 Hello, welcome to theCUBE's International Women's Showcase. Featuring International Women's Day, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. And we have three great guests, videoing in from Kuala Lumpur, as well as Bangkok, Joanne Kwa Group, CEO of KSK Group. There's sister Christina Kwa, co-founder and head of KSK City Labs. And Cindy Kwa, co-founder of Sunday Insurance in Bangkok. Ladies, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks for joining me on this special day. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. You guys are three sisters trailblazing in the insurance and real estate through digital transformation in the cloud, taking a three decade old family business to the next level, raising the bar, as they say in the cloud business. Congratulations. Tell us how it all started. What's going on now? What does it look like? Where did it come from? Tell the story. Okay, so maybe I'll start, you know, since I'm at the Group CEO level. So as a quick introduction, you know, KSK Group, we are about 30 years old now as a group, three decades. We started off as an insurance, non-life insurance company. And then over the years, you know, we operate in Southeast Asia. So we are based in the ASEAN markets that's West Indies also sitting in. And very quickly over the years, you know, we decided to actually venture into property development as well. And really across the journey, you know, we've always been very obsessed over the customers, you know. And you know, during this time in age, you know, all the customers are really digital natives now. And you know, the tech is very, very interesting. And so starting in the year of 2017, we decided to actually venture Cindy and I at least, we decided to start up our own insure tech called Sunday. Cindy is now the full-time CEO and we're both co-founders. And you know, it's an exciting journey from then on where now the first full-stack insure tech and in the whole of the ASEAN market starting off in Thailand. And then when Christine came back to join the business, you know, since we were already in real estate, we decided taking on from the inspiration of what we did with Sunday, how about we do the same in property? Because we obviously saw, you know, there was super loads of opportunities that we could do and a year ago, we gave birth to KSK City Labs, now a prop tech company based in Malaysia. Yeah. Christine and Cindy, tell the story here because this is actually a fascinating story. You're sisters, you're entrepreneurial. So you know each other, you're related and you've got an ups and downs with the startups and growing companies changing landscape, a lot of challenges. You all got to get along all the time. How's it going? What's it like? Maybe I'll start. I think for me, I'm probably the newest addition to the trio in the, you know, working together kind of space. So for me, I think it's all about really learning how to, you know, separate your professional and personal life. And like you mentioned, you know, we live together but we also work together. So for me, I think I took a lot of advice and direction both from Joanne and Cindy and she helped me a lot. So I think that's been, them experience been great so far. They've been really, really supportive. And I think going through this journey of, you know, like founding a company together it's obviously very challenging. And so I feel very fortunate to have two sisters who have already gone through it once, you know. So it's been great. We need to have the screen for the other guests that's trying to get on the cube here over there. Sounds like fun. Christine, so on the city labs, you got a tech side of it there and the property tech. That's exciting. How's it going over there? Super, super cool, super fun. It's been one heck of a journey building a company from scratch, let alone in tech. I think, you know, we created KSK city labs because we really wanted to modernize the real estate industry and create like super transformative solutions. Many for two reasons. You know, one is to improve the quality of lives of the community around us. And secondly, really to harness all the technology and this unused data, right, in the real estate industry and try and say, hey, how can we use that to make more intelligent business decisions? Yeah, so really, I guess for us, it's been really exciting because we've launched two products, you know, one of which is AI driven dynamic pricing engine and we realized that actually the way that homes are priced today in real estate is super archaic, right? You only use few basic variables, like how big is your house, what views do you have? But then we realized that actually, hey, with AI, we suddenly can use like hundreds of variables and even, you know, consisting of wellness variables, for example, and we can really customize pricing all the way down to a single unit level. And we realized that by doing this, we could actually unlock fair prices for our customers while also constantly kind of tracking the financial health of the company. That's awesome. Cindy, I want to get you in here, a co-founder of Sunday Insurance. That was the origination, but a lot's changed. Data drives everything, machine learning. You got to have the state of the art. What's going on with you? Yeah, I think for us, essentially, we're operating in a very old industry. It's one of the oldest industries globally and if you look at the entire insurance value chain, every part of the process is all about data. It can be disrupted, but yet every inch of the value chain is also regulated. So I think essentially what we're trying to do is, we're trying to really innovate the customer journey. So imagine if, even in the States now and even coming back to Asia, a lot of how people buy insurance is still very face-to-face agency, but I think in the future, it's going to be remote online on your app through any partners as well. So I think we're trying to adopt any AI machine learning to really scale and automate the journey of anyone who's trying to buy insurance, but at the same time for insurance companies, we're also trying to help them automate that function itself. So imagine if banks are trying to dish out loans and you're trying to predict what's the credit risk of every single customer. That's exactly what insurance company needs to do as well. And I guess insurance is all about buying a service as well. It's unlike when I buy an Apple, it comes with a hardware. So we're selling a service. So essentially your service has to also dramatically change. And I think these days, especially when we're operating in markets like ASEAN, Thailand, Indonesia is one of the highest adoption rates for mobile these days. Everyone does everything, lives on the app. So insurance companies also needs to really onboard their journey on that as well as increased engagement. So I don't just want to be an insurance company where I speak to you when I have an issue with my claim. I want to really build a relationship with you and engage you differently. So I think essentially that's the mission for Sunday. So I think imagine an insurance company 50 years in the future, how would it be? So that's our mission. Sure, and this is a great example you guys. First of all, you're very dynamic. Thanks for sharing your story. But when getting to the tech here, if industries that are transforming because of the digital transformation, the consumers expect the apps. You guys as co-founders and entrepreneurs now running this big business have to meet the demands and leverage the technology. How have you done that? How have you guys managed that? What kinds of decisions have you made? Can you share some either experiences or observations of how to navigate and how you're riding that wave? Yeah, so I think if you hear from what Cindy and Christine has just mentioned, I mean, we are playing in two of the oldest and largest industries in the world, real estate and insurance. And in both these industries, as I said earlier, it's really all about the customers, right? In the past, we used to think of businesses as what's your vertical and your horizontals. Today, at least for KSK and all these tech ventures that we are now venture building, we're really thinking about it from the customer lens. So really thinking about it from a customer ecosystem perspective. So instead of creating products and having that push out to the customers, we use tech and data and especially data today and the right amount of data and what type of data that we want, understanding that and really building that product and really the services for the customer. So once the customer enters our ecosystem, whether it's in your real estate ecosystem or whether it's in your insurance ecosystem, we want you to continue to stay with us and to trust us. And so it's not just about selling you a product, but really like what Cindy says, building a relationship with you because we think that obviously, when insurance is something you really need and when things go wrong in your life, we don't only want to be there when things go wrong in your life. And for real estate, everybody needs a shelter. So that's why we think that building relationships are very important. And from really true that lens is when you really think about the ecosystem and you think about data, I think Cindy and Christine gave some examples of how we're approaching it. A lot of people start from a traditional business and from within, but for us, we decided to actually take it outside and take the approach of venture building from a startup, but really have on the backend, really have that connection to the core businesses because what the core businesses understand is lifetime and experience of how customers feel and in insurance, it's really about how to run a financial institution. In real estate, it's really how to build buildings and that is something that we can't take away, but you use technology to enable and to power, but what venture and startups do extremely well is really the way we're extremely nimble in the way you use tech and data to navigate the quick changes of customer demands and one thing an app and it's all about quick iterations, right? When you build a super app, how do you iterate all the features that are coming in? You have to keep on iterating, changing, innovating and innovating small with quick wins and then taking on a larger scale. And so the way we position ourselves is when you have the startup and you combine that with the core and putting the two together is how we look at things and that formulates the whole ecosystem. That's awesome. And being agile is fast and speed is key if you want to be the startup but yet the core business, that's going kind of slow. You got to kind of make everything go faster. That's a great insight. Let's talk about the disruption of the property industry. Again, that's real estate. Now with the internet of things, technology is and also people expect technology. They want to have access. They don't want to have all these passwords and they want to have easy in and out. They want good efficiency, save money. What's the disruption angle on the property deck, Christine? How do you see the big disruption going on? Yeah, so I think as Joanne already mentioned before, I think our customers we know are becoming digital natives and they expect very convenient lifestyles and we're all about our customers. So actually that's why we launched also another product where we're taking all of these things that you just mentioned about IoT into account. So what we found is that actually today, really about real estate is that we all live through that life as well. So we can experience that. And we found that residents today, they find it quite challenging to request, basic services like housekeeping, managing their defects, their tenants, even the financial planning and even getting into the building, right? They want more convenience. But we realize that actually all these services in the real estate industry right now and even in the pop tech space, they're very segmented. They're all dispersed across multiple different apps. So what we really tried to do is, hey, let's try and consolidate all of this into one single app, which we have done, which is really cool and it helps our residents really stay engaged and connected with our property. What we did also was on the IoT front, we were actually the first developer in Malaysia to also integrate future proof solutions like remote lift calling as well into the mobile app. And that's to really go like push on the IoT front for us as well. Must be great for retention. It's all the gadgets are built into the, of course you have good Wi-Fi fiber in there. Everyone's got, you know, good bandwidth. For sure, definitely we have. It's like water and plumbing. I like to get that and everyone loves that. I got to ask now on the disruption is great. Now you get the cloud. So the cloud is here for us, the Amazon, you guys are a big customer because you guys can move fast and they do all the heavy lifting. How are you guys seeing that help modernizing the industry of insurance? Because that's a big vertical for AWS and you guys are doing it. Cindy, what is the, what is the modernization path that you guys have taken with AWS? Yeah, sure. So I think essentially for insurance, it's a product development. And when we talk about product development, it means how do you price every certain individual or company very differently, right? Because everyone has very different risks surrounding them. Currently what we face is that it's a flat pricing, fixed pricing, and it's not really personalized to you. If you're a very good behavior and safe kind of customer, it doesn't translate to any premium savings for you. So I think part of insurance is to give, for example, affordable access to healthcare. But if your premiums isn't sustainable for health insurance, then it doesn't really meet the point. For Sunday, how we're trying to do it differently is for example, we use AWS cloud solutions and AWS Lambda to really power our machine learning, serverless and cloud infrastructure. So for example, at Sunday, we were a series B company, so we're in a growth stage. So at any point in time, we need to ensure that our infrastructure is able to support a huge spike in transaction volume when we're working with large-scale partners like telcos, e-commerce companies, or even within our organic channels. So our AI machine learning risk prediction model which is basically powering our premium pricing engines whenever there's any request coming in from a web for a quotation. For example, if someone wants to buy health insurance, it can go up in spike, but also the data model is actually pricing, processing billions of calculations, ingesting a lot of data points and it needs to do that within seconds. So yeah, I think AWS has been using it from day one since we launched. It's been helping us on that. And make you go faster, that's that big thing. I got to ask you, when you guys have this family business now three decades, you get a lot going on, extending that legacy and sustaining the family legacy. I love the story, so who decides whether to do the startup? You guys draw straws, is it you guys flip a coin, who runs the big business? How do you guys decide that? Maybe I'll... You don't have to answer. Go ahead. I would say maybe it came very naturally to us really. I guess here we didn't have to disclose our ages a little bit. So I mean, we all, actually the background is really all three of us before we came into the family business, we were all working professionals in very different fields. I was in banking, Cindy was a lawyer and Christine was a doctor actually. But I came back first, I'm the eldest. So after working outside and looking into the family business, so I came back first and from there I took over the insurance business and looking at it, it was a very lonely place to be. So after a couple of years of Cindy being in professional life, we said, hey, would you like to come back and let's take a different journey with insurance and see how we can build something different since we know a lot about insurance, but let's make a difference and be sustainable, but also evolve over time and show the world that insurance is actually pretty sexy actually. And then Christine saw the fund that the two of us were having and at that time we had already started building a real estate on my end and then she came back and we had a conversation and we said, look, looking at what we're doing in Sunday, building pricing engines and being able to price to a single customer level, we saw that opportunity in real estate. And so I asked her, I said, look, would you like to do this? Because I think there is something cool. The three of us can band together and still inspire each other, share ideas across each other. That's an opportunity that a lot of people don't get, right? I mean, two oldest industries in the world being able to cross share ideas and sometimes inspirations and ideas don't come from the same industry. And so I think, and that's how we started really, John, it's not, maybe we're lucky and we should be grateful for that. Well, you're all power women. I love the story. And this is good that they come together. And I think the entrepreneurial kind of twist makes it more fun, but not everyone's cut out for the entrepreneurship, but it also gives you more risk management. You can go after opportunities. And I love the strategy there. You guys are great leaders. Any advice for other aspiring women leaders and entrepreneurs out there who want to make a difference, make an impact? The world is changed, it's getting better for everyone. And again, entrepreneurial could be in big companies and also big companies doing startups as a whole new world. What advice would you guys give other aspiring women leaders? I'll keep it short from my end. I think for me, it's about really following your passion, following your ambition. And lastly, I think not to try and, not feel like you need to conform to any gender stereotypes because I think in male dominated industries such as real estate or tech, I think people might have some ideas about, you know, what a tech leader or what a real estate leader might have to look like, but you don't have to conform to that. So that's probably my advice. Yeah. Yeah, I fully agree with Chris right there. I think gender isn't an issue here. If you have a passion and you identify there is a market opportunity that you can, you know, you can really do something about it, just pursue it. I think most importantly, if you ever want to be an entrepreneur and start your own business or your own startup, so long as you have the confidence, I think you're good to go. There's a lot of talk out there that women-led startups are not attracting funds, but we haven't faced that anyway in this part of Asia. I think that's a lot of, I think it attracts even more attention if you're a woman in a male-dominated industry. Like, hey, then, you know, it's quite unique. So I think you have a strength there and I think there's a lot of diverse talent out there. Post-pandemic, a lot of people are looking for changes as well. So I think it's a lot of opportunity out there. Yeah, yeah. Joanne, you know, the thing is with cloud computing, it's a level-setter. It really, because if you can come together, whether it's sisters like you guys, powerful sisters and professional experience, coming together to leverage technology to refactor old industries, it's all about the numbers and the performance. At the end of the day, you know, you move faster and you take territory and beat the competition. That's right. The ultimate leveler. Well, congratulations. You guys are great. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. The Quad sisters, you guys are amazing. Great story, love it. Thanks for coming on and celebrating International Women's Day feature today. It's part of our International Women's Showcase here on theCUBE. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Okay, the CUBE's International Women's Showcase going on all year, this time featuring International Women's Day, the big celebration. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.