Amidst the dynamic landscape of the Web Summit Qatar, Dr. Gang Lu engaged in a thought-provoking interview with Bill Deng, the Founder and CEO of XTransfer with the theme “AI at the helm: accelerate B2B growth in 2024”.
In this summary, we encapsulate the key insights and highlights from their discussion. For those eager to delve deeper, watch the full video interview below to provide an immersive exploration into the future of AI-led business acceleration.
Panel Insights Summarize
Dr. Gang Lu: When we talk about cross-border B2B e-commerce, there should be lots of changes before the pandemic or after the pandemic. So can you show us what change you saw in the past? Tell us what’s changed right now.
Bill Deng: In B2B, the trade tack is happening anywhere after the pandemic. The regulators are introducing technology platforms. So everybody is introducing the digital solution. But still, for B2B, it’s so scattered, that we don’t see a comprehensive digital platform that aggregates everything. Just like, everyone is talking about the platform the B2B version of Amazon will appear. But it is still missing right now.
Dr. Gang Lu: On the payment side, what is the difference between B2B and B2C?
Bill Deng: B2C payment from all the platforms like Visa, master card, or Paypal, payment companies have been playing dominating roles in B2C payment but for B2B there are banks traditionally. Actually, like underground money services, they kind of became mainstream in some countries. So on top of banks, we don’t see payment companies or payment platforms playing a very important role, unlike B2C…So we create an AI-driven infrastructure to deal with all these AML challenges facing importers or exporters.
By leveraging AI technology, we can not only help fight against the underground banking system, which enables banks to serve SMEs easily, but also offer streamlined processes and enhance compliance measures within our platform. It’s a triple-win situation.
Dr. Gang Lu: Talking about the adoption of AI. As you said, now XTransfer is using AI to help customers open the bank. How do you see extract for maybe the next five to ten years by AI technology? What’s the perfect solution for the customer?
Bill Deng: We believe AI would change every corner of this business operation so we are monitoring the breaking point of AI. It could replace human beings, to replace manual work. We believe this could happen. So we are keeping sensitive about the change. We’re flexible and ready to introduce all these solutions that are ready to provide their value to our platform.
Dr. Gang Lu: I’m sure now lots of customers come from China, you’re helping the Chinese to go overseas to sell products overseas. Do you have any plans to help global clients to sell stuff anywhere in the world?
Bill Deng: XTransfer serves importers and exporters around the world and it makes the supply chain in global trade much easier.
Dr. Gang Lu: How do you see as a founder to build an international company
Bill Deng: Regulation could be very complicated in cross-border trade. But we still believe this is the right strategy to go with. I think there are just two things to do: dare to do, dare to go globally. The second thing is we must adapt to cautiously implement everything.
Dr. Gang Lu: How do you see the trends in the future like transporter e-commerce?
Bill Deng: E-commerce is happening in the B2C area but we believe that eventually it will be brought into B2B. All these technology-digitized solutions are so scattered but eventually, they will be linked together.
Dr. Gang Lu: What’s your opinion of OpenAI for startups? Is it good to adopt OpenAI or deal with something on their own?
Bill Deng: On the one hand, we are utilizing the large language model but we will not only use the OpenAI solution. On the other hand, we are trying our model. It’s a small language model that focuses on trade settlement-related topics.