Corebridge was originally a company sitting in France with a piece of funky telephony data integration software that had not been taken out of the Paris metro district. The (current) CEO is a bit of an entrepreneur whom I met when he was based in Hong Kong in 2002. He returned to the UK and set up a company to take Asian software to Europe and European software to Asia. During the course of his travels, he was introduced to Corebridge; when he saw the application he thought ôthis is my futureö. We put a plan into action, raised some private equity and to cut a long story short, took control of the company in September 2003.
What was CorebridgeÆs existing model and what changed as a result of the buyout?
The company had an existing user base of 6,000 users in France and zero outside of France. We restructured the company, transferring the ownership into Hong Kong. We initially brought in investors from Singapore, Hong Kong, the US, Canada, the UK, Dubai and Bahrain and subsequently attracted institutional capital from Hong Kong and Singapore.
To date we have raised approximately $8 million and further funds have been committed by our lead investors to facilitate our expansion plans into the US market. We now have fully operational offices with sales and support capabilities in London, Paris and Hong Kong, and partners in Singapore, Jakarta and Bahrain. Our global headquarters has moved to the UK along with customer support and administrative functions. R&D remains in Paris.
In the telephony space, what are you offering to clients in Asia and globally?
Most enterprises have a myriad of applications and databases that are not in any way connected to their communication infrastructure. In simple terms this means that when we make or receive a telephone call, our applications, customer data files etc. do not react to the call.
Employees have to manually retrieve customer files and data wasting precious time and impacting customer service quality. Corebridge is a middleware that connects to the telephone systems and company applications and databases including e-mail, CRMs, ERP systems, etc.
This allows customer information and files to be immediately accessed upon initiating or receiving a call. The result is a huge increase in staff productivity and more focused and informed customer service. Corebridge also offers a unique mobility solution allowing out of office staff to route all calls through their desktop phone allowing mobile calls to be logged (for compliance purposes), recorded (if a recording system is in place), and to be made at least-cost-routing-landline rates as opposed to mobile IDD rates.
WeÆve constructed a number of value propositions across industry verticals, the first of which is for investment banking. The key three deliverables of the solution are increased employee productivity, enhanced customer service and mobility. Capabilities of the application, including rapid directory search, click-to-dial, detailed call logs, intelligent call routing and CRM integration are features which have proved attractive to investment banking clients.
For example, parameters can be set that capture the importance of a given customer (ie they may have an internal rating from A to F). We can set a rule that if a grade A customer calls in, a person within a given team is notified by a screen pop-up to make sure the call is prioritised. By adding a queuing system, we can make sure that grade A customers go straight to the top of the queue - they can even be routed to the correct dealer based on incoming call identification.
Identifying and routing calls from important customers in this way can save a broker more in one trade than the actual system would cost to implement. We are effectively taking æcall centreÆ type functionality and applying it to the enterprise desktop.
How does the relationship with IPC work and through this relationship, what are you undertaking at CLSA?
We have an exclusive partnership with IPC, who are the worldÆs largest dealerboard manufacturer. IPC have approximately 60% of the global dealerboard market and in Asia, between 40-45% of the market.
The initial introduction to IPC came from CLSA, which selected Corebridge in early 2005 as its preferred unified communications solution provider. IPC, BT Syntegra and Etrali, which collectively control 95% of the global dealerboard market, were invited to bid for CLSAÆs dealerboard business.
The three companies looked closely at us because CLSA wanted its new dealerboard environment to work with Corebridge. IPC saw an opportunity to further differentiate its offering from the competition by partnering with Corebridge and offering cutting edge computer telephony integration (ôCTIö) capabilities to its dealing room clients.
Corebridge is now installed at CLSA both for its normal telephone (PBX) users and on its IPC dealerboards. The dealerboard installation is quite recent and exists only on a few test machines while the PBX installation is in the process of being rolled out to business users after having been vigorously tested by the IT department. The Corebridge solution is integrated with CLSAÆs in-house CRM, which is now CTI-enabled.
How does Corebridge benefit from the relationship with IPC?
The reason we liked IPC is not only because it is the market leader that can take us into major accounts, but also because it is a visionary company looking to constantly improve its offerings and stay ahead of the competition. When IPC takes us into a customer, Corebridge is automatically validated despite being a relatively new name because IPC is a well respected vendor, which can attest to the significant technical due diligence that was conducted by its US technical team before the partnership agreement was signed.
IPC and Corebridge are now conducting joint development in order to expand the number of client platforms that we can operate across. Dealerboards usually sit outside the corporate LAN while Corebridge ideally sits inside the LAN in order to synchronise with applications and data.
Because many dealing rooms have strict firewall policies it can be a challenge to communicate from inside the LAN to the dealerboard. It is worth pointing out that these security issues do not arise outside of the dealing room where staff use normal telephones.
We are able to deploy Corebridge into back office, corporate finance, private banking etc today without any security-related concerns. It is only in highly secure firewalled dealing rooms that we have an issue.
How does Corebridge plan to operate around such restrictions?
We have a two pronged approach to resolve these restrictions. The first development is called a JAVA Interface which allows us to communicate between the LAN and the dealerboard using the port through which the Internet is transmitted. Most investment banks have this port open. We have already discussed this with our partners and potential customers and they have confirmed that this development will meet their security requirements. The JAVA development should be ready in the third quarter of this year. Once this is live we will be in a position to approach any investment bank dealing room and offer full Corebridge functionality.
Another development in process is called SIP (Session Initiated Protocol). SIP is the global telephony standard of the future and all the major players including IPC, Cisco and 3Com are developing their SIP platforms. If youÆve ever used Skype then youÆve already used SIP! However for most companies SIP is not a major commercial reality at the moment; maybe only 1-2% of new telephony switches globally are SIP-enabled. However, if you move a few years forward this number is likely be 60-70%. We expect our SIP platform to be up and running by the first quarter of 2007.
Once IPC have completed their SIP dealerboard most new sales will be of SIP-enabled models. However we still see the market for older dealerboards running on the current standard lasting at least another 10 years. The JAVA development therefore has significant commercial potential and we expect to be selling our JAVA solution alongside the SIP solution for a number of years to come.
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