
Ed talks about combining humanity with Artificial Intelligence to create compelling outcomes in the Collections and Receivables world. Fascinating advances in FinTech.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.
Ed Wallen: I’m the CEO of C&R Software. I’ve been doing this for about 25 years building, marketing, and selling financial services solutions and systems. For the last 17 years or so, it’s been on the subsegment of that collections and recovery market.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What is your engineering team in Brazil like? How big is it? Is it all in one place?
Ricardo Josua: It’s spread around the world. We have 280 engineers at this point.
Sramana Mitra: In Sao Paulo?
Ricardo Josua: No, they’re remote. Maybe 120 are in Sao Paulo. We have become remote-first. People have an office if they want to go to an office. If the team wants to have a meeting and three of them are in India, everyone has to connect on their own device. It has to be the same experience for everyone. We have now engineers in India and Singapore. We have a growing team of engineers in the US and UK.
>>>Sramana Mitra: I have a slightly different kind of question. You are a developer who turned into a successful entrepreneur. You have a real insight into how a developer becomes an entrepreneur. Torc is working on the basis of equipping developers to be freelancers and blossom their careers. Given what’s going on in the world today, there is this tremendous desire for developers to be entrepreneurs. Is that something that you’re thinking about? Is that something that you want to facilitate?
Michael Morris: In our original business plan, we wanted to have a track in Torc that allows that path of going from a developer to an entrepreneur. I also want to be realistic. I think that for 9 out of 10 developers that want to go down that path, it’s not a great idea. Maybe they’re part of an entrepreneurial team. Everybody wants to be a CEO or a visionary.
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I am a huge fan of virtual companies. Here is a conversation from 2019 about a virtual company built with excellent execution by a Russian entrepreneur, Percona Founder CEO Peter Zaitsev.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
Peter Zaitsev: I was born in what was the Soviet Union. I studied Math and Computer Science in Moscow State University. I started my first startup company while studying.
Sramana Mitra: Your core value proposition when it comes to the global market is the combination of payments and core banking?
Ricardo Josua: This is one of the main features. You have everything rolled up in a single integration. The second one was that this is not a monolithic solution. It can provide all the systems, but you can build around them. One of the pains that we try to solve was that we don’t want to be the bottleneck in the development of products from our clients. We have to make sure that we have out-of-the-box solutions if you want a basic product.
>>>Sramana Mitra: How big is the developer community now?
Michael Morris: It’s about 2,600 people. We’re still getting off the ground. Out of that, about 500 are vetted. These are people who have gone through our assessment process, built their profiles, linked up their GitHub accounts, and installed and started using our productivity tool.
Sramana Mitra: You have enterprise customers already?
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