Paula: Welcome to Let’s Talk Loyalty, an industry podcast for loyalty marketing professionals. I’m your host, Paula Thomas, and if you work in loyalty marketing, join me every week to learn the latest ideas from loyalty specialists around the world.
Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV. And today is truly a momentous day for me and our team, as you’ll hear in today’s episode. Today is our fifth birthday. And as the company founder, I couldn’t be more proud of the brand we’ve created, the loyalty leaders we’ve interviewed, and the impact we’ve had so far in the global loyalty industry.
As part of our birthday story, we’re making some significant changes to our business model for Loyalty TV, specifically. And we’re announcing our biggest ever partnership to date with Capillary Technologies. Capillary Technology Solutions, Power Loyalty Programs for some of the biggest brands in the world, including 300 marquee brands across 30 plus countries. They include some of the biggest I’ve ever heard of, such as the Tata Group with 170 million members and the upcoming launch of a program for IndiGo Airlines, the largest airline in India, and now the sixth largest in the world, carrying over a hundred million passengers annually.
As you’ll hear in this episode, Capillary will be bringing all of these incredible clients to share their stories on Loyalty TV. And these video interviews will be exclusively available free of charge on capillarytech.com. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Aneesh Reddy, Founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies, as we today announce our biggest ever partnership. And hear the story of their incredible successes in recent years and Capillary’s even more exciting plans for the future.
So, Aneesh Reddy. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Loyalty and welcome for the first time to Loyalty TV.
Aneesh: Thanks Paula for having me here today. It’s a pleasure to have a chat with you.
Paula: Well, honestly, Aneesh the pleasure is all mine. As you know, today is a massive milestone for us as a business. We’re turning five years old from the date that our very first podcast went live back in 2019. And I couldn’t be more thrilled than to be celebrating it with you. And of course, announcing our amazing new partnership with Capillary Technology. So thank you for your faith in us.
Aneesh: You know, five years is a great milestone Paula, big congrats to that. You know, and especially, you know, I think you’ve been this nice voices for a lot of the loyalty industry to you know, to learn from each other, to have good conversations, to have open conversations. That’s been amazing to see you know, over the last few years as I got to know about you the impact you’ve had in, and wishing Loyalty TV and Let’s Talk Loyalty. You know, another 10 years ahead, you know, or more.
Paula: So, yeah, indeed. Yeah. Like when I reflect back Aneesh, honestly, I mean, the date itself is significant in a personal way, actually, as well as a professional way. So just for anybody who hasn’t heard the quick backstory for the show I’d been plotting and planning, of course, to do the podcast for many months. And even after it was recorded, you never quite know when it’s going to go live, actually. So, particularly from an Apple perspective, the Apple podcasts, they really say it can take up to two weeks for any new podcast to be published. So I wanted to be live in September, 2019. I wanted to be first in the industry and I literally was by one day.
But what really I suppose thrilled me was I uploaded it on August 21st and again, allowing the two weeks, plenty of time for it to go live. And it went live within a day. And it was also my mother’s birthday was August 22nd, Aneesh. So it’s a special day for me.
Aneesh: Wow.
Paula: Yeah. So it really felt like she was, you know, blessing this new endeavor that I had. So, so yeah, it’s, as I said, personally, as well as professionally, it’s a special day. I’m thrilled to have you as part of it.
Aneesh: Yeah, no, thanks for having me over, over on the fifth anniversary.
Paula:Amazing.
Aneesh: There’s obviously something very special about the day for you.
Paula: Yes, totally.
Aneesh: That makes it a lot more special.
Paula: Indeed. Absolutely. Yes. So listen, Aneesh, let’s get into the fun conversation. First of all, you were on our show actually, of course, in audio format only back in October, 2022. And obviously Capillary’s been on a massive growth phase in that kind of, you know, two years. I know you are of course, 15 years in business, but would you mind just for our audience who haven’t been as up to date as us in terms of what you’ve been up to since you were last on the show. Tell us all of the big, the big news and announcements.
Aneesh: No, I think you know, it’s been an interesting last few years. It got to be right. So, of course, COVID hit was hard for us. We were a retail tech place. We had, and I’m Asia focused at that point in time.
So we had quite a bit of, you know, our cash flows evaporated by about 80 percent for six, seven months. So we kind of did some rethinking on what we want to do with the business. And, you know, so, cut to today, I think, you know, the business is a lot more retail is about 40 percent of our revenues. We now in healthcare. We work with the largest healthcare provider in the world now. We’re into oil and gas, into airlines, into travel and hospitality, into conglomerates. So it’s been a good we’ve kind of diversified the business, de risked the business a bit from when we spoke last you know, there’s been a lot of good progress on the product as well.
You know, I think we, today I mean, whichever analyst you pick, we are in the talk to products on loyalty that they talk about, whether it’s Forrester, whether it’s Gartner, whether it is, you know, Spark, whether it is Everest any of them, right? So, I think there’s been a lot of investment that’s gone into making the product multi vertical easy to integrate.
There’ve been significant AI investments, you know, you’ve seen some of the demos that on the generative AI side you know, so lots of good progress there. In terms of just the company, I think we’ve grown four times in the last four years. You know, so it’s been crazy growth you know, and and that while we are profitable, we’ve been profitable for three outta the last four years, including the last year. Right. So it’s it’s been an interesting interesting, nice journey, you know?
Paula: Oh my God.
Aneesh: And it’s it’s been good. You know, we now have seven Fortune 100 customers in our pipeline. Wow. That’s as good as it gets. So let’s see. Let’s see where this goes.
Paula: Unbelievable. My goodness. Well, congratulations, Aneesh. That is a testament to I know the incredible dedication you have and the ambition, actually. I always think when I talk to you and even I did get to attend your conference, your customer conference earlier this year in Dubai as well, and I was blown away by the commitment to being literally the best in the world.
So that’s obviously coming through, as you said, if the analysts are saying it if you’re in the top two rankings, that’s extraordinary achievement. And the diversification I think is super interesting because even as recently as this week, I did ask you that specific question. I still associated you with retail particularly, but you’ve got some amazing case studies and in fact, it would be remiss.
I didn’t even ask you our typical opening question. So I need to I need to start with that actually right now because it does refer to a client of yours, but I was so excited for this fifth birthday story that that I even missed that. So that’s a first for me. So let me backtrack a little bit, Aneesh, and tell our audience, what is your favorite loyalty program?
Aneesh: No, I think it’s Taj. It was the same one that I spoke about. Taj Mahal. You know, I’ve been a member for many years now, and we do all our vacations in Taj you know, we have this annual ritual of both sides, parents and the kids and both of us going for so no, I think you know, it’s they personalize it a fair bit, right.
And the good piece they do is, I think they allow the staff to make you feel special. Like, I’ll give you this small instance, right? So, we were there for our anniversary early this year and we polished off it was just me and my wife and we polished off a few bottles of wine. And my mom, my wife woke up with a little bit of a heavy head and the person came to, you know, clean up the room in the morning and then he saw that she was having a slight headache and then he got in a lime juice for, you know, and the good part was it was not on the bill.
So, it was kind of from them saying, look, you know, stuff like that, right? It’s small things like that, which I think go beyond just the program and just the and lots of stuff like that. Like they, I mean, I think they, they have it well captured that what kind of room do we like, or the kids like, you know, some of that. So it just makes life a lot easier. It’s far beyond just the points you earn and the membership and stuff like that.
Paula: Well, it’s a brilliant example, Aneesh, and and sweet and amusing and very human. I mean, of course we talk on this show a lot about emotional loyalty and there it is right there. And that’s way beyond, as you said, anything to do with the technology platform. And I know they are a client of yours but that’s not the point. The point is, they have all of the basics in place in terms of the product. And then they go with what does Aneesh need and his wife this morning on this particular heavy celebration. So very well done to Taj. It’s a long time, actually, since I’ve stayed in a Taj Hotel, Aneesh. So they’re on my wishlist. So, I know they do have a property, I think in Cape Town where I’m going shortly. So please God, I’ll get to experience that.
So, so listen, You’ve talked now, of course, about what’s been going on recently. I’m sure most people listening to this show and watching us on Loyalty TV saw the big fundraising round in February that was announced your Series D of 140 million dollars. So congratulations and all of that.
I think what I particularly liked about that and you were telling me earlier this week, Aneesh, was I suppose the amount of market research that you had to do on loyalty marketing, of course, in order to raise that level of fundraising with savvy investors, dare I say it. So you’ve shared some incredible statistics with me that I’ve never heard before. So would you mind talking through what you’ve kind of learned about the scale of the global loyalty market and the size of the opportunity?
Aneesh: Right. You know, I think so yeah, so, you know, whenever you raise a lot of money, you have to convince a lot of smart people that the business is worth it. And all of that I think that also helps is you also build conviction along, along with it. Right. And we’ve always wanted to build the best loyalty company out there in the world.
And so the question I always would get asked is, Hey, it’s a niche. Are you sure this can be large? Right. So we this, the last few years, we spent a lot of time mapping the market out saying, look how many industries is this relevant to you know, and all kinds of loyalty, right? Not just retail, but consumer B2B, healthcare you know, and some of that we think roughly about 70 to 80 percent of the Fortune 2000 in each of the markets would find loyalty relevant. You know, there’ll always be some businesses which don’t find royalty relevant, right? That’s, let’s say the 25 to 30 percent of the businesses.
So, so you’re, let’s say give and take looking at 1500 large companies in the US and Europe and Asia as potential customers, we play in the large enterprise space, as you know, I’m sure it is relevant to a lot of the smaller businesses as well, but just our stack and, you know, the depth of the stack and some of that mean that we better align for large prices.
Now the good piece is these large enterprises spend anything from a million to, we now have a customer who’s who will get to spending about 80 million a year on us on on, on what we do for them.
Paula: Wow.
Aneesh: So it is a large spend, right? I mean, it’s a fortune five. I can’t name them. I guess it’s yours. But but it is a very large market, you know? So anything from a million to you know, multi tens of millions is what people end up spending, customers end up spending. So it’s anything between a 6 billion to a 10 billion addressable market as an industry, right? So again, you know, I think it kind of corroborates with the data that you gave the other day that there are about 12,000 loyalty managers on LinkedIn, right?
And my gut is, you know, you have to be a certain size company, probably a billion dollars or more in revenues to have a dedicated loyalty manager In the profile, you know, so it’s probably so yeah, I think it’s a large industry. Yeah. It’s been an industry that’s been there since I don’t know, 1960s. Right.
So, and I think it’s very important for all of our customers, especially in environments like this. Where it’s important to retain more than just spend on acquisitions of customer and things like that right. So, and I think we’re in a pretty nice place. I think there’s a lot of technology shift that’s happened in the last 10 years and is happening even now, right?
So whether you look at the cloud, they look at mobile and we look at social and now, of course gen AI and the broader AI parts. So, yeah, I think we are in a great place to kind of disrupt you know, a nice niche industry. And what we love about it is the fact that you know, there is a small, there is an art and science to loyalty, right?
So it’s it’s not without the good word that, you know, a good program design of the start can do, which a bunch of our partners and companies we work with do. And there’s a lot of art to this as well. Right. So which kind of makes sure that you can’t commoditize a business like this out. Right. So we do think you know, it’s a nice place to build you know, a lasting company for the next 20, 25 years.
Paula: Indeed. Yeah. Very well said Aneesh. And I suppose from our perspective, we’re very much on the art rather than the science. And I do think we, we very much have the shared goal, I suppose, of helping loyalty managers to do better work because I know they want to certainly that was my pain point and that the whole reason I started the show, and you guys are there as well to support and educate and I suppose get everyone bang up to speed.
Of course I looked at all of your AI demo videos which I’ll make sure we link to in the show notes for this episode as well, because obviously AI wasn’t even you know, an idea when I was running programs kind of 10 years ago. So lots of stuff you’ve already mentioned in terms of the developing the product.
But even before we get into what AI is doing for loyalty managers, Aneesh, would you mind just, you know, I suppose, summarizing what you’re hearing from the kind of projects that you’re bidding for and you know, what’s happening in terms of the RFPs, because it definitely resonated with me when you talked about, I suppose this was the numbers that are coming through.
I know you’re a very collaborative guy and you do talk to a lot of your competitors, of course, as well as friends in different sectors. So RFPs are something that are close to everyone, you know, watching this show. And there is actually quite a small number. And of course, within those, there’s an even smaller number that do ultimately make a decision to come on to a new platform like the Capri Technologies for the first time. So what are you hearing from loyalty managers that you talk to at any stage of the RFP process?
Aneesh: Right. So, you know, for a lot of our conversations, Paula, we do a very deep discovery. We try to understand what the pin point of our customers is. And usually what happens is you know, these are very smart people really want to make an impact on the business.
And but, you know, where the struggle with is, you know, running running a simple campaign in an old, oldish software, you know, means that it’ll take you two months, you go to your agency and, you know, they’ll run some manual analysis and then you have to use five tools. It’s a little bit of a broken thing, right?
So from promise to performance, I think is. Is a big gap. Right. So, so we hear a lot of that. We hear a lot of stuff around saying, look, promotions take forever. We are not able to personalize. Well, we hear a lot of stuff around you know, reporting and analytics taking forever. I mean, I can totally understand coming up with a strategy takes two, three months and it’s very important.
Right. But you know, how did your campaign run last week? Or, you know, some basic stuff should be like straight out of the deck, right? A few clicks, you should have it out. Right. So, so that’s something we hear quite a bit again from a lot of our customers. We do hear this piece around you know, I think loyalty is also changing.
I think 20 years ago you know, loyalty was about you know, getting a membership, saving some points, you know, and things like that. But today I think you know, the world has changed, right? I mean, I think for the Gen Z you know, I think people wanted here and now it’s about experiences. It’s about, can you recognize me? Things like that. So we see a lot more interest in gamification. We’re seeing a lot more interest in things like badges, things like, can you keep me engaged between transactions? Right. So between, you know, can I play a game on the app? Can you you know, have a trivia for me, you know, suffer that, right? So, more interesting stuff there.
We’ve seen a lot of brands saying look, can we go beyond just discounts or redeeming points for discounts and do more of rewards, more of collectibles, more of things that are you know drive more emotional value. You know, and as we know, Briley has a very good emotional loyalty quotient tracker. And we’ve seen more of that play out quite a bit. Right. So the other thing that, of course, seeing across the industry is Is this question on you know, should on, you know, the cost of making technology changes is very high, unfortunately, today, right? I think with the cloud, it comes down a little bit.
There’s a lot of pre integrations available, but we definitely seeing more of our customers saying, look, we want to run a POC for a month. You know, we want to see if the integrations is easy. We want to see if you know how much of a heavy lift is it on our side? So we think some of these, you know, in fact some of these, you know, the investments that we made off late on the Gen AI side or building a lot of extensions to our platform so that you can integrate a lot faster.
Earlier, what would happen is, you know, if you had to integrate with a loyalty platform, it’d be like a one year you know, one year roadmap and your IT teams, your system integrators, all of them will have to get involved. We saying, can we change that? Can we make it easy that you continue to use the same API endpoints that you had as a business? And then we do the transposition on our side as Capillary. So instead of taking a lot of time and a lot of resources to go live, you know, all that you have to do as a business is just a quick QA test at the end you know, making sure that you know, it’s all working well and you’re fine. Right.
So we’ve now migrated a couple of customers like that birds being a good example that large complex program. It’s been around for 30 plus years and the entire migration took about three, four months end to end. And their team literally had no, no line of code to write. Right. So it was a pretty interesting investment. Some of that, I think we see the intent from a lot of businesses to say loyalty has to move out of the 80s. You know, we can’t use this clunky tech, both companies founded in the 80s, but then the mountain to move, right, is the 50 integrations, the 40 field files you have, and all of that. Right. So, so that’s what we hear.
It’s integrations, more AI you know, more verticalization. So you don’t have a lot of features you need to build. Each time when you go live or over a period of time are kind of the investments that we’re hearing we’re making based on the feedback we’re getting from prospects and customers, you 50 ish RFPs a year. So it’s a good, large set of RFPs and conversations to track from. I think the market gets about 100, 150 RFPs if you ask me. So it’s much smaller than the 4, 500 customers out there. So I’m hoping that we can together, you know, move the industry forward. And I think the industry has been stuck in old technology has been stuck in a slow ways of you know, waiting for promotions, waiting for reports not being able to react to what’s happening in the market quickly.
I’m hoping that all of us together can, you know, supercharge the loyalty industry over the next five years.
Paula: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first of all, I mean, the Hertz example, I know we’re going to bring them onto Loyalty TV to to get, of course, the full story and the inside track in terms of their legacy program and platform but extraordinary to hear that something of that scale and with that level of, again, global customer base and member base managed to transition so seamlessly.
So the proof is in the pudding and I know for sure what I hear from people, you know, whether it’s on air or off air, Aneesh, a lot of the time what the industry would say is they’re really worried that even if they do, you know, like, and believe whoever is chosen, you know, as the successful vendor after an RFP. You know, it’s always a concern. Like, is that really going to be our experience as a brand when we go to execute? So you’ve just obviously delivered on exactly that with Hertz. So a great client, a great brand. You must be super proud.
Aneesh: Yep. You know, I think it’s been an interesting last four or five years. You know, we’ve, the number of Fortune, we now have 16 Fortune 200 customers. I think three years ago we had two or three, you know, so it’s been we’re adding one a quarter almost. So it’s been good. You know, the other thing we’ve seen is a lot of large logos. I don’t want to name name, name the customers again, wanting to do a POC first.
I’m basically saying, look, I think how much is this real, right? How much is this whole API first you know, microservices architecture, ability to make small changes very quickly. You know, can we play with the tool ourselves? You know, because, you know, when everyone tells a good story, right?
Paula: Exactly.
Aneesh: So it’s important to, you know, go under the hood, you know, open it up, see whether, you know, so we now actually have a full POC module where we give you postman scripts. We give you, we onboard you for a month. We give you APIs, which you can call, test out. You know, so, so then you’re a lot more sure that, yeah, I mean, you know, this is worth migrating, you know, this is worth making that investment you know, and yeah.
Paula: You know, I’ve never heard of that before. And I think what that does is actually, of course, it’s the ultimate tool in terms of building belief, because again, I know what we’ve all done again is, you know, talk to people who are, you know, proven clients but we all know as well that of course, the references that are given are, of course, always the best clients. So it’s a great step to go through, but there is nothing like getting under the hood, as you said. So I love that you’re able to do that and literally say, look, we’re putting our money where our mouth is. You get to use the tool directly and then there’s no surprises. So yeah, so, so I really liked that. I’ve never heard of that before. So that sounds like a very effective way to help people be reassured about the decisions they’re making.
Aneesh: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Paula: Great. Great. And tell us some of the other ones. Aneesh, you told me off air. I know there’s an airline and it’s not live yet, but I think you can share and announce exactly who that airline is because it’s unbelievable in terms of I hadn’t realized how big they were globally until you mentioned it. So do you want to share about the new airline client you guys are about to launch?
Aneesh: Yeah, no, I think you know, they’re also on our website and very hopefully we go live in the next month or two, again, it’s, I think from signing paperwork to going live is less than six months for a line of that size.
You know, you know, so it’s it’s IndiGo they hopefully go live in the next two months. For those of you who don’t know, IndiGo is the largest airline in India. They have, I think the 60 percent plus market share today in the airline industry in India, they fly a hundred million passengers every year actually and they’ve doubled in the last two years last three years. And I think they’ll double again in the next five, you know, so it’s, they have this very nice punchline, which is India by IndiGo, which is so true because they’ve connected just so many small towns, all these small places with the metros that suddenly you see India is flying, right? So it’s a it’s just a very nice feeling when you see people of all classes of all of various parts of India just suddenly flying, right. So it’s makes me feel good. Right. So, yeah.
And then now the sixth largest, when we started speaking to them, which was probably a year and a half ago you know, they were the eighth largest airline in the world. They’re the sixth largest airline in the world now in terms of number of passengers. They are the first, third most valuable airline globally you know, behind I think Ryanair and Delta and you know, so, it’s a great brand, great people. Like quality of people they have is just amazing. So we’re looking to do some really cool stuff for them. There’s some very interesting unheard of features, which you will see when the program goes live, but look forward to it.
Paula: Okay. So we definitely need them on Loyalty TV as well, Aneesh. That sounds amazing.
Aneesh: Yep. Yep. Once they go live, I’ll try and see if we can get Neetan or Kaushik to come.
Paula: Amazing.
Aneesh: Have a chat.
Paula: Well, you know, it does make me laugh that, you know, there’s this extraordinary business. As you said, a hundred million passengers a year. I had no idea they were that big. I’ve never flown with them. Of course, I think there is increasingly around the world, everybody realizes that India, I think is already now the most populous country on the planet. Am I right? Or is it still just tying with China? I’m not sure.
Aneesh: I think we just went ahead of China last year, but you know, that’s hopefully it will be a, you know, a country with great demographics in terms of just you know, quality of life as well.
Paula: Indeed. Yes.
Aneesh: And so not just the population, but but again, Indigo is is 17 years old as a business. You know, it’s amazing that in 17 years, they’ve gone from going to a hundred million passengers, right?
Paula: Wow.
Aneesh: So it’s a good company, just great talent and very well run business. Probably the best we’ve seen. s
Paula: Wow. Brilliant. And of course, again, you did have them on stage at your Captivate conference back in April of this year, but I’d love you just to touch on your other, I suppose, incredible client, which, you know, our audience may or may not know the name of Tata Group, but again, another Indian conglomerate, which I know you guys have been very close to and obviously doing exceptional work for. Would you mind just giving us an overview of that as well? Because just the scale of their loyalty activities, it just blows my mind.
Aneesh: Yeah, no, I think conglomerates is again, for is a large part of Asia, right? Whether you look at the Al Futtaim in the Middle East, or whether you look at folks like the Tatas or the Birlas in India. Or you look at Masan right in Vietnam and these are all customers of ours. You know, we see a lot of play there of saying, look, it’s the same consumer. They come in to buy from a Tata brand or from a Al Futtaim brand or from a Masan. Can we treat them as one across the entire group? Can we give them benefits across the end group? Right. So, so the Blue program in the Middle East, the Tata new program in India, my son’s program in Vietnam is is launching on us as well.
And each of these companies probably have, you know, 30, 40 percent of the the households in each of these markets as probably more 50-60 percent of the households in each of these markets as customers, right? So, so with the data, it’s again you saw them speak at the event as well. So it’s one program across the hundred billion dollar revenue group.
So right from Starbucks to, you know, Air India to Taj for Dallas to, you know, their Apple formats to their jewelry formats to you know, all the businesses that you can talk about, right? So they now on back of that program, they now launched a credit card with the country’s largest private sector bank, HDFC. And in one year, they have more credit cards than American Express has had in 20 years in India. It’s just the scale of that. So, so today that program, the Tata’s is it’s 117 million members on the program. It’s, I don’t know, I think it’s about 10 million, something, this is less than 10 million transactions a day. So it’s serious scale. It’s one program across and it’s amazing benefits, right? So you could kind of, on everywhere, burn anywhere you want to they’ve also done a great job on personalizing you know, some of that.
So it’s yeah, I mean, when they signed us up about four, five years ago, you know, I think it was a monumental moment for us in Capillary and be very proud that, you know, with the complexity they have you know, I think we deliver a 99.99 percent uptime. And generally, it’s been a, it’s been a lot of learning for us, a lot of value added. So, yeah you know, we should actually have them you know, if you’re interested, I can connect them to.
Paula: A hundred percent. Yeah.
Aneesh: As complex a project as it can be, you know, just. So many, they have 30 public companies in India. So each of these businesses is an independent, large, multi billion dollar market cap public company.
Paula: My brain is just firing on all cylinders and he’s just thinking about that. And so please, of course, we’d love to have them on the show. 170 million members. Like I’ve often thought, even just for my own, you know, curiosity, like I’d love to just do a table of the biggest loyalty programs in the world because so many of us do loyalty research and we look maybe to the west or we look to to more, you know, considered mature markets. And then we hear these programs are running and I for one never knew until you brought them to the conference. So definitely let’s do an episode with them and each that’s absolutely an incredible story.
Brilliant. Brilliant. So listen, we’ve touched on an awful lot. For me, I suppose the key things that I’m hearing from you is I suppose the, on the B2B side in terms of our audience loyalty managers there is, I suppose, all of always a shared concern that you’re very keen, of course, to, to build in terms of the reassurance that the simplicity is finally available.
So even though, you know, integrations and changing platforms historically has been seen as long, complex and something that just couldn’t be imagined. It’s definitely something now the key message, I guess, is it can be done quickly, relatively easy with the proof of concept. So you know, to, I suppose start to move beyond those legacy concerns.
And I see your tagline there, you know, say goodbye to 80s loyalty. And again, with the best will in the world, like when I was running programs, which is probably 10 years ago now, I had all of these issues that you talked about in terms of, you know, going to the agency to build a promotion, going to them to get a report. And even then I remember thinking, this is bonkers, you know, there’s, there has to be a software that could do this. So, so I think there’s a lot going on the industry side.
So I’m very reassured that you’re, I suppose your focus is two things, I think, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but one, I hear the ambition to be the best loyalty technology in the world. And secondly, that you are really committed to helping loyalty managers do their job better, because if they’re successful, you’ll be successful.
Aneesh: Yep, absolutely. You know, so I think you know, I spoke about this, right? I think there’s a in general, if you talk to CXOs you know, they tell you that there’s a lot of promise on loyalty, but the performance is, you know, and when you dig deeper, it’s because, you know, if you want to personalize, you need to have 20 creatives.
You know, and that’s a lot of work, right? So, so that’s like a month added, right? So, so the question that we had was why can’t we use generative AI to kind of get you to those 20 creatives, you know, and we have a creative school pilot. I mean, just see what we’ve done with gen AI is we’ve picked up all of these use cases which are, where does the loyalty manager what are these small use cases? Which kind of slow down a loyalty manager, right? Creatives is one.
The second is just getting, reporting out, right? That how did my campaign do? Who should I run this campaign on? Things like that. Standard use cases. I’m not saying, you know, we are trying to eat into strategy or deep analytics. I still believe that, you know, we need a lot of art and loyalty. Right. So, but the basic use case is like, you know, customizing creatives, getting a reporting out, you know, you want to run a promotion. Can we make it as simple as typing in natural English? You know that this is what I want to run, and then it shows up, it configures, and then you just have to confirm saying, yeah, I’d configured it right.
So we still want to avoid the hallucination issues that you have with the eye, but and hence all our investments have been on the copilot side, right? Whether it’s a creative school pilot, whether it’s the data analytics copilot, whether it is the promotions copilot.
And finally, this whole use case of you know, customer service. Today for a customer service agent to understand why did some promotion apply? Why did something not apply? You know, and there’s we see that a lot, right? Customers calling and saying, look, I didn’t get my points. I didn’t get mine. You know, all of that. Right. So, so we’ve kind of, you know, it’s on our website as well.
So basically trying to apply some of this, the new advancements in Gen AI to make what would have probably taken a few days for the loyalty manager to be a few minutes.
Paula: Amazing.
Aneesh: And remove this dependency on saying, look, I have to constantly go out to get something done. Right. Can I do it in house? Can I do it on more than in house? Can I do it here and now? Right. Can I just like, you know, and I don’t think it would have been possible to for five years ago, but I think some of the changes in Genii, you know, all those videos are live, right? That you’ve seen we now have beta customers for it. And as some of our customers have seen some of that stuff, we actually had to go in and say, we are stopping any more betas, right? We stopping anymore. You know, we, so, so till the end of the year, we have a set of customers. Now we are you know, going deeper on the Gen AI stuff.
But yeah, I think the biggest gap between promise to performance is not, intent, is not good thoughts, it’s just the ability to execute, you know? And I think with Gen AI that changes significantly. So, I’m hoping, you know, the rest of the ecosystem is also as excited about applying Gen AI and making those investments. To get stuff done, right? Because it needs a it needs a much more nimbler architecture to be able to, you know, integrate for us, we could come up with some of this in barely a month or two, you know, because we are a microservices first architecture. It’s all API led. So, you know, so the teams could just call whatever API they wanted, you know, and get going.
You know, in fact, investing in, you know, moving some of this out of open AI and into our own private elements so that for a large enterprise, they don’t need to bother about, oh, is this any of this, is this going out of their estate? You know, some of that. So very excited about that. I do think, you know, we could you know, increase speed to delivery from months to at least days, if not hours, with some of this.
Paula: Well, honestly, I mean, I am convinced, Aneesh again, everybody is talking about AI, you know, constantly, and, you know, I tend to wonder, you know, is it real? Is it not? And for sure. I mean, the videos on your website, there’s four of them there. So for anyone listening, if you do want to see what’s possible with AI, I think that would be the absolute best use of five minutes of your time today, just to kind of see those demos, because again you know, compared to what I was doing when I was running programs and I know there’s a lot of that technology still around, so very inspiring to see it coming into our industry finally, in a way that obviously has a clear understanding of the pain points and, you know, as you said from promise to performance. Actually abused that term now a couple of times in each. So I’ve written that down. I think that’s something that we all need to focus on.
Aneesh: Yep. You know, and I’m hoping we can move the industry forward in that.
Paula: Totally. Totally. Listen, I don’t want to take too much more of your time, Aneesh. I know you have a busy day ahead, but it would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the future.
So, you’ve given us amazing insight in terms of what Capillary is working on and has been working on all of the success you’ve achieved and the incredible clients that you’ve already onboarded. But what’s next for the business? What are you looking forward to?
Aneesh: You know, I think we’ve been very blessed to have great folks working with us for many, many years, right?
So, in a company, which is about 700 people I mean, full time employees, we have over a hundred who’ve spent more than 10 years with us, right? So that’s and we’re a tech startup. People don’t last in tech for, the average lifetime in a startup is two years, right? So, and I think we’ve always had this collective ambition or collective vision to build the best loyalty company globally.
Right. In in, in our small niche build the best product, build the best company globally. And I do think if we want to continue playing on that you know, it’ll need, it’ll be important that we stay private or we stay, independent more than private right. We stay independent. I’ve generally just seen when large, you know, these mega vendors or these mega companies end up buying loyalty companies.
All of them have gone sidewards or downwards, right? It’s just very unfortunate. So, and I think it’s because loyalty is a different business, right? It is a niche. There is I mean, you know, you need software and good software to accelerate, but you need the human side to it. You need the services side to it. You need the strategy side to it. You need some smart thinking. Only software, I don’t think we’ll cut it right. And hence when, hence you need a slightly different kind of a mindset than the typical software buyers or the services buyer. So at least our goal Pallon Capital is to make it public in the next few years.
Because we think that’s the right way to build a loyalty business, you know, and rather than be part of a larger company or any of that, right? So, so we will hopefully list in the next a couple of years you know, and the company is profitable. We’re growing very well. You know, so we, some of those big boxes to you know, you know, you know, to go out and list it’ll be an India listing you know, so yeah that’s what’s in the future.
Otherwise in terms of just the product and and technology, we’re doubling down on AI, we’re doubling down on making the vertical specific sorry, making the product specific to verticals. Like, you know, do a oil and gas or a fuel stack, do a healthcare stack, do a you know, and the intent again, being how can we get you to market sooner, right?
As a loyalty manager, how can we, how can we try not to get you stuck in this two year, you know, migration or two year, you know, plan to get somewhere, right? So, and of course the third piece is just you know, the whole piece around integrations, extensibility making it easier for larger enterprise, right? So, lots happening, you know, it’s we’re more excited than we’ve ever been.
Paula: Yeah.
Aneesh: You know, and we done we done 16 next month, you know, and it still feels like, you know, we have another I actually feel like the a series A company, you know, which is just raised this is the humongous 140 million you know, but yeah, it’s interesting times.
Paula: It totally is. My God. Interesting, exciting, and expiring actually all of the above. So definitely with an IPO on your roadmap, I can imagine that’ll keep you incredibly busy. I think the important thing from our side as well is to say that what we’re, I suppose, committed to doing is of course, making sure that all of these incredible case studies that we’ve talked about on this show are available, particularly on an exclusive basis, free of charge on capillarytech.com.
So as a business, what we’ve realized is of course, we need to move Loyalty TV into a business. Page subscription model in order to be able to continue creating such content, but with your support we are absolutely able to make them available on a continuous basis, free of charge. And we’ll be sending all of our viewers directly over to your website, to a wonderful new section where all of these incredible interviews of Loyalty TV will be made available. So thank you for your support on that side.
Aneesh: Paula, thanks for allowing us to be a part of the, part of the ecosystem and part of the journey, right? So, no, I think you’ve done some incredible work and I think there’s lots of value. So totally understand the subscription site. I think you know, happy to have some of those videos on our site for you know, for loyalty managers and enthusiasts in the industry to get a quick access to.
Paula: Amazing. Yeah. I think what I’ve always loved with you guys is that shared purpose that we really want those loyalty managers to be able to do their jobs better. As you’ve said, there’s no shortage of brilliant people out there, super smart and just want to have all the latest insights and the latest news. So, together we’ll be delivering that going forward. So on that note, is there anything else that you want to mention Aneesh before we wrap up?
Aneesh: Oh, congrats again. Five years is a great milestone. I’m hoping you’re taking some time off and, you know, enjoying the, you know, and not doing the usual startup going from one thing to the next thing happened. So, yeah, and that’s again, I’m wishing you a great next 15, 20 years. Right.
Paula: Amazing. Thank you so much. So Aneesh Reddy, Founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies. Thank you so much from Let’s Talk Loyalty and Loyalty TV.
Aneesh: Thank you.
Paula: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Let’s Talk Loyalty. If you’d like us to send you the latest shows each week, simply sign up for the Let’s Talk Loyalty newsletter on letstalkloyalty.com and we’ll send our best episodes straight to your inbox. And don’t forget that you can follow Let’s Talk Loyalty on any of your favorite podcast platforms. And of course, we’d love for you to share your feedback and reviews. Thanks again for supporting the show.
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