Celebrus and Consumer Data Privacy – Bill Bruno, D4t4 Solutions Plc

This is texturung TV. Hi everyone. Welcome back to techstrug TV.

I'm really happy to have as my guest for this next segment Bill Bruno bill is the CEO of D4 T4 Solutions and Bill. Welcome to Tech strong TV. How are you?

I'm doing great Alan. Thanks for having me excited to be here. We're happy to have you on so hey Bill, I'm going to be before we jump in to D4 T4 and other things we want to talk about today.

I want you know, I always like to have our audience kind of get to know who the person is on the other side here. So I see a whole bunch of stuff on the wall behind you. Let's start with that.

Yeah, that's the stuff that my wife tells me needs to stay in my office, but I collect a bunch of vintage action figures. So Batman wrestling Ninja Turtles all kinds of stuff but been doing it been doing it for years. And yeah, it's a passion hobby of mine.

Very cool. Where do you get most of your way, you know different. Sorry from there.

You know, it. It depends. I've got some stuff from all over the world stuff from Mexico Japan some stuff that I used to have as a kid back in the 80s and 90s that I've rebought just for Nostalgia purposes.

So it's sure kind of all over the place conventions just random eBay is a big source of that sure. There's a new version of eBay called whatnot. That's quite quite nice.

They're not sponsoring me right now, but you know, there's some there's a free plug for whatnot and it's a really good place to get stuff too. Excellent event. All right, besides action figures what else they'll give us a little of the bill Bruno's story.

Yes, I think yeah from a business perspective right out of college started my career and and what at the time was called Web analytics and is now built into just a large, you know data and Technology industry, but help found a consulting firm right out of school focused on helping clients and Brands be better with data and how to build better data to build better experiences with their consumers. So that's always been a passion of mine and that's carried through I sold that company to a different uk-based company back in 2013 and then spent about six years with with them for kind of building their analytics and data science practices and then eventually found my way to d4t for which I actually you know, our celebrates platform, which is our predominant software technology that we sell today around the globe. It's deployed in 27 different countries today is actually a platform that I've worked with for over 20 years starting in my Consulting career.

So it's a platform. I'm very passionate about and at the end of the day, you know, we're holistically Focused on building better relationships between Brands and consumers and doing that through better data, whether that's helping from a marketing perspective and helping build experiences. When you interact with Brands, you know helping you find what you're looking for helping you do whatever it is you're there to do that day on that device or whether that's on the fraud side, which is basically just focused around protecting your money and making sure that it's actually you making that purchase and you know things of that nature.

Absolutely, you know, I've been seeing more and more. Of things of stuff like that on the web in terms of helping consumers. You know try to avoid being the next victim.

Yeah, right. And and some of it is I think just like cya like the bank saying hey before you sell this person their money make sure it's really them because once we do it you're done. You know, you got you gotta love that error message you get now though that laundry list on zel.

It's like if you take this box, it's your fault right involved of everything. but I mean and so that's one example, but I think there's better examples where a lot of the Like I'll get transactions that get flagged and I immediately get that text message right, press one. If it's good to if it's not stuff like that and you know and look whatever algorithms they're using.

They're usually Dead on. Right. I mean I I agree some of those look a little sketchy to me too.

I'm not buying action figures on what what well, right, that's a whole nother thing, right? I got to ask Bill D4 T4. What's it stand for?

Yeah, so not everybody that's listening to this might remember this but but you and I will I think Alan remember when he used to write words on pagers back in the day. Yeah, so thank you this. Okay.

Yeah if I'm gonna if if I'm admit to it so or so are you right but think of the fours as A's and that was you know, this this predates me but it's d4t for just spells data and that's and that's why that's what this company has been about from the beginning. I mean the company has been around for over 30 years or publicly traded out of the UK. We've got offices in the US in the UK and India and Australia, I'm based just outside of Chicago and you know, so we're Global business delivering software technology that tries to to fix all the data problems that businesses have, you know, trying to use traditional Technologies to capture data today is really difficult particularly given the fact that we all have, you know, three four five different devices that we connect to different brands on or interact with brands on.

It's not easy. So you need better technology to do that. And that's what our celebrities platform is focused on.

Not many of us use be present anymore, though. I think because I was thinking like day four I was like, okay. No, we have day two but I didn't realize that day for but you know, sometimes I get sometimes I use the joke that we're just Star Wars fans and it's like R2D2.

But yeah that could be you for Interesting stuff. So you mentioned celebrus it might pronouncing it, right? Yeah, you are nailed it.

Yeah, perfect. Let's let's kind of Define that for the audience if we can't. Sure.

So yeah celebrates has been around as a platform for over 20 years and it's obviously evolved as the internet has evolved and as digitals of all right, but at the end of the day our clients are using data from celibrous to facilitate hundreds of use cases around the globe. And so what the platform does in the core sort of elements of the platform is around digital data collection and and digital identity verification. For individuals Journeys across web mobile apps kiosks think of ATMs Etc.

So anywhere where your digitally interacting with a brand whether it's a bank a hotel a retailer Healthcare organization doesn't matter, you know, our software can run in the background can simplify data collection by not requiring tagging not requiring all kinds of heavy lifting can build you a digital data set and data model that makes sense that actually allows you to use Digital Data in a meaningful way, which over the course of my entire career has always been a challenge for organizations and then ultimately solves the digital identity Gap and and you know, whether you're looking at the states and this will kind of date when we're recording this right but as of this morning, you know, Indiana just passed their Privacy Law for Digital Data so that now brings the state count to seven you've got gdpr throughout Europe. You've got versions of that all over the globe as I mentioned. We're in 27 different.

Countries today and so for organizations that want to still capture data and Journeys and interactions from consumers across their their websites their mobile apps Etc and want to do it in a compliant way and want to stop wasting money doing it the old fashioned way with tagging and all kinds of other, you know, custom code and things like that and are struggling with things like apples intelligent tracking prevention and the death of third-party cookies and all of that element then celebrus is the solution you've been looking for that you probably didn't know existed and that's that's what we're solving for clients on a daily basis. fantastic How far like how? Does you know companies say hey this sounds like something I might not want to do.

Yeah, we make it really of course good you make it really easy to use. So it's the pricing is very straightforward. It's it's just based on how much data we're capturing and how many systems were connecting to we are a true first-party system what I mean by that just to dig down out of the buzzwords is clients and own and and control the install of celebre.

So you don't send data to us you install celebrus in your own private cloud or in in a hosted option single tenant that we can offer for you, but you own it you control it. It's within your domain and it's a it's an annualized license in essence. So it's extremely straightforward and we we offer a lot of land and expand options.

So if you have a specific use case or a specific pain point we'll sell you the part of the platform that does that so you can prove the value and then you can consider all the different add-ons and modules that we have across the platform. We try to make it as easy as possible and honestly Alan I think that just comes from my Open background. I always hated when vendors hid fees or didn't explain things or said here's your year one discount.

Then you're using the application all of a sudden now the price goes up 3x like nobody. Nobody wants to be. In that position right can't stand that approach.

So we're extremely transparent about our fees and how it's structured because we want it. We want to be a much better vendor partner than perhaps some of our competition ends up being at the end of the day. agreed customer by Ambush.

So Bill, you know we mentioned seven states here in the US now have their own. Yeah data privacy Rags. This is of course gdpr and then there's the new one coming and you Oh, I forgot the name of it.

But it's the same name you anymore devops? Yeah. Dora yeah, the Ora yep doors coming out of the EU and then this talk.

I mean I won't hold my breath but this talk of a US wide data privacy Rags coming out of Congress. Yep. Who knows but I mean certainly it's a it's a Rat's Nest one might say of or maze or a you know, it's a complex.

That's a web. We weave here with data privacy. Yeah.

But it's not simple. Hey, just you celebrus will we could make all that go away for you? It does doesn't it it almost sounds like black magic.

But but yeah, you know, what a magical. Yeah, I mean for us it's it's second nature, right? I was I was in a meeting.

I always reference this but it was about six months ago. Now where we presented to a Chief privacy officer at a organization. We were selling into and he pulled me aside afterwards and said, you know, we're the first data collection platform and contextualization platform that he's ever seen that put Security in privacy first, we built our compliance capabilities in the platform to sort of adhere to user preferences and give Brands the ability to pick and choose what they collect and when well before gdpr was even put into law, right?

We saw the writing on the wall. We've done a lot of work historically in financial services insurance and Healthcare which naturally are much more strict when it comes to where the data goes and how it's used and three of the top 10 Global Banks. Edit our control capabilities years ago, and we've just enhanced it from then so when you look at the compliance challenges in the states, and I agree with you, there should be something National Nationwide because it's it's really unfair to Brands to try to keep up with.

State level mandates and where people are located and versus having just sort of a global way of of addressing consumer privacy. But whether when at that in today's day and age, you have to have a platform that can build standards and practices at the state level in the US and that's what we do. Yep.

you see Well, I got to ask this question. Excuse me for asking it, but it What role did Will AI you think play into this? Yeah, that's a Pretty interesting topic these days it it is an unbelievably popular topic especially right now, right?

You know, where where they were AI now seems to be moving much faster than any compliance standard can possibly keep up with and again for those of us that like myself that grew up in the 80s. We saw what happens, you know skynets created Arnold Schwarzenegger has to try to save the world those types of things. Naturally.

You don't know to do it again, you know, it's just unfair we've asked him to do so much but you know, I think you know what we're AI really comes in in my opinion and and we've done it in our own products. So we've built a lot of machine learning a lot of the ability to import models and decisioning Technologies into celebrate in the moment. And so it's kind of a double-edged sword.

I think AI offers an incredible amount of value and everybody needs to be looking at it because at the end of the day, you're trying to predict consumer Behavior, you're trying to deliver a positive exper. It's there's a lot of opportunity to speed that up and make it more automated. But then on the flip side of that particularly in digital particularly when it comes to fraud prevention and and even with offers that you might be presenting somebody from a marketing perspective.

There's a bias that that comes into data sets that people aren't aware of. And so there's you know, the topic that in my opinion needs to be elevated even more so than it has been is around ethical AI because if you're going to sort of set these things and and you're going to let them run there has to be checks and balances because there are natural biases in our data sets. There's natural biases in you know, what we're feeding these platforms and AI is only as good as the data that it has and people seem to forget that at times and I think that it's kind of running away from us a little bit if I'm being honest.

I I don't disagree with you. I mean and some recent headlines I think bad that out as well. Hey Bill, we're almost at a time, but for people who want to get started.

Here would give him a good on-ramp. Yeah, so, you know we are we are always happy to have conversations. You know, we're this isn't a I suppose this isn't a complement at the end of the day, but we sort of consider ourselves as the the best data collection platform out there that nobody knows about I suppose that's why I'm a secret.

Yeah. Nobody wants to be that one. You're selling software, right?

That's why they brought me in as CEO. That's why we've made the changes. We've been making to be louder and to become a household name.

But you know if you were if you're interested in come reach out to me directly. I'm at Bill Bruno on on pretty much every single platform. com.

You can find us on Twitter sellers Tech so reach out we'll connect you with somebody. We're always happy to share our story. We're happy to demo the platform for you on your website.

We've got some really really cool things that I think people would be interested in seeing because chances are you got a data problem a digital identity problem or you're tired of trying to make Digital Data work with other systems. We're probably the solution you need you just Know it. I love it.

com. Can you it's c e l e b r u s nailed it calm. All right, man.

He built. Thanks for being our guest today our Tech strong TV. Keep up the great work.

Keep collecting your figures come back on soon and talk to us again. Okay. Thanks Alan.

Really appreciate it. It's been a great time. All right, Bill.

Take care. Excuse me. It's still Bruno CEO of D4 T4.

com here on Tech strong TV. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.