Loraine Lawson
Good day and welcome to The Buzz, a Bank Automation News podcast. I’m Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson. I recently spoke with Adam Famularo (fam U Lar O), the new CEO of WorkFusion, which combines artificial intelligence with robotic processing automation and machine learning. We discussed how data and machine learning relate to RPA bots, as well as what the company will do with its recent 220 million dollar cash infusion.One thing, I noticed that you had worked at a company that specialized in meta data and data. Yes, that’s a, you know, a challenge for banks managing data, they have a lot of data that they don’t know how to use really well. So I wondered if you saw updates for synergies between work fusions bots and data analytics.

Adam Famularo
I did. It’s actually one of the reasons that I’m here. When I ran in built Erwin, which was a data governance software company, our number one company that we sold to were financial services. Number two is healthcare. And then insurance followed right after. So those were our top three, normally very heavy regulated industries that were challenged with things like GDPR and CCPA. And being able to govern the data flows in their enterprise. And when we would do that one of the first steps in, in understanding your data is understanding the business processes that supported the data. And we had a tool that documented and captured all of your business processes. And, you know, is very complimentary that big companies would say, Well, hey, now that we’ve, we’ve captured and we understand all these business processes, well, how do we now automate these so that, you know, we can get, you know, kind of savings on on these these business processes, but that was never, you know, our bailiwick, so we would always kind of refer them over to other RPA vendors. So that’s what got me familiar with the industries I was working in data and data governance, the close tie to rpa, was really around to business processes and how they supported your data flows in your enterprise. And, and how to automate them after you understand, you know, where they are and how they’re being used, which is what we did it early on.

Loraine Lawson
Ah, makes sense. Yeah. So what do you see bringing from that job into this job?

Adam Famularo
Well, outside of, you know, relationships, which I have plenty of in the financial services industry, it’s bringing that acumen of the understanding of where banks are in their evolution of really understanding from where their data is to how it’s being used to the business processes that have been used to support them specifically for that industry, to now being able to overlay this brilliant workfusion technology, to be able to now automate those processes to save them millions and millions of dollars. That’s, that’s a very nice, logical flow. For me.

Loraine Lawson
It sounds like you’re experienced in financial services, that the main thing that caused Workfusion to want to bring you on board, are they hoping to expand in financial?

Adam Famularo
it, it was one of them. Also, I have deep roots in channels and partnerships. And I think that they’ve also, you know, realized that partnerships need to play a big foundation in this going at it alone is never a good recipe, especially when you’re you’re you’re selling and servicing customers with big complex challenges, that making sure that we have deeper richer integrations with other ISDS as well as you know, building out joint solutions with system integrators is going to play a big part of our future. So being able to bring partnerships into the equation, plus my experience with financial services is a nice mix that made it a nice a nice landing spot for me.

Loraine Lawson
I’m trying to remember the Gartner report, but again, so it’s financial services. How big is that for Workfusion? Is that for you? They focus or where they want to enter or …

Adam Famularo
It is a focal point of ours, but we do have other providers from insurance to healthcare to manufacturing, we do have other providers, but we’re going very deep in financial services. Because of the we’re getting specific in the use case, around stuff like know your customer, and understanding your documents and your document processing. So we want to get really deep there so that we can then take and use that use cases in other industries, as well.

Loraine Lawson
So what does that mean to get really deep? Does that mean you, you support it in very specific ways? Or?

Adam Famularo
Yeah, the deeper you go, meaning, how far you you’re integrated into the systems that financial services providers use, how much you actually know, and can speak their language and their processes, because their processes are very different from from industry to industry. And then it’s building specific, purposeful bots that can satisfy automating those specific, those specific processes. So that’s, that’s why we’re going deep into financial services. And we have dozens and dozens of customers there today that are very successful using our software. So I still have, I still have to learn which ones I can reference. So I’m going to be careful not to start throwing around names in Irwin, I was able to throw around names left, right and center. On week three, so I’ve met, I’ve met a dozen companies, and I can tell you, the dozen I’ve met every single one of them has saved millions of dollars using our software. And as soon as I know, you know which companies I can reference, I will I’ll share those names and speak up.

Loraine Lawson
So does that mean that you might be having pre- packaged bots, that there would be you know, instead of someone has to develop their own, but for know, your own customer process, you just might offer that pre made?

Adam Famularo
you got it pre packaged bots ready to go with the expertise associated with doing the delivery and implementation as well. So, you know, we’ve almost automated that function for ourselves and for our customers, by using our own software. So we’re, we can go out there not only provide you purposeful software to help you automate faster, but we also have the delivery expertise as well.

Loraine Lawson
So you already offer sort of pre made bots, or that’s something you plan to do?

Adam Famularo
We already have those today for financial services.

Loraine Lawson
Okay. So what technology is on the forefront of innovation, that you’re keeping your eye on?

Adam Famularo
Woof, I will the cornerstone for what sets us apart from the competition is machine learning. Right. So our machine learning technology was derived in an MIT lab, you know, almost 10 years ago. But to this day, you know, it’s continuously enhancing it. And that’s what’s continuously sets us apart from the competition. So we have to make sure that we continue to evolve and develop and invest in brilliant data scientists that continue to make our algorithm that much smarter than everybody else’s technology. So to me that will continue to be at the forefront of everything that we do.

Loraine Lawson
What does that give you – what can you do with the ML?

Adam Famularo
Well, what it does is, in this specific in this specific use cases that we serve, it’s all about being able to have higher accuracy rates. So where you’re 95% accurate, while we’re always taking into consideration human loop as well, where humans can intervene and be able to provide their assessments as well. But at the same time, the smarter we are, the more cost savings that we will provide for our customers, because they’ll need less resources on these manual tasks.

Loraine Lawson
You’ve talked a little bit about it, but are there specific ways in which you plan to expand right off the bat that you know of, and goals you’ve said or products you want to see?

Adam Famularo
Yeah, so I look, I’m here to grow and grow fast. I have I’ve got plenty of cash and capital behind me. And I’ve got plenty of people that you know, I can bring up to scale this business to grow at a very fast pace. So for me right now I’m focusing in on go to market. I’m focusing in on building and developing partnerships, I’m focusing on on hiring and attracting talent that can help me kind of manage the book of business thing for that book of business while we continue to invest in the technology, right? So we spend, you know, the lion’s share of our dollars today on continue to enhance and continues to set ourselves apart from a technology standpoint. So that’s, that’s what we’re doing.

Loraine Lawson
Oh, you recently got what was it? $220 million. Yeah. That’s quite an infusion. Do you have specific plans for that? Or did the company have specific plans for that.

Adam Famularo
And so as I said, it’s, it’s all about go to market. So it’s you always have to balance, right? Because we want to, we’re continuing to invest in technology, we’re investing a lot in cloud, that’s going to be kind of, of course, our next evolution for our customers, we already today can deliver and manage services, we already today can help them install in their own local cloud. But our next instantiation is going to be us really providing a total SaaS based solution out into the marketplace, where customers can use specific use cases, they can, you know, get the power of a network of people behind them to help go to market even faster, and even increase the speed of the total cost of ownership. So that’s the investment from a technology standpoint, and then everything else needs to go into into sales and marketing.

Loraine Lawson
So are you primarily on-premise now is that …

Adam Famularo
We are on premise, but we also deliver as a managed service. And we also deliver in any one of our customers, cloud infrastructures, financial services companies know they, for the most part, they want it behind their firewall, and then it’s a choice on how they want us to manage it with them thereafter. So that’s available today. The future is really how we deliver this as more of a SaaS based model. Right? Which is a true more of a true cloud-based model.

Loraine Lawson
You’ve been listening to the Buzz, a Bank Automation News podcast. Thank you for your time and be sure to visit us at BankAutomationNews.com for more automation news. You can also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Please don’t hesitate to rate this podcast on your podcast platform of choice.