If you’re involved in finance, into fintech, have an ERP (on-premise or cloud) that is tedious to use, or are looking to make savings and improve efficiencies, you may be dealing with a few ‘Pains in Your SaaS’. If the answer is yes to one or more of these, the following article on what Kalev Kalamäe had to say—in the first of our ‘To Be Sysynkt’ series of chats—is a must-read.
Q1: Hello Kalev—Sysynkt was officially founded in 2020 but you’ve been developing Sysynkt since 2016 - can you tell us a bit about your background and what started you on this journey?
A: It’s really something that was gestating for a decade; I'm a techy person by nature so when I landed my first accounting role out of university and had to use Sun, I naturally looked for ways to make all the tedious processes easier. I built some fun little apps using macros and VBA that did niche jobs for us, but they were quite basic. David Shahinian at Forpoint introduced me to the world of companion products, which is where I really cut my teeth with the Sun ecosystem, it was a truly fun and worthwhile time, but maybe because I was younger than your typical consultant I started to ask why there wasn’t much innovation, particularly when I saw clients doing the same, tedious processes that I used to have to do. All along I was expecting that products and software would evolve, but they never did, so one day I sat down and started building a solution—Sysynkt was born.
Q2: You mentioned you were frustrated—what from your experience would you say are your top three pains in your SaaS?
A: I certainly was frustrated—here’s why:
- We’ve seen a host of existing players launch “cloud” versions of their products over the years in a mad run to “tick that box” but there’s been a few common themes and pains that have ultimately meant that the whole experience has been less than ideal. Probably the most painful part is that the traditional player’s cloud offerings are simply just “ports”, simple web-enabled versions that ultimately just are the existing products with a new coat of paint. There’s been no innovation and the architecture is not fit for the 2020’s. All this means that the typical, modern user in a finance office expects modern speed and features that we get with all our other day-to-day apps, and that’s just lacking.
- Cost is also a big pain point, and that means a lot of things. With SaaS you don’t need to worry about infrastructure, maintaining servers or even the electricity! When it comes to patching and maintenance, SaaS does away with the need to schedule consultants to run patch updates—that’s if you can find a consultant that has any availability—with SaaS customers get immediate services and support. Put it this way: why is it that a 7 year-old kid can update all the apps on their phone with the click of a button, but finance systems need so many resources just to run on the latest version of Windows?
- Innovation – or the lack of it – is probably my final pain point. The world is moving rapidly, and technology is changing all the time. In the SaaS world, we can tackle this head-on by building systems from the ground up in such a way that we can embrace new technologies, trends, and practices and importantly deliver them to customers immediately. This cannot be said of the traditional players who are typically on a much slower cadence, often constrained by design decisions made for their software decades ago, before the internet was a thing!
Q3: It’s been estimated that a company with 1,000+ employees has between 150 to over 250 business process apps—of all the business process solutions on the market today —what makes Sysynkt different?
A: The number of business process apps companies have is unmanageable and unnecessary, especially in the Sun market where users must jump from app to app to app to do basic functions. Sysynkt gets rid of the need for so many separate single-function apps into a unified workspace, where modules and communicate with each other. The fact that we’re [Sysynkt] born in the cloud—true cloud—means that we can rapidly deploy to customers while also quickly respond to issues. And obviously the whole re-invented environment by its very nature is geared to embrace new technologies immediately.
Q4: I’ve heard you say that no company should be excluded from the advantages digital transformation can bring—what do you mean by this and what are you and #teamSysynkt doing to make a difference?
A: This is really important to me. Our unlimited-user and volume-based pricing model opens up opportunities that were otherwise prohibitively expensive, especially in the NFP and SME space. I remember one horror story of a customer who could only afford licences for half their staff, so they started sharing logins, meaning that the whole point of control and audit was lost. With Sysynkt we want the question of users licences removed completely; why should someone have to fork out some huge amount for a licence for an employee who only lodges one or two expense claims a year? I like to think that we are democratising cloud finance systems by offering access to everyone at a fair price that reflects a customer’s actual usage.
Q5: You mentioned AI—well Generative AI—tell us more about it and the enigma that is Audrey…
A: Our AI-Assisted Document Recognition Engine—or Audrey to her friend is fun, I like her a lot.
She’s lots of things. When people throw around words like “Machine Learning”, “AI” and “OCR” typically they don’t know what it really means and how it’s actually used. Audrey is the recognition that there are lots of models and approaches that can lead to desired outcomes, because no two companies operate in the same way. Audry leverages the broader strengths of massive AI models to intelligently recognise documents before applying more nuanced customer-specific actions.
Q6: Open banking—can you tell us a bit more - is it secure and safe to use? How do you make sure Sysynkt helps to protect your customers' data?
A: Most of us are using Open Banking already in our day-to-day lives when we are paying bills or splitting dinner at a restaurant. The advantages of Open Banking are twofold—first is that it’s entirely API, so there's no need for file transfers, FTPs, and other clunky—and insecure banking—it’s consent-based, meaning that you're in complete control of the data; everything happens at the bank itself, Sysynkt never sees your credentials, but the consent means that we do the heavy lifting for you.
The best part is that if a new bank started tomorrow, you’d have access to it in Sysynkt tomorrow. No software updates, no file formats, it will just be there ready to go.
Because Open Banking is still new, there’s a lot still to be implemented. Watch this space, particularly when it comes to things like Open Utilities, Open Billing and Variable Recurring Payments.
Q7: SaaS is one of the most important technologies in business success—what’s your prediction for tech developments in 2024—what excites you about Sysynkt’s plans/roadmap?
A: We’ve got a lot in our roadmap that I could talk about, but if I had to say what excites me the most it would be Passkeys. Yes, something as simple as logging in isn’t typically very exciting, but the adoption of Passkeys to me represents the industry-wide effort to secure people’s data and identity in a simple but secure way. If someone isn’t offering Passkeys as an authentication method in their applications by the end of 2024, then it will be a real indicator of how serious they are about security and innovation as a whole.
Q8: You talk about super-charging SunSystems - in no more than three sentences, how do you do this and can Sysynkt bring the same benefits to other ERP systems?
A: We make Sun fun again.
No, truly, we take pain out of the every-day processes that finance teams across the world are having to deal with when they could be spending time on more critical, value-add tasks. I hope people can see that Sysynkt is something written by Sun users, for Sun users. The fact that we’re true cloud and a new player means we are doing things differently, the days of “same old” are gone.
Q9: It’s a tough market for all businesses at the moment—and many tech startups are vying for funding. Why won’t Sysynkt be another flash in the pan?
A: We are different and here are four reasons why:
- We’ve been developing, testing and refining Sysynkt since 2016—plus it is a true-cloud system not a ‘port’ as I explained above in Qu2.
- We are not competing for the limited VC investments—we have a backer and mentor who not only believes in Sysynkt as a whole but brings his decades of business experience to help us grow in a sustainable way. We see this as a major competitive advantage!
- We’ve already got real-life customers with increasing daily transactions and a super healthy pipeline.
- Last but not least, we have attracted not only a bunch of talented Sysynkters but also incredible consultants and partners… and as far as the number of SaaS providers—there may very well be a shakeout but the indispensable ones that truly add value—like Sysynkt ;) won’t go anywhere.
Q10: When you’re not at Sysynkt, coding or travelling how do you like to spend your free time?
A: Ha, what’s free time? I hung up my rugby boots last year after being lucky enough to play alongside some great people; that was a really important activity for me over the last decade but now I'm using the extra time to enjoy local live music events or facetiming my nieces and nephews.
Got a pain in your SaaS? Want to know more about Sysynkt? We’re all ears and ready to help—send us an email and we’ll take it from there hello@sysynkt.com