchain to a travel rewards program at Cathay Pacific. But I want to start with you, Lawrence. Let's describe the business problem that you were trying to solve. The Asia Miles program is already sort of a world class program, very competitive, but it's still had its kinks. So what were you trying to do to make it better? Okay, first of all, Asia Miles is a lifestyle, you know, finger fryer loyalty program. And in almost every year, they're running over 460 marketing campaigns in a year. So you can imagine how much work they have to do. So from the customer point of view, they have a ping-pong of whatever activities or redemption of, you know, award, all these kind of things. It's going to take a long time for them to get the miles. So from the customer point of view, this is not really ideal. And on the other hand, at the back office, because we're running so many marketing campaigns, so there's a lot of back office operation and a lot of paperwork and all these kind of things. So it's also not having a very good operation efficiency. So from the customer point of view, from the back office point of view, so that's the key ping-pong we want to resolve. Right, so it was tedious to operate for both the customer and for the business itself. So why was blockchain the technology that could solve it? Well, we study one of the key features or component of a blockchain is called a smart contract. And we consider smart contract, we were able to help bringing our customer and Asian miles and also a merchant together. So by using blockchain, the miles and redemption, all this will happen almost in a second. So how did this work, Lawrence? I mean, in terms of working together with Castell Pacific, how did you work together to create this new program? Okay, effectively it's a very co-create process. It started with a conversation with Lawrence. We had the idea. So Lawrence was courageous enough to let us try it. But we did a very short, quick pilot. We proved the concept. Then we went into a very rapid development cycle as well. And then within weeks, we get the product done and then we launch and go to the market. So Peter, is that generally the way it goes in terms of this co-creative process? I mean, we're hearing so much that Accenture and AWS have these solutions that they can bring to clients. And then is it sort of happening in the background or are you on the ground together sort of dreaming up ways to make this better and make the technology work? Well, we used to call this the new way of doing things, but I think now this is the way of doing things, right? Because it's a perfect combination. The client has perfect knowledge about the business. We understand the technology and we have enablement partners like Amazon. So we just work together and make it happen. So from Amazon, so we hear blockchain, you automatically think Bitcoin, you just do. But this is actually a very different kind of use case for blockchain and it's one that really is so pertinent. Can you talk a little Masimo about other use cases that you're seeing? So indeed you are right. Blockchain has been very nebulous and always associated to Bitcoins. But there are actually some use cases that are much more relevant, especially in the travel industry, when you have complex transaction multiparty where you are actually going to do transparency and data integrity. For example, we had a proof of concept with IATA about a one ID project that allows to travel agency to register themselves with this authority, get a key and then seamlessly doing transaction with travel providers by identifying themselves through blockchain. That allows them to actually be recognized and you have a seamless process with the new NDC, new distribution capabilities coming along that is going to be extremely important. This is one type. Another type is when you wanted the immutability of the data. For example, when you have planes and you want to see you getting leases on and off lease you want to see all the maintenance that occur there and you want that that doesn't change. You want to use a trusted system that is transparent and that is not changeable and that provides a lot of value. And the third use case that I personally like is automatic contracts. So when, for example, you have corporate buyers that the buyer travel product from a travel provider like a Pacific and you want that you buy the ticket but when is the airline going to get the money? The reconciliation is like with the flier miles. You want to be done as soon as possible. Other cases is the passenger flying around. If he doesn't fly, well, what happened to the taxes? Taxes should be actually returning back to the customer. So with automatic contracts you would be able actually to reconcile that behind the scene. These are use cases that are very valuable in the travel industry. So this immediate reconciliation and this trust, I mean trust is such an important concept right now. What are you hearing? What are you from both the client side and the provider side? Where are we? Yeah, that's true. I think trust is one of the key elements of doing reconciliation. So what we are doing now is still within our ecosystem. So we trust each other. But looking forward, I think one of the key areas the botching will help a lot is the entire supply chain. But when we talk about the supply chain, there's so many stakeholders. So building a trust across a different stakeholder will be a challenge. I think that's something across the industry has to put more thought onto it. What are we seeing so far? So this was implemented in April of this year. What has been the return on investment so far? Oh, it's phenomenal. For those marketing campaign we're using BotChain, we have these new capabilities. We have a triple digital growth in terms of sales. And also because we also use a kind of a game to gamify the whole thing. So it creates a lot of traction and a lot of excitement. So the number of people, the number of customer engagement in those marketing campaigns also have more than double growth. Peter, what's most exciting to you about this process? The most exciting thing is that as you heard from Lawrence is indeed generating performance and results. And the process of co-creating a successful solution is a very rewarding experience. So I mean, and then AWS is, in terms of the co-creative process, I mean where does AWS fit into this? So we are the enabler and I'm glad that actually both Cathay Pacific and Accenture are using AWS for this. So we have standard templates, blockchain templates that actually take away all the heavy lifting or put in place the platform to run the blockchain. So actually the customer and the partner can focus on the business need that they have at hand. And this is all open source, so you can see how it works. And it's so transparent that we are very glad to enable our customers to do transformative things like this. So the word is out that blockchain is not just for Bitcoin anymore. So where do we go from here? So we're talking about the travel industry but are the learnings that Cathay Pacific has had and Accenture in terms of how applicable are they to other industries? And how are you sharing what you've learned in a collaborative co-creative process? Well, other than AzureMouse, now we are taking what we learned from the blockchain. We are going to apply to the cargo industry and also apply to the airport operation, particularly the baggage. We're considering baggage between different people across the whole supply chain. Great. Actually, many clients are now talking about this Cathay Pacific case and they have very creative ideas how to borrow the concept and apply to their own business. So we should see more and more application of this solution. And we are seeing an acceleration of adoption of cloud technology throughout the travel industry with airline and technology providers out there and I'm very glad that there are taught leadership for example from Cathay Pacific to take these hypothetical use cases and taking the lead on showing how it is done and sharing with the industry. We are looking for those travel leaders that will help the industry to move forward because it's a very challenging industry with very low margin and any improvement in customer service is going to go a long way and we are glad to be part of that. And is that what it is? As you said, it's sort of seeing even the incremental improvement and how that can be just so transformational for a company's bottom line. Yep, yep, absolutely. Well Massimo Peter Lawrence, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. It's been a really fun conversation. Thank you, thank you guys. I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of the CUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.