Regum, Fintech That Grows Sky High

With the solution Avaya IP Office PoweredBy, Regum has made a giant leap in quality to rival the large financial companies it competes with. Though quite new, Regum’s managers have put in a great deal of experience into the company. It also enables to expand operations to other territories with an agile, versatile, efficient and economical system.

A Leader Because of Tight Client Relationships

Financial Services Boutique

Created in 2016, Regum is a financial technology company that focuses on two major business angles. The first is training and education of people who want to increase their financial literacy through courses, talks and seminars. The second is managing different investment products, from the most traditional, such as stocks and bonds, to more sophisticated ones such as cryptocurrencies and financial derivatives. All of these lend Regum a financial services boutique character which covers any client investment need.

With 15 years in financial markets, the Fintech firm is led by Rodolfo Grela, CEO and Director together with his partner, Diego Rivero. “We started out with four people providing financial education at our Montevideo office, and in 2017, we spread to the investment products segment to channel the needs of our clients. In 2018, we opened our first office outside Uruguay, in Santiago, Chile, and in January 2020, we will open our third branch in Lima, Peru," says Grela.

Overcoming Break-Even

According to the specialist, the regional framework was quite favorable to developing the financial market, and there was an eager public for investment options. In a little over two years, more than 500 students have graduated from the stock trading and finance courses taught at Uruguay's main offices. In Chile, on the other hand, there are already more than a hundred. “In the area of channeling alternative and traditional investment products, we are close to a thousand clients. We work mainly with financial products listed on the stock exchange, where the main reference is the United States. At the same time we offer their derivatives, and are market leaders in alternative investment products. Our growth rate is 15 to 20 percent per year, both in revenue and new clients," he says.

Today the two offices have 25 employees, and by the middle of 2017 the firm had managed to overcome its break-even point. Since then, Regum has been generating revenue on a sustained basis. "Our main strength is our close client relationship. We invest in the face-to-face sales model, giving support 24 hours per day, five days per week so that the client always has a person they can ask questions, clear up doubts or consult. The client sees us as a partner and not so much as someone who wants to sell them a financial product”, explains Grela.

Dialog Between Technologies

Rodolfo Grela says they had a communication team gauged to cover contact with clients on a local scale. “To support the company's international growth, we needed a scalable communication solution that would allow us to interconnect several offices, an agile virtual PBX to reduce the server and data center space, ensure information backup, take it out of local servers, mount it in the cloud and improve the cloud log.

“An important point for us was to reuse the hardware we already had, that the solution could dialog with our IP phones, cut costs, reduce hardware investment and make monthly license payments to avoid a large outlay on technology," he adds.

They came into contact with CloudMasters and Avaya, and chose them because they gave them scalability, support, quality assurance and the PBX properly located in the cloud. The solution they were presented with included Avaya IP Office PoweredBy, Avaya CPaaS (or Zang) and Avaya Equinox, the installation of some gateways and IP telephones; the firewalls we had were able to dialog with this solution," he explains.

The digital transformation process was relatively fast. In October they set up Uruguay, and in November they connected Chile.“CloudMasters first ordered our emails, domains and the G suite, providing us with cloud storage and then migrated to the communication solution. Montevideo and Santiago are interconnected in a single PBX and work as a single business unit," he admits.

New Offices Without Effort

Dialog Window

More than 20 internal telephones were connected to the new Avaya PBX. Now, communication is immediate, the calls are high quality and they allow them to dialog more accurately. “The solution includes recording our telephone logs in order to listen to and back up sales and communications with clients," said the interviewee.

“In addition, we are developing the integration of the Avaya PBX with our Salesforce operating system. This is so the executive can dial directly from their computer and automatically opens a dialog window to generate the interaction they maintain with the potential client".

To get an idea of the improvements, he says that though it is a holiday at one of the branches, all clients are given support from the other office transparently, “without a hitch, which does not generate an expense of international calls," he assures.

“We have the peace of mind that our PBX can add 10 or 12 more telephones to its flow without a problem. What’s more, with the scalability of Avaya products, it is not only possible for us to open offices in any part of the continent but in any country in the world, without great effort. Through the investment in a Gateway, some IP phones and a firewall, we would already have the office set up from a communications point of view; it's just a matter of emulating what we already have replicated in Montevideo and Santiago".

The Next Challenge

This new communication is also appreciated by its customers, because the response times have been reduced. "Before, clients had complaints because they couldn't communicate, and we missed some calls in the direct inward system access relatively often. We've stopped missing calls, and the incoming call channel is much more optimized.

According to Rodolfo Grela, they have a solution that can continue to grow. "The next challenge will be to integrate our WhatsApp channel to the PBX; we are now integrating it with CRM. What’s important is that the flow of communication is unified. Avaya allows us to scale according to market needs. That's why we hired a friendly and agile cloud solution that doesn't work like conventional PBXs that at some point, run out of capacity. We are in a process of full expansion as a company. For us, it is key for contact options to widen increasingly to maintain easily flowing contact with clients".

The CEO points out that CloudMasters represents a strategic partner, because they delegate all incidences to the partner. "Our company is 100% dependent on the stability of the communications system. The business partner’s fast response times allow us to operate and dedicate ourselves exclusively to our business itself without worrying about the other aspects".

To wrap up, Rodolfo Grela holds: "There are companies that have made much larger investments than ours in communication systems, and there is no substantial difference between how they and we communicate at the regional level”.