Equalizing Supply Chains for Impact
In this episode we speak with Catherine Nomura, President and Founder of Kountable. Kountable is focused on solving the world's distribution problem by integrating people, products, profit and purpose. She is also the co-author of The Laws of Lifetime Growth.
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Imperfect Show Notes
While these notes are not perfect (computer transcription is still a work in progress), they give you the gist of the conversation. Enjoy!
My conversation with Catherine Nomura:
Morgan Bailey 0:02
Hello, and welcome to the profit meets impact Podcast where we explore the intersection of doing well and doing good in the world. I'm your host, Morgan Bailey. And I'm excited to bring you the wisdom of entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are using business to create sustainable and meaningful change across the globe. Today, we are jumping into a conversation with Catherine Nomura. She is the president and founder of Kountable, a company focused on solving the world's distribution problems by integrating people products, profit and purpose. She's also the co-author of the laws of lifetime growth. Catherine, I've really been looking forward to this conversation, we had our initial call, and we had so much synergy. So it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Catherine Nomura 0:52
Thank you. Likewise, I am very excited to to continue the conversation.
Morgan Bailey 0:58
So you do some amazing work with Kountable. And I learned a lot just learning about the organization. But I know there's so much behind it in terms of your experience. I'm kind of curious, like, what are the life experiences that led you to the work that you do today? And like, what are some of those paradigm shifts have guided this perspective that you have?
Catherine Nomura 1:16
Sure, well, it's, you know, it's funny, because it's been quite a circuitous route, which I think is not that unusual with entrepreneurs who get started running their first real business as late in life as I did. You know, this was it was in my mid 40s, when when, when Kountable came into being and really I realized at that time that I'd kind of been thinking about these things and moving towards this for probably 30 years. And it started with being just really interested in business when I was a kid, even though I was more of an artsy kid, I was the artist on this on the student council, who designed all the things but my dad was was quite a successful businessman. And, and he used to take me to events. And I actually really loved kind of the activity of being in a room and networking and all the relationships around it, and understanding how how things happen behind the scenes. And so even as like a 12 year old or 15 year old, I was already sort of a little fascinated by it. But I didn't really think it was cool. And I didn't really think that was what I was going to do with my life. I thought I was going to be an animator. And I was on that path. And then it's life events took me on a trip to Borneo, which almost sounds made up because this was very exotic sort of pattern interrupt in my life where I ended up there with with my family and visiting tribes in the rainforest there and met some people who really changed my perspective on they made me want to think about different things as a nomadic tribe that was in the process of not very successfully integrating like this is looking back with 2020 hindsight, but not really being able to join the modern world very well. As a nomadic tribe, they depended on the rain forest, which was being mined and logged as, as it is. And that was very hard on them and their lifestyle, but I kind of fell in love with them as a people. And I got very interested, really passionate actually about how this kind of situation could be different. And so I came back to Toronto where I was living at the time and everything sort of dull in comparison to what I had just experienced. And I decided to do a little more instead of moving ahead. And there was sort of a natural break point in my career with the the company that I was working with, sort of shutting down. So I had an opportunity to go back to school. And I actually went and studied entrepreneurship. Well, I went and studied international development. But at that time in the world, the one success story in international development in the early 1990s, was actually an entrepreneurship and it was through it was through microfinance, which that was the time at which the Grameen Bank had sort of burst onto the world scene and sort of been around for some time. But people were starting to realize that this was a real success story. And microfinance throughout the world was starting to catch on and there are many different versions of it cropping up. And it was it was being successful in lots of different places in lots of different forms. So I started studying that and looking at that as what what I was looking for is how can how can people actually determine their own path, you know, join the modern economy on their own terms. And that's, it's a challenging question, you know, because if you've grown up in a world where everybody gets a job, you have to have this around this structure around you. If that doesn't exist, how do you? How do you find your place in the world and bring the unique value that you have to the world. And I realized that entrepreneurship was a path for that. And that was, you know, interestingly that the very first replicate of the Grameen Bank and you know, people might be familiar with Muhammad Yunus who won the Nobel Prize for, for being the innovator in that space. But the first replicate of Grameen Bank was actually in Malaysia, and it was in Malaysian Borneo right had this first realization. So it there was a sort of a sweet, kind of full circle effect when I got to go back and live there and work with that NGO, which at that time was 10 years into its life very successful had over 40,000, all women, business owner clients who were receiving loans, some of whom, who had had tremendous success, I mean, gone from selling toiletries, off the back of a moped to running a store that was able to put two of their children through university in Australia and Japan, I mean, a really, really remarkable shift in quality of life and economic, you know, really remarkable economic success stories, but also, they were creating things that their communities needed, which was exactly sort of the reason why I had become so interested in this, they were doing it very much on their own terms. And I was so impressed by that, you know, when I got, I got to dig down into how this organization worked, I was doing a consulting project with them. So I got to visit all of the states in Peninsular Malaysia where they were not born, yo actually, unfortunately, on that trip, but all the states and see and sleep on the floors of of these women who were customers and learn what their lives were like, and how this organization had affected them. And, you know, the real sort of love that they had for it also. And that, that made me come back very humbled. Partly because I realized, I kind of went there with the idea that I might help them, which you know, as a consultant, you hope you can help them create value, but I got so much more from that experience than I felt like I was able to give them wow, yeah, that
Morgan Bailey 7:27
sounds Yeah, I'm just appreciating so much about your journey, right? I mean, this, especially like this, this younger version of you is very interested in business and like how things work and behind the scenes, I can see that, you know, and then you take this trip and you know, in Borneo, and, you know, the, the thing that you really stuck with me is like that, you know, from that came out of that experience, you know, how can people like enter into this, like, this economy on their own terms, right. And then seeing that, and then, you know, through microfinance, seeing that as the opportunity because I imagine you were at a crossroads, right? You're like, wow, like there, there's so much that you could do based on his experiences. And something, you know, perhaps it was that that that moment of microfinance that you're like, Okay, well, business is the lever here. But I'm kind of curious to hear a little bit more about like, how did you decide that business was a lever that you want to pull as opposed to like going directly into nonprofit or charities or things like that.
Catherine Nomura 8:22
You know, as I started studying, I was incredibly lucky, because there was an organization in Toronto, that I think our bakery actually but they, they decided as a as a, as a passion project to amass the world's most comprehensive library on microfinance institutions. So I was able to study every microfinance institution in the world, from this little room, basically, that just had everything I learned how to read and Portuguese and Spanish, it's really quite an adventure to deep dive down a rabbit hole, but But I realized that you know, these are very practical problems that are being solved. And it's, it's sort of like one, one borrower at a time, one transaction at a time. And it's not a theoretical kind of thing. So being in school and studying this, that when you do it, I did a master's degree and the natural path is to do a PhD. And the choice that you're talking about, where it was really clear to me that I was making that choice that I had a choice to make was that I realized, if I do PhD, I'm going to study this problem. But I'm not going to roll up my sleeves and get in there unnecessarily help to solve it. And that's what I really wanted to do. So I did an MBA instead. And I went and that's how I actually got to go and work with a monitor Malaysia I realized that this is a almost a business operations set of problems. It's not an things that were happening at the large theoretical level and those you know, the World Bank, the IMF Those were the not. So the things, the stories that were coming out around what was actually happening with some of their programs at that time. We're not, you know, it's like, this is all about stats. But if you really look at what's happening on the ground, it's not what you think it is, it looks good on paper. And that was being revealed at the same time as I was seeing this tremendous success in microfinance. So, you know, if you get it, this is business, and it's very practical. And the idea that Muhammad Yunus had was a very practical, business driven kind of idea, despite the fact that he was an economist, it was about this intervention into individual business, how do we make this work as a type of business model, essentially. And that's it. So besides the fact that it was entrepreneurship itself, which obviously, you need to understand business, and I needed to increase my understanding of business tremendously as much as I'd grown up, you know, with someone who worked in a sort of a medium sized business, but I knew very little about what it really meant to be an entrepreneur, I could stand aside and watch these people and be in awe of what they had accomplished. But the day to day of being an entrepreneur, I still feel like even in this last 10 years, I've learned so much about what that actually is and what it really means to build and grow business.
Morgan Bailey 11:18
Wow. And so I'm curious how many I mean, talking about the business piece? Yeah. So in maybe talking about some of the early experiences, that particular experiences that led you into creating Kountable, I'm very, very curious and accountable works with with supply chain, it works with wholesalers, it kind of works at about a systematic level. How did you identify that is a challenge that needs to be addressed?
Catherine Nomura 11:46
I think we, you know, the short version of that is we did it the way that I think anybody who finds a cheap business opportunity does, which we talked to the people about the problem. And we didn't know what they were going to say to us when we did but I said the way that cannibal came about for me was that I ended up after, after that time working with microfinance institutions and my education, I went to work for a very successful coaching organization called strategic coach and I worked with them for 20 years. And I brought some of, I had the opportunity to take some of their tools back into some low and middle income countries and do some side projects. But that was not their focus, their focus is working with sort of like the top, maybe 2% of entrepreneurs income wise in the world. But in the course of that, I got to meet a lot of entrepreneurs. And one of the projects that we did, through a client of ours who really wanted to do this, partly, I think, as a way to give back also just he just fell in love with Rwanda, and wanted to do a version of the strategic coaches coaching program in Rwanda. So I ended up as the only person in the organization with experience and development was very natural for me to be a part of developing that program, I got to know the entrepreneurs that we worked with over there quite well. And they become became like a focus group. And a lot of entrepreneurs that I knew from that community ended up going over there and you know, doing business, with Ronda, with the Rwandan entrepreneurs in various ways. But I met a client in the Strategic Coach program, and he had an idea to turn social capital into financial capital. And we talked about it over a few months. Turns out, he lives in where I live now. So it was easy for us to get together for coffee, the idea kept evolving and evolving, and to the point where the only next step really was to go try it out on some actual entrepreneurs and see if they would actually go for this. And he had never been to a developing country at that point. So it was it. So I offered him the opportunity to go to Rwanda and test it with this group. And eight days later, we were on a plane. And when we got there, you know, I felt like I had to go with them, because I didn't want to throw them over that without any experience, you know, such short notice no time to really prepare. So we went together. And, you know, not only were they very interested in the idea of turning their network, which I think, you know, I think every entrepreneur understands that they're now covered, because valuable, but it doesn't usually translate into, into credit worthiness. And we're seeing more of that now. But you don't, it's hard to turn that network into a financial asset. There are easy ways to do that, even though it may be one of the greatest assets you have in your business. So they were very fascinated by this idea and said, Yes, we would absolutely love to do that. But then we kind of went into the backroom back office of one of the entrepreneurs and he brought in people who weren't even in this program, but lots of entrepreneurs that he knew, to tell us what their real problems were. This is what we really need help with. And they brought these contracts. X. And they showed us they showed us contracts that they had one but couldn't execute contracts that they had one but lost lots of money on. And they, they they went after them because they wanted to do business with that customer, it was usually a really high profile customer seemed like a great opportunity. But then when it came down to actually getting the good and these were all these were all contracts involve buying things and selling them. So reseller type contracts, sometimes they would be doing some manufacturing, or some kidding of the things, but generally they were buying something from a supplier and then selling it to a customer. And, you know, we had no idea and I had been I had spent all this time I have a master's degree. And I have two master's degrees actually and an MBA where I studied entrepreneurship in low and middle income countries. And I was a good student. And I had never come across this problem or understood the extent of how the inability of of the small businesses to get this job done could affect much larger projects and much larger goals. And it just showed up in what they showed us because they were so open and honest with us about what they were really going through and their challenges. And that was such a huge gift. I mean, it's it's rare, they were very vulnerable with us, really, they were telling us about how they were failing. So that was a tremendous gift. But that was that was where the kernel of the idea came from, because we realized that we could help them and went back and started pulling together experts from trade finance, from from the world of finance with my co founder is from the world of wealth management, and understands finance well, from technology, you know, and people who would never get to stand in the shoes of those entrepreneurs in that situation. So they would just never see the problem from that perspective. But bringing together those knowledge sets, and that problem set was like alchemy.
Morgan Bailey 17:08
Wow. It's fascinating to me, too. I mean, we're, you know, started going over there to do some form of coaching program. And what you walk away with is very different. And I think that's a testament to you listening to like what's really there, right? Not necessarily your agenda, like, Hey, this is what I think the problem is, but somebody saying, hey, look, this is what we're dealing with, which would sounds like was not on your radar at all?
Catherine Nomura 17:32
No, it wasn't. And it was, again, I mean, I think treating that kind of thing as a gift is it goes against the idea of being too focused on a goal, you don't want to be too focused on trying to sell something, what we were really there to do is to learn to propose something and just get feedback. What do you think of this idea?
Morgan Bailey 17:52
So to dig into the problem a little bit more, right? Because I mean, me as many other listeners like, well, things are bought and sold every day, right? Like, what were the issues. And you know, I've traveled around the world, and you don't always get exactly what you want. But like, you know, things, you know, things, you know, come things go. So, you know, what, where's that challenge? Like? What what are people not seeing that's happening underneath the hood that countable is trying to address?
Catherine Nomura 18:20
Sure. You know, I think I think what they're not seeing, and I think we all had a bit of an experience of this during COVID. So I think people can see it more now at least you understand the pain that you can go through when supply chains are broken. And what all these challenges add up to this really broken supply chains for a lot of different kinds of products. And so when you go to, you know, low and middle income countries and things are not available there the natural, the natural place, at least, you know, my friend went there too, as a even as someone who had studied development economics is that is because they're poor. They don't have the money to buy everything. So of course you can't get everything here. We learned that that is very much not the case that it's not that in fact, they overpay by staggering amounts. And you know, this is even more astonishing when you consider that quite often this money is coming from donors and you know, so it's money that you really want to be used efficiently. But the way that the way that it works out from a supply chain perspective, and they're they're really good reasons why small businesses, small business local suppliers are involved in the procurement process. Sometimes it's anti corruption in a lot of places the government for instance, everyone needs to put out lady to put these contracts out to tender or to bid so that there aren't big payoffs involved and they aren't allowed to direct buy off From or even to specify a certain supplier. And that's it to prevent corruption, that's not going to change. And then also local suppliers often have skill sets that are necessary to both determine what the right products are for very local conditions. And also to do after sale service and, and sort of awareness even of what's available in the world. Because if you think about just the sheer number of products that are available, and the level of innovation that's going on, many, even you know, here in the US buyers don't always have all that knowledge, they need experts in those areas to help them understand what to buy. So those are often smaller businesses, but those businesses are very under resourced, when it comes to actually making the purchases for those goods. And they have to finance usually the period of time between when they buy the goods from the supplier, and when they get paid by the by the buyer. And if it's being shipped, you know, globally somehow that can be that can be you know, 180 days is a small business buying, say, you know, enough COVID tests, for instance, for a whole country or, or malaria test for a whole country, which would be an example in Rwanda that we actually did, that, that can be a very significant amount of money that they have to find someone, you know, to prove up to provide and their balance sheet.
Morgan Bailey 21:32
Yeah, and so this money, in essence, so that's like, you know, if, if I'm a, if I'm one of these individuals, right, I bid on a contract to say, Hey, I'm gonna get all these test kits, I'm going to provide them to the country. And they're like, great, and it sounds like, you know, they're not going to get paid until they get the test kits, but they can't get the test kits unless they have the money. Because then they're, they're just stuck in the middle. And because they don't have a level of credibility or credit, and they're small, they kind of they, they're kind of lost in the mix.
Catherine Nomura 22:04
Exactly. I mean, banks really can't serve them, because the risk is too high. And these are short periods of time. So if you think about, like, this could be, you know, a deal like that could be could be a million dollars for, and that's a lot for a small business, with without collateral. And they're doing probably trying to do lots of these transactions. So even if they did have collateral, they have to, they have to buy all the things that they need to. So there's a ceiling on how much they can manage.
Morgan Bailey 22:33
When I'm sitting with his wells, when you think about that, I mean, these might be small amounts of money, when you think about, you know, large, large economies like the US like a million dollars for some, you know, let's say some medical supplies in the US, it's not going to buy a whole lot, right. But you know, when you think about serving, you know, more emerging markets like that money can go a lot further, that money can have a much bigger impact. And I imagine that it also really makes it difficult to for these countries to scale. Right or to to adapt and respond to challenges to global changes to pandemics.
Catherine Nomura 23:06
Absolutely. You know, I mean, it particularly if you think about all the competition that was going on, even around PPE and things, you know, the large buyers in the US who were placing these huge orders who were had the power to push themselves to the front of the line with a supplier, even, small, small world, even not even small countries, but any country that requires that to be done through a tender. So it's a small and medium enterprise that's actually winning the contract that has to buy the goods. Now how can one of those local medical suppliers compete against the government of Michigan, it's just not it. That was a very big problem at the beginning of COVID. They were completely locked out regardless of whether they could even pay for it or not, that wasn't even the biggest problem they just don't have the clout, surely because of their size.
Morgan Bailey 23:57
So then Alright, so then one of these one of these buyers has a contract, they need the funds, they have a supplier but you know they need the down payment for it. So how does tell me talk to me about how Campbell comes in and what can a hold of
Catherine Nomura 24:12
Kountable is able to digitize all this business to start with and it was a part of the reason why it's so hard for funders is they have no information when it none of this is nefarious. Nobody's trying to in fact, in fact, the banking world has been trying. I've worked for banks in the in the early 90s, who were trying to solve the problem with SME lending. It's a huge it's a multi trillion dollar problem that's measured every year and very little progress. It's been steady and it's actually grown even during COVID. It jumped up to almost twice what it had been sitting out for years. And these are transactions that are not getting done transactions that have been initiated presented to a bank somehow and rejected so that's not even measuring the whole problem. But banks are not set up To be able to do this because it structurally, these organizations don't have collateral. And the amount of the cost wondering here's where we get into profit as well being a part of this is it's not profitable for them to underwrite such a short term, you can't make that much interest on a transaction that's maybe 180 days long, maybe much shorter than that maybe only 90 days. But you think about the amount of work that goes into it, the large amount of money that's being requested the amount of risk given that there's no visibility really, but who this and giving money to an entrepreneurial business, which got entrepreneurs out there, you know, if you get a check in, you're going to use it for whatever you need to use it for, you're not necessarily going to reserve that money and trading doesn't all happen, the disbursement of those funds isn't all upfront, so a portion of it will go to pay for this for the actual materials. And then you have to pay logistics providers and customs clearance agency, you have to often pay for insurance and other so there's other payments along the way that are required to get those goods from A to B. So the money needs to be there, when those payments need to be made, it's still not going to happen. So what Kountable has been able to do is to digitize the whole process so that we can see all those stages, we can see how the money needs to move, we can see how the goods move. And we can all of this is laid out in the basic paperwork that that is available right at the beginning of one of these transactions and contracts or purchase orders, you can actually lay out what a transaction looks like from end to end. And that allows us to bring institutional capital into into these transactions to turn them into an asset that can sit in a portfolio so that a funder doesn't have to fund just one trade, which is obviously much higher risk than a whole portfolio of them. And really, what we're doing is creating an account receivable, so a situation where at the end, the job is done. And there's a payment from one of these big, you know, that's a government or it's a large corporate, and that's something that banks understand and can buy. But getting to that stage is what's been so challenging for the is, you know, if you can't get the goods moving, you're never gonna get there. So, so what Kountable does is is makes it easier for, for the trader, to use what they have, which is all the knowledge they have about the trade who the parties are, what needs to happen for the goods to get from A to B, and they're experts at this, they know all the steps, they know who you know, and some of these things are not that easy in some of these locations, how you actually get things to move, who get that various stages to do different activities to make sure the goods get to the buyer. But there's, there's a set of milestones that can be mapped out. And once you see that, and you know, and can determine how much funding is necessary. And when you can actually draw down funds, and the risk is reduced really significantly, from versus not having any information at all. And having to just, you know, trust that you're gonna get paid back, it's a completely different kind of scenario. Kountable is a trading company. So we actually just make the funds available. So they're not it was all the payments go through Kountable. The entrepreneurs not given the money until the transaction is done. And at the end, they get the portion of it. That is their profit after everything else has been paid for including including the investors who put the funds in. So that, you know completely removes the chance that they're going to divert funds to some other use, which is really the biggest risk that banks have in trying to fund SMEs through loans. The process doesn't lend itself to loans very well. Thanks have lost a lot of money on SME lending. And they're very unsure even when they are able to actually do the paperwork and have the transaction meet their criteria.
Morgan Bailey 29:12
Define SME, for for our listener,
Catherine Nomura 29:14
it's a small and medium enterprise. It's more of a global, global institutional word SMB is used here sometimes but the small trader in the middle between usually a much larger and much larger manufacturer supplier and a much larger buyer.
Morgan Bailey 29:35
So, I mean, I'm sitting with this and just really appreciating that I guess the simplicity it sounds like you provide individuals, right? So what I'm hearing that like the timing of it, I'm guessing is is much faster, right? Like you have a platform you're able to map the end to end and you're able to say hey, this is how this how the financial process is going to work. And this is what the timing looks like which which it sounds like is A big challenge prior to your prior to working with Kountable, is that correct?
Catherine Nomura 30:05
It isn't it, it actually doesn't. I mean, it comes up and is that so from a project management perspective, the platform just helps everything to be laid out. But yet time Time is money. And a lot of the reason why these projects don't happen is they get dragged on and on. Because the trader can't find the funding. And then what happens quite often is that the funds get in, if it's a public project, they may get withdrawn from that budget and put somewhere else just their time, their expiry dates on most of these contracts. So they're, they're under the gun a little bit, but also the delay in getting things, especially if you're talking about medical supplies, or, or, you know, the building supplies, and there's a project going on, if that gets delayed significantly, it really affects the outcomes on the other side. So
Morgan Bailey 30:55
yeah, and the other thing I'm sitting with you, because I'm also imagining that like, you know, the role that these these traders play, right, I get when they know, the local economy, they know, the local supply chain, and the supply chain, and a lot of places very informal. It's not like, I feel like in, in the West, like we have these big developed supply chains that are a little more straightforward. I mean, sometimes, you know, in areas I've been and worked in, like, you know, you have, you know, something comes in on a plane, that goes to a boat, that goes to a distribution center that goes to a smaller boat that goes to a motorcycle goes to a bicycle, right? And like, you know, for a large for large corporation organizations doing trading to be like, okay, cool, I'm gonna, yeah, like, let me work in that they're gonna, that's a, that's a big, that's a lot of unknowns, that's going to create a lot of challenges.
Catherine Nomura 31:43
Yeah, they know, the, you know, the cut offs, they don't even know who the distributors are, that they should be working with in these markets. That even that is incredibly challenging, who is who is good at what they do, who know, there is so much nuance, and there's so much, and there's so little visibility for these local traders that, you know, sometimes they will have, they'll have a customer that really wants to buy a product, and they can't even get the supplier to take their call.
Morgan Bailey 32:13
So the other, go ahead,
Catherine Nomura 32:15
I was just gonna say so the other piece of Canada, we've talked a lot about the small businesses in the middle, but we also have those larger entities on our platform. So they join and they bring their distributor network and the supplier, you know, Mike, give us their entire distributor network and ask us to help them find more quality distributors, a buyer may come on the network and say, help us fund our procurement through all the local small businesses that we, you know, we want to support our need to support because we have some sort of a mandate for that and make sure that we're actually getting what we need from them on time and at the best price.
Morgan Bailey 32:52
Amazing. And as you're talking everything that's going through my mind is around equity, and financial equity, because what it sounds like is I mean, you know, with large organizations who have large access to capital only willing to fund other larger established organization with lots of capital predict, you know, particularly in Western markets. It sounds like in terms of, you know, equity, there's a lot of people being missed, that can be can be, I think, as you mentioned before, in previous kinds of counted, in this case through countable.
Catherine Nomura 33:28
Yeah, it's it's so true there, then it's not again, it's it's, it's, you can understand how this evolved quite naturally, out of a profit motive that no and, you know, it's this very diverse set of small business messiness in there that that large systems are not well, you know, the saps and the oracles of the world are not really well designed to, to work with that, which is why something different needed to be created that started with how did these guys do business? What do they actually do? It's actually fairly simple, what they do, but it needs, you know, you need to work with how they work and not make it excessively complicated because it has to fit with some big systems. So the nice thing about Kountable is it can kind of overlay over top of all of those things, the big, the systems that big players use and create a system that smaller players use that can plug in and level the playing field that way, so that the data, everybody has high quality data, the trader who is really taking all the risk and making the thing happen, builds the transaction and provides the lion's share of that data but doesn't in a way that is actually making their job easier. In many ways. It saves them time, and is helping them to operationally do what they want to get done and work with their teams. So there's a little ERP component in there that helps them run their business while they're also doing something that allows them to play in this much bigger global supply chain. Market is and there's also sort of the strength The numbers are being part of the network, which allows us to, you know, they're buying a lot. If you think about what it costs for you to send a package versus what Amazon pays. It's, it's a lot like that for them. They're paying for all these trade service providers at almost retail rates, because they're so small. Whereas if they're members of the platform, we can, we can use, we can accomplish economies of scale, and even higher service levels, because it's all accountants accountable network that they're serving, not just one trader who might be doing one trade along this axis every year or two years.
Morgan Bailey 35:35
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like there's so many benefits that I mean, I'm just thinking through your story from my kind of where you started, you know, with business and in Borneo, and like how all these experiences led up for your ability to see this thing that I'm like, I'm like, I don't think I would see that. I spent a lot of time talking to people across the globe, and what that and just like how the some of these nuanced challenges that have such a big impact, right, and particularly coming out through the lens of financial equity, like the role that that plays, and being able to create a level playing fields, as you say, for these traders across. And, and to be able to also, I mean, that means to be able to, you know, to have to be able to purchase at better rates as well, to be able to keep more of that money in their local economy, as opposed to push it out just just sounds like a really, really powerful platform. And I'd love to hear if you have some likes, what are some of the success stories that you've had so far was countable?
Catherine Nomura 36:37
Again, as well, one is around, it was one that was when we know this because it was in the newspaper from Rwanda that we supported one of our most active traders actually ever on the platform had the contract to supply Rwanda with all of its malaria tests for it was a three year period. And during that period, the incidence of malaria went down in the country by over 60%. It was around 64%. And it was attributed to only two things, which was the increased incidence of testing. And they were doing some work with drones and, and pesticides. But, you know, there, there's a very tangible effect of getting the job done, you know, and what we see, the heartbreaking Flipside side to that is the trades that we haven't been able to do for various reasons, and you see what's lost. And it just isn't what I know is that that type of opportunity can just as easily fall through if there isn't accountable there to help with the funding to get that to happen on time inside the timeframes. Whether it, you know, happens too late or doesn't happen at all we've seen We've seen countries lose access to a whole either testing or treatment protocol. Because of that, so I think they're, so there are just so many opportunities, like that's one opportunity, another, that trader also increased the number of Nino's neonatal ICU and Rwanda from two to 26, in a few weeks, by being able to buy all the equipment and then trained all the nurses and the techs, and that was obviously, you know, a massive increase in their capability, but only made possible because all of that can be coordinated. So that's
Morgan Bailey 38:27
what's powerful. You know, and I'm this word phrase coming to mind, I don't know if it's an actual phrase, but it's almost like, like, you know, technology, equity, software equity, right, that like, you know, so much of these other systems are missing these individuals, which are having an impact, not only on their business, but on the organization or the countries in areas that they live in the economies that they live in. So it's like, as you're creating a technology that creates better access is more equitable, like in creating more, you know, whatever, technology, software equity, however, we want to phrase that but, you know, looking forward, like, do you see that like this? What sounds like I hesitate to call what you're working on as a niche, because it sounds like it's huge. It's just untapped. It's just been ignored. When you look forward to you, do you see other like platforms popping up around this? Do you see countable increasing at scale? What's what's next in that space?
Catherine Nomura 39:24
You know, we're already seeing just in the, in the time since we started in 2015, we've seen a lot of partners get a lot smarter about that. And we're not the only ones. We're all working at it sort of from different directions. So for instance, we have a financing partner now who is financing trade and securitizing they set up a business security as a service business for trade transactions that can that so they're doing pieces, they're solving pieces of the puzzle and when we when we connect all those pieces together, we get the opportunity to really make a map out of it. fact much more quickly. Countable is like an adapter in the middle that allows all these different parties to work together, whether it's governments or funders, alternative funders, banks, the traders themselves, the parties to the trade themselves, the buyers, the sellers, and the suppliers. And we've, we've seen a lot of advancement on almost all those fronts, and either their willingness and COVID did some of that it raised awareness around the importance of supply chains. And you know, that there's, there's a lot of resilience in working with small traders as well, you know, gives you options. So there, it's, it's an area that's received some love over the past few years and money. And that's, that's great. So I see us as being a platform that's going to connect to other platform level or large scale solutions that together can help us leapfrog forward, once we get those things working really well together. And technology allows that also, we're taking something that hasn't been digitized, just because this huge chunk in the middle was this data desert and digitizing it, which just opens up a world of possibilities. So I think we're kind of at the knee of an exponential curve, where you could see a lot of transformation in the next five to 10 years in what's possible, which is really changing the landscape, I think, for entrepreneurial businesses that are there buying and selling finished goods. And we're talking about Project supply chains, not not a product supply chain of not supplying a factory with what they need to make a product but supplying projects and projects. One of the things that this was a light, big light that went on for me that again, then in all my studies, I had never really seen or cottoned on two, which is that these projects, by the time they get to the stage where they're failing or or succeeding, you know, where we see them, so much has gone into them. So many resources have gone into building them, to getting budget for them to putting out contracts. For that to fail, it's really failing and like the last inch, not even the last mile. And if we can get, you know, even a small number of those, I think we can get a lot more of those projects off the ground, quickly, but even a small number of those who then the amount of impact that you can have quickly is astonishing. And I mean, those two examples I gave you are typical that What are you know, that's that's a good kind of example of you can make really statistically noticeable differences in impact and health in capability and infrastructure very quickly by by working in that that space where so much has already gone into doing a lot of what's really kind of a lot of the really hard work, right, and just getting rid of that one bottleneck, that's preventing the final result from happening. So that's what excites me the most about it. And I think a lot of our partners, so they see there's immediate opportunity, there's so much opportunity just right there ready to be plucked, almost, it's a very, very ripe field with lots of room for lots of players to do different pieces of it.
Morgan Bailey 43:09
Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like so much effort goes into like creating the these opportunities, the platform, the foundation for it. And you know, it's just like a couple pieces of red tape that like put everything at risk. And that's, it sounds like you're going in there and helping smooth out that process. It really makes a big difference.
Catherine Nomura 43:30
And over time, the other thing that will happen is as these transactions become more predictably successful, prices will go down around the world for lots of really important things. And you'll see you know, things like medical supplies become more affordable and more more variety available, thanks to all the things that those are things that we associate with development, but you can there's a very direct path between solving this problem. And doing that. So putting donor funds to use much more effectively. Apps giving lots of people access to lots of things that they don't have. So it's not just not just the equity of the people that are actually involved in the trading. It's all the people that benefit Yeah,
Morgan Bailey 44:10
the downstream. Yeah, it sounds like such such ripple effects. Okay, then I really appreciate this conversation with you. And for our listeners who want to learn more about cannibal in this work. What's the best way to do that?
Catherine Nomura 44:23
They can go to our website countable.com. And if anybody would like to approach me directly, I'm on LinkedIn. And you know, I'm happy to answer questions or talk to anybody who is interested in in what we do. As you can tell, I love to I love to talk about countable. And I think there's a lot of people that might have a lot of different reasons to, you know, to be interested in it. So I'm here.
Morgan Bailey 44:47
Awesome. Hey, thank you so much for this conversation. I look forward to seeing what countable creates as it moves forward. And perhaps we'll have another follow up call in the years to come.
Catherine Nomura 44:58
Sounds great. Thank you so much. Florida.
Morgan Bailey 45:01
Thanks for listening to another episode of the profit meets impact podcast. If you enjoy this experience, please subscribe wherever you find your podcasts and leave a positive review. You can also find out more about the podcast at www.profitmeetsimpact.com