How a Single Professional Identity Framework can Empower your Business

Recently our CEO Dima discussed our Single Professional Identity solution with UC Today reporter Kieran Devlin 

Watch it here: 

Below please find some highlights of their conversation. 

Hello and welcome to UC Today. My name is Kieran, and for this session, I am delighted to be joined by Dima Gutzeit, founder and CEO at LeapXpert. Today, we are discussing how a single professional identity framework can empower your business. Dima, thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Kieran. 

Before we dive into the topic itself, can you please tell us a bit about yourself and the work you do with LeapXpert, and the origin of the business? 

Sure. My name is Dima Gutzeit. I’m the founder and CEO of LeapXpert. We are in this business since 2017. My background and our core team background is enterprise communication. We’ve been doing this for 20 plus years, each one of us. Then around 2017, 2019, we started seeing gaps in the way communications was being done with our focus on external communication. Company employees, towards external parties, clients, and so on. So big gap. We started working on it. In 2019, we released our first product in the market. And since then, we’re only growing and addressing more and more aspects of this gap we’re looking to plug, which we call Responsible Business Communication.  

Perfect. And before we dive into the meat of the topic itself, I’d like to pick your brain and leverage your expertise with the broader environment we’re finding ourselves in. 2023 has been such a crazy year in the UC and collaboration space with the introduction of AI and machine learning technologies. And it feels that post-pandemic, there is a real sophistication and refinement of technologies that were introduced the last couple of years. Looking toward 2024 and beyond, what comes to mind as the major communication challenges faced by enterprises? 

Yeah. So let me bring this question more to the ground when it comes to compliance, and that’s what we do. Compliance, communication between enterprises and the clients. If you look back a few years, we started with a very big problem in the messaging space.  

People were using WhatsApp, iMessage, and so on in a non-compliant way, which resulted in up to date 2.2 Billion USD in fines in the US alone. And this problem is now expanding globally. So we see Europe picking up, and Asia as well. 

So for a few years, it was indeed a messaging problem. And indeed, our buyers or our customers were looking at it separately. Messaging concerns and voice concerns. And what resulted is this disconnect.  

So on one hand, company employees had voice call recording handled, maybe by some local vendors in some geographies. And then the messaging part was done by us. And then what we saw in 2022, 2023, was a shift. It’s no longer a messaging compliance and voice compliance question. Now it has morphed into mobile communication compliance. And even the buyer persona at our customers changed, no longer looking from messaging and voice perspective, but looking at it as a whole. 

And that’s exactly the shift we’ve seen, and that’s what led us to this innovation we are talking about today, which we call a single professional identity. 

That’s a perfect segue into my next question. How would you define a single professional identity? And how would you see it impacting the enterprise side as this new feature of the LeapXpert platform? 

For the longest time, this space was really convoluted. People who wanted to communicate responsibly with the clients, they had to settle for less. They had to maybe have one phone number for voice calls, that’s sometimes recorded, sometimes not. Another phone number, maybe for WhatsApp communication, maybe another phone number for SMS, if at all it was allowed by the enterprises.  

With a Single Professional Identity, we’re completely shifting the paradigm. What we are able to deliver is a single phone number, single mobile phone number, anywhere in the world. 

On top of this phone number, people can use any communication medium they need. Voice call, SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, WeChat, it really depends where you are.  

But the point is that we are able to provide, to meet the needs of global financial institutions first, and also any large enterprise, law firm, and so on, no matter where they are. So as a result, company employees have a single phone number. They can communicate without being afraid because by default, everything is recorded for compliance and archiving needs. And so that’s on one hand – a single phone number. Clients are happy because clients can use any messenger, any communication channel they really need, knowing this single phone number. 

And of course, on the other hand, the enterprises who adopt our solutions are happy as well, because, all of a sudden, they can enable any communication channel. They can stop worrying about multiple phone numbers or multiple ways to reach the wealth advisor or the lawyer on the other hand. And they can rest assured that all the compliance needs, regulatory requirements are met. 

Perfect. I was actually just… The next question was about that side of things on the compliance side. What would you say are the implications for data retention, for security, for the control side in regulated industries and beyond with SPI? 

Absolutely. All those concerns are fundamentally addressed already by the greater LeapXpert Communication Platform. So we’ve been created to play in this space. It’s security, of course, but security is not a feature. Security is given. Second, compliance. Any communication that flows through any communication channel enabled by this single professional identity is recorded. And any message you send or receive, any file you send or receive, and now also every voice call you make and receive, it’s all recorded if the enterprise wants.  

I have one more thing to emphasize: For us to be able to offer this SPI solution, we had to add voice capabilities in addition to messaging that we’re offering. And luckily, my background and our core team background is in voice.  

So we were lucky to assemble a strong voice team. And over the past two years, we’ve been working really, really hard on voice strategy that enables, that underpins our SPI strategy, single professional identity. It requires partnerships with many big vendors all around the world to enable mobile connectivity. I believe that what we deliver is the first innovation in the voice over IP space in the last 20 years.  

Because our platform supports SIM, e-SIM, supports fixed mobile convergence, the ability to deliver land-line calls to mobile and so on. It’s also supported by voice over IP and companion apps that help company employees to be more compliant in general. It’s a very big thing for us, and I think for the industry as well. 

Now, just on that topic of how holistic and interoperable a lot of its functionality is, how compatible is this feature with third parties, especially Microsoft Teams? 

Yes. So our bread and butter is a federation in integrations. So our solution is open architecture, which allows us to integrate with anybody, really. For this, we have all the required components of a voice network and messaging network, which are using all the standards in the industry. We also built in into the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. We have a very close relationship with Microsoft that we’re nurturing for many years. We are deeply integrated in Microsoft Teams ecosystem when it comes to messaging and voice calls. So for example, if you’re an enterprise and you’re already using Teams telephony, you can simply extend your already existing voice capabilities of Microsoft Teams, and to be able to message with the same phone number over any communication channels your clients need. Whatsapp, iMessage, SMS. So very deep integration. 

Fantastic. And I guess one final question before I let you go, Dima, is SPI is out now. By the time viewers are watching this, it will be available. It will be formally rolled out. Do you guys have any plans in mind for the future? What is the roadmap for SPI now?

Absolutely. Before we talk about the future, a little bit about the past. We spent two years developing this solution and its already a soft launched by a few of our close customers and partners for almost a year. It’s a proven solution with different customers that we are announcing today. 

When it comes to the future, we’ve spent many years enabling connectivity, enabling responsible connectivity, messaging, voice and other communication mediums that people need. And it echos back to your introduction to the call that 2023 was all about AI space – so we are definitely looking into it. We are looking at what sense we can make from all the data that we are enabling through the single professional identity.  

We enable communication, we capture all the different channels – what’s next?  

Yeah, it sounds great. I image there will be so many different capabilities and functionalities that AI can enhance the feature. I think thats all we’ve got time for today. But its been a really enjoyable session. So thank you to Dima for being here today