Hanging out with CEOs At Collider and Digital Shoreditch Festival

Jeroen Vanderhaeghen, CEO of Hyghlyne "The blurry pic was an intentional aesthetic choice!" -Ashok

This week, my diary was filled with many events and had quite a talk with many different CEOs. I also had a great experience at  Colliders’ MadTech forum recently and thought this was a really fascinating area of London’s tech scene and a sector where London has a great competitive advantage. Last Friday, at the Digital Shoreditch Festival, I got to sit down with Jeroen Vanderhaeghen.   Jeroen is a former management consultant and he and his team set have been using their insight gained from the industry into producing the next generation mobile technology platform. They founded their company, Hyghlyne in Belgium but  have recently moved to London to take their business to the next level.

I wanted to learn more about the business problems that they are aiming to solve, and their new solutions.   In their view, customers now expect a holistic experience through the discovery, shopping and experience journey. For millennials, in particular, delivering a great product in a brick and mortar shop is no longer enough– they need a post-purchase experience.   Hyghlyne technology, via a mobile device, aims to allow brands to do this in a seamless way. They see a costly fracture for brands in using a plethora of platforms, devices and channels to achieve these goals.  The powerful insight for me, was that if you are spending money on a customers’ discovery, their shopping experience and finally their experience and you don’t tie it all together, you are giving part of the house away for free.

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Many of the MadTech companies are providing a technology solution. It’s crucial for the B2B purchaser of the product to be in a position to enable the technology. If you are a brand or store and don’t know your customers well and have lost your way in speaking to them or have no idea what your customer experience is, even with the best technologies in the world you are still dead in the water.  So MadTech offers all kinds of new ways to reach your customer, for all you brand strategists or CMOs who understand their demographic,  MadTech is just another tool in your arsenal and your job is still safe.

By Ashok Parekh, Director of Investment Services