Digital Transformation in Registration and Payments | Interview with Asaf Darash, CEO of Regpack

Ryan Purvis 01:27:12
Hello and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings.

What do I say to the digital workspace week's podcast, you want to give a brief introduction to yourself?

Asaf Darash 01:27:46
My name is Asaf Darash, I am the founder and CEO of rich Regpack, which is an onboarding and payment platform in Canada platform. For the service industry. We work with a lot of extra curriculum organisations, courses, after school programmes, analytic education, educational tourism camps, stuff like that conferences. Our platform allows them to allows basically any service based business to create an onboarding process that is exactly according to their needs. And then from there, it allows them to select the services that they want, do besides issue payments, and we have some unique offerings connected to instalment payments, that is connected to the service industry. And that's about it. The company is stationed around the world, the majority of our activities in the US, UK, Canada, and Israel. We've been in this about 10 years. And we really enjoy helping these organisations which are bringing exceptional value to their end users, and help them lower the amount of administrative tasks that they need to do.

Ryan Purvis 01:29:11
Great and I mean, that leads me nicely to the usual question is What does digital workspace mean to you?

Asaf Darash 01:29:17
I would say that a digital workspace in a way is, is what, what the world is today. I would say, let's take a really nice example from what happened. And I think that COVID made a major difference to to the change. In the past, we were a company that we had a huge office in San Diego, we would only hire people from California or from Israel. And then COVID came in. And suddenly we understood that when you have a digital workspace, meaning that you can meet people around the world just through through the computer, you can you can have meetings from people from three different countries at the same time at the same is something that will take a week or two to actually waste on it before people get a work life balance that is much better for them, and they become more productive and happier. So I think that the digital workspace means our ability to live our life in a way that is much more flexible, and allows us to, to do a lot more with a lot less stress.

Ryan Purvis 01:30:27
Yeah, you study the knowledge for a lot of people. I mean, that's, that's definitely my view on it as well. And you know what you're doing with onboarding, I think it's really easy. Just think about that. It's just bringing somebody on to do something. But it's also manage the them through, you know, their, their journey, if you're like with the company that they're involved with. And then the onboarding as well. And because everyone is now comfortable with remote working and using different tools, you can reduce a lot of friction, because the education gaps aren't as big as they were, when people weren't comfortable with using a team's or a Zoom before. Now they are comfortable. And now they expect their level of other service to just be available that they could just use, you know, to get paid or collect money or pay their taxes or whatever it is.

Asaf Darash 01:31:17
I totally agree. There, I think there are two nice stories that that really highlight exactly the change that happened and, and even though COVID was was hard, and you know, a lot of lives were lost and all that. I think that COVID advanced the world by half a decade, just just by the fact that it happened. Let's say before COVID If someone wanted to meet me or talk to me about something was obvious that we would need to meet in person. And then if I would offer them, let's meet just through the computer, it would seem odd, right? But today when I do that, and I ask them, like, do we need to do anything physical together? Do we need to touch each other? And the answer is 99% of the time there's no right. So there's really no reason for us to actually physically meet that one. One thing that I think really, really changed it The other one is, is actually what we're seeing with our clients, a lot of our clients before that, before COVID, or before, let's say in the last two years, they didn't, they didn't see the the idea of allowing their end users to onboard and put the information themselves control their account, control payments, they didn't see any any importance in that. And now what's happening? It's actually coming from from the ground up, because their clients are telling them, okay, how do I go and, and register onboard online? Or how to like pay online? If they tell them, you need to send a check, or, or you need to wire money or whatever they're like, Okay, I'm moving on. I'm going to someone else, since it. I had a conversation with with a large school in the US yesterday, and the trigger that caused them to, to look for a solution was that one of the they told one of the parents, you need to come in and issue payments, and they were like, This is 2023, what are you talking about? And they understood, okay, we need to, we need to change something considerably.

Ryan Purvis 01:33:24
Oh, 100%. I mean, I was at the post office yesterday, and they want me to give them cash to pay for something. And I said, I don't carry cash. You know, what, why can't I just tap it? And like, No, this is an old process, et cetera, et cetera. And it just wastes so much time unnecessarily. Because, you know, order status, create paperwork gets created admin, and a bit of frustration. So I'm very glad to hear those sorts of things. Do you think people on the other side of those processes that have always done it that way? You know, they're sort of phrase have always done it this way? Do you think they realise that the pain and they're changing, are you seeing almost disruption because of those that are willing to do it and cut the bureaucracy?

Asaf Darash 01:34:04
I think what's happening is, is there are two situations. One is that organisations that are attentive to their clients and their end users or their, their community, they understand that they need to change and that they need to move forward. And they and I wouldn't even say move forward, they would just they just need to get into the situation that everybody else is doing right there to allow, allow people to control their accounts themselves, they need to allow people to, to edit things, they need to allow people to do something at 12 midnight, and it's really powerful, especially with the educational organisations that we work with, where parents, there are a slammed when you have three kids, and you're doing it and you have a job, both parents are working, a lot of times you're doing these things at 10pm or something. Now, if the organisation demands them that to come in or to talk to them on the phone, or whatever, it's like it's not gonna work that they did, they just don't have time. So I would say that that's one that for organisations that are attentive to their clients. And I would say the other one is, is the organisations were that were not attended to their clients, and they're starting to decline. And then they decide, okay, we have to fix this, because we have a churn problem, a major problem where people are leaving us, people don't want to work with us. And a lot of times what, what we see is that, when there's personal change that happens in the organisation, they, they, they put the finger on it right away, they're like, this is the problem. This is why it's not working. And once once they change that, a lot of times they see a growth, a major growth in the revenue comeback.

Ryan Purvis 01:35:56
It's usually said that when personnel changes, I think that's usually when people are the key to all this stuff. And when it comes to changing systems and the adoption of changing systems, if the people aren't part of that journey, they become the biggest friction to that. And I don't know how common is I'm sure in the States, it happens. But then I noticed some organisations, we actually have periods where to where you have to be off for two weeks without any access. So we could see what impact that has on the business, not only from a process point of view, brought from a security information, security point of view, and all that kind of stuff. And I think it's a good practice to take yourself out of a process and see, have someone else come in and look at and go, Why are you doing it this way? Like you should be cutting steps out here, here, here all one form versus five forms. Versus, you know, only obvious when you're not involved in all the time.

Speaker 3 01:36:44
We actually see that a lot as organisations come to us. They try to replicate something that they already have. And it takes time to explain to them that that moving something to the digital space is not just like copy paste. It's just like similar to if you write an article that will be read it. People will read on a physical newspaper. You need to read it in a different way. If you write an article that people are going to read on a computer, right? If you if you build a form a form on a computer will function very differently than the paper form. And, and a lot of times we get big organisations especially we especially seeing this in universities, where they're they're slow to move very heavy, big organisations, where they, they'd say, like, we want it this way. And we try to explain to them, yes, you can do it this way. But you're not taking advantage of all the changes that the technology can give you on one hand, and, and you're, and you're suffering for all the disadvantages, because you're trying to create something that the computer is not good at. The computer by definition is good at repetitive processes. And anything that is repetitive computerised it, anything that is not repetitive, don't computerise it. And we actually see situations and I think this is about, you know, digitising work with clients, this is really important. We see a lot of times where they focus on the end cases, they focus on the three or 5% of people that have very, very unique needs. And they they hurt the other 95% by creating a process that will allow them allow those 5% or 3%, to do what they need to do. And it's a real process explaining to them look, you need to cater to the common case, what's important is to work, something that will work for 95 96% of your clients, the other 4% It's totally okay to go manual on that it's totally okay to add notes, to do something that your administrative staffs will need to do something, but it's only 4%. But if you actually create a process that those 4% can also do it by themselves, you're going to make it miserable for the other 96%. Right. So they will need to do so many steps that that they will tell you this is terrible. So so it's really a process of of when when an organisation goes digital, it's really the process of understanding how to do it. And I think that it's also really important to pick the right partner to do that with you. Because otherwise, they can come out of it with with their clients being very unhappy. And deciding that digital. digitising was was a mistake, when it wasn't, it's about how you implement it.

Ryan Purvis 01:39:52
Yep, you're resonating with, I'm thinking of all my failures in life, where we've gone too complicated, or we've not not step back and done that sort of thing, most common denominator for the process, because most most applications are forms going through a workflow and different workflows, and you just have to find them the contextually in point information at that point in time to provide to the person that's involved, you know, being someone that's doing admissions, be it someone that's doing the financial stuff, or whatever it is, they need to see what they need to see the journey to everything. And often, if you look at some of the old systems, the problem with them is they had to every single piece of data was on the screen, because they built one screen for everybody. Instead of, you know, specific screens for specific roles. And a lot of the stuff you talked about I used to do is process reengineering, which is going through those processes and thinking about it from the context of each person. What do you need to know? Yeah, what does the student need to know? What does the admissions person need to know? What is the finance business? So that's really Yeah, I mean, great, great insight to what you guys are doing. Do you do some sort of and, I'm curious, when you do this sort of convert conversion from analogue to digital? Do you do some sort of value calculation, some sort of return on investment or by by going down the route we'll say your product or your process?

Asaf Darash 01:41:08
Normally, we don't know why it's so high. It's so like, it happens so quickly, that it's, it's a little ridiculous to do that. For example, if when organisations turn it on the instalment plan option that we offer in the application, they see an average of 25 to 30% revenue growth right off the bat, just by allowing instalment plans. So a lot of times working on ROI is sort of like you know, okay, so you paid $2,000 And you're getting 200,000. So yeah, like you covered it in a day and a half. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 01:41:52
Yeah. And I think I mean, this this problem is some of the stuff that I do as well we have some really big numbers, and no one believes in because the numbers are really big. And And often those those return value in conversations are not necessarily money back in the bank account because it's saving staff time or you repurposing the money elsewhere. But with what you're talking about, yes, you could definitely see top line revenue changes, because you're cutting out a whole lot of noise and bureaucracy. And as you said, people people go with their, they don't like what they see they move somewhere else, because there's so much competition that are doing. So

Asaf Darash 01:42:29
One of the things that would be really helpful for organisations that are on the fence, and that they don't really know if they want to do this is that we explained to them, that they're changing the structure of their labour. Whereas today, when they're not digitised their workforce is basically the workforce they have in the office, or that is on their payroll. And once they go ditched digital, they change the fact that their work, their main workforce is going to be their clients, because they are doing most of the work for them. They're going in, they're filling out the information, they're selecting everything, they're doing everything that beforehand, they had 3, 4, 5, 10 people doing that. So once you explain it to that, in that way, where basically you're changing the structure of your workforce, and you're you're moving a lot of the work to your clients, and, and not in a bad way in a good way where it's a win win situation. Because your clients are are empowered, since they can do their selections and do what they want faster without the need to contact you. And at anytime that they want. And at the same time, you guys are lowering the barriers of entry and lowering your costs. So yeah, and also growing your revenue. So when we get a lot of a lot of objections, where it's like, how can this be, this is impossible that the ROI is so high, and so forth, then once we explain that, I think it resonates much better, since it's sort of oh, okay, so I have 1000 clients, and they, they're actually moving a lot of the work to them right now.

Ryan Purvis 01:44:13
It makes me think of when I when I started university back in 2000, that a very sophisticated onboarding process to get us all in. But it was it was basically destroyed by having every person going to talk to another person who was typing in your details into the web application. And I remember even then, I mean, I must have been 18 or 19. Time going, this is the most inefficient way to do it. Because I'm computer illiterate, I can just do this stuff. I could have done this at home, I'd have to come in here. It's been hours and queues. Because all I needed was my student card with my number on it. That was a and you know, I think that's that's sometimes when people miss, and that's back to your 4% thing. For the majority. Nowadays people can do these things. There's this, there's always going to be the exception that exception be handled, how it is handled. So I mean, I'm curious to know, I mean, we just hit this adversity in education. I mean, what what are you seeing now with them? We have to generate a generative it AI to an extent. But are you seeing your customers now pushing now that they've sort of taken the poll, and they're going down there to digitalization or they're pushing you with more and more requirements that you hadn't thought of? That's enhance your product, or you see AI becoming more and more prevalent that you can do a lot of things quicker for your clients, before they even ask you, if you understand my two different sides of the same question.

Asaf Darash 01:45:29
I would say it's the second one. A lot of times, what happens is that the organisations that we work with are less. It's not that they're not computer literate, but it's not something that they focus on, it's not their main interest. They are there to supply the the educational needs are so forth for the for their, for their students. So what happens a lot of times is that as we as we develop things that we know that will help them, we actually see something a little different, where a lot of them are hesitant to implement the new changes and the abilities. And the way that we have a good example is the instalment plans, we created an automatic instalment option that allows the base it's basically most of the instalment plans that people use today's Buy now Pay later, right where you you go in and you have a credit check. And basically you're doing micro financing, you're getting a loan for let's say, 100, 200 or 1000 $2,000. And then you're paying it in instalments, right? The service industry doesn't need to have that structure because it's connected to space and time, right. If I do a course, the course is going to take six months and preregistering four months in advance. Probably they need the money in order to fund me as a student only three months in that means that by definition, I can pay in seminary instalments, right, and there's no no financing needed. So we build an algorithm that knows how to make sure that they get financing in time financing for the organisation and then we can allow people to pay installments without any microfinancing of the students and so forth. Now, when when I explain it like that any any person who is a little bit connected to economics and so forth will be like, Yeah, this makes total sense. This is easy. Just implement this. With educational organisations, they're very hesitant for change in general, right? And then what we found, the best way to do is to say, Okay, let's let's, we implemented an AB engine, where we let them AB test and tell them tell them okay, let's, let's put 20% of the people expose them to lose, okay, and see what happens. And then they suddenly see that the completion rate on those 20% is 95%, versus the other 80% is, let's say, 80%, or 75%. And they're like, Wow, okay, can we move this to 100. And suddenly, they grow their revenue by 25 to 30%. And, and then what happens is, as we start pulling out more and more abilities, they're less hesitant. Because because there's a trust that was created between us and them that they say, okay, these guys know what they're doing. They know what they're talking about. Let's if they offer us something, let's just do it.

Ryan Purvis 01:48:25
Yeah, I think it's a great approach. I mean, the, the what if the what if scenarios always worked, where people put people into analysis paralysis. Whereas if you do it this way, I'll do that when you're getting better. But I think doing AB testing, and that is a great way to show it, show the value. And I think also, as you mentioned, that the average person that's putting the data in is sophisticated enough to give you good feedback to say, this really worked or this didn't work. And that also helps the value proposition. So what are your plans with with the company? What are you guys doing this year that that's interesting for the listeners that they'd want to know about?

Asaf Darash 01:49:01
So, Regpack is growing into to more verticals, as we one of the unique things about Regpack is that we really have a technology what Regpack is based on on my PhD, on how you can build computerised systems that have no constants in them where everything's a variable, right. Now, the, the the service, the service based market is huge in the Western world, right? I think I remember reading stat, where it's like 65%, or 70%, of income in Western countries or developed countries is services. When you look at that market, that market is very, very fragmented. You see, software where things like like this, like if I if I want to go out and sell pens or watches, I will implement a software to sell stuff, right? I won't look for software to sell pens, or software to sells watches. Whereas that's exactly what happens in the service based market. Like doctor's offices look for a doctor's office software, camps look for a camp software, it goes so rarely, rarely, it's like a conference will look for conference software and an event we'll look for an event software as if I didn't even know what the difference is between the two. And, and the reason for that is is because of the onboarding process, which is unique for each vertical. And until until the technology that was built by Regpack, you really could not service to two different verticals, which by the way, is part of the reason that the service based market is hesitant to implement technology, because they're implementing a lot of technologies. Think of a school, a school does parent payments, they might do parent payments for for special programmes. They might also do a camp and after school, maybe an adult education and they have a conference, right? So they're using five or six softwares. And they're a school. They're not like a multibillion dollar this business, right? Their school, they should not be using so many software. So they're very hesitant every time they implementing more software, because it's like, okay, there's another layer and another software that you need to take care of, and edit and so forth. And then what we found is that, that when you you explain to these organisations, that they can do multiple things in one software, they really have that aha moment where it's like, wow, so we can actually do this, this and this all in one place. So that is the plan for Regpack. We really want to become, I would say, the Shopify for services in a way where we can offer these organisations the ability to have one place that they can go to work with and implement their, their workflows, the onboarding processes, the the payment processes that they need, in a simple and easy way. So yeah, we we have a few new updates that are happening. The automatic instalment plans is something that this year. Ah we we also have new integrations that are happening that happened automatically. And I would say that the biggest thing that we're seeing in Regpack today is, is now that the downturn from COVID is slowly drilling dwindling down, and we're seeing an up, we're really, really excited to help these organisations go into the future.

Ryan Purvis 01:52:40
It's very exciting. And and I'd love to reach read your PhD. Purely because, you know, a lot of my career was around pretty much what you talked about, you know, systems using the constant variable. And when I was sort of starting out, it was called dynamic case management, primarily, which was, you know, forms of data in going through small processes, but the object that it belonged to would always be accessible to go different directions, versus sort of traditional BPM where it has to go to like, like a, like a train on a railroad track, it goes has to go through each station before you could actually interact with the, the object. So I'm very curious to see how the product works, because I think that's where a lot of these things, a lot of systems fall over, because they have to become rigid at some point. And that that becomes the sort of problem with the system where the friction starts to develop was built for one sort of flow, and then the flow has to change. And that's a big effort to change the system. Whereas if you guys are dynamic, or fluid, as you say, that that's a really positive move, because that's, you know, everything. Everything evolves over time.

Asaf Darash 01:53:45
Yeah, and obviously creates problems for itself. Because when everything is joyless, it's very hard, let's say, to search, or to, to see patterns or stuff like that. But a lot of times the way that I explain it, because we a lot of people that we work with our people that have kids and so forth, it's very, it's very easy to understand this analogy. So let's say all the systems out there or systems that have constants in them are an awesome is the difference between Playmobil? And like, right? Playmobil like you take it out of the box, and it works right away, right? It's just works, right? But it is what it is forever. If you took out a car, it will be a car forever, it can never be anything else, you have to have a very elaborate imagination to think that the car is a tree, right? Yes. With LEGO, you take it out, it doesn't work, you have to do something, right. But after you do that, you can decide it can be a spaceship, it can be a car, it can be a knight, it can be a house, right. And that's exactly the difference between Regpack and the other systems out there, the systems out there are playable, which is, by the way is is very nice and comforting. Because you just take it out, and it works. Right. But then like you said, but now my need changes. Now I want to play with nights, but I can't, right, because these are cars. And and Lego maybe demands a little more work a little more brainpower, a little more creativity. But you you're, you have more more flexibility to change. And I would say it's more connected to how life is in a way. Life is very dynamic. And things are not always what they are forever. Right. So so. So I would think that that analogy really, really helps people understand the difference between a system that has no constants and a system that has constants

Ryan Purvis 01:55:45
Yeah, it's a great analogy. And that's exactly as I say that the passion area that I've been involved with is exactly that example, because often you're dealing with a those variables are constant for that period of time, and they're going to change. And like you say, if you bought the Playmobil you struggle and you look at some of these ERP systems or some of these big systems that people are putting in to do something often it's a it's a huge overhead to keep it up to date because it wasn't even built to be kept up to date. It was meant to do it one way. So it's a great analogy. If people to get hold you what's what's the best way?

Go to the website Regpacks.com or LinkedIn is very, very active. And Instagram, Instagram, LinkedIn, we also have a really really good blog that helps people understand how to go through the digitising digitising process

Asaf Darash 01:56:46
like we have use cases and stuff like that, where how organisations went through the process and and what they understood what they how they understood, like okay, we need to give this up in order to gain something more. We have a few articles they're connected to exactly like the 90 96% versus the 4%. I think these are things that are important, especially as the digital world is much more prominent than than anything. It was back then how it was, let's say 10 or 20 years ago. And I think that we're only at the tip of the iceberg it's going to get, I wouldn't say worse, but more prominent, right? It's going to be like the place of digitization in our life is going to be nets. So so anyone who has hasn't gone through the process or is struggling with the process, I think the blog will really help them because because there's a lot of information, a lot of use cases of how people went through these things.

Ryan Purvis 01:57:49
Fantastic. Well, I'll get a link for that. Put that in the show notes. And great. Well, thanks very much for coming on. Thank you.

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