#77 - Rui Paiva, CEO of Wedo Technologies - On how AI helps telcos stop fraud and protect revenue

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to intelligently help the telco win the fight against fraud and revenue leakage. My guest is Rui Paiva, CEO of Wedo Technologies.

Prior to co-founding WeDo Technologies in 2001, Rui Paiva was System Information Director and Deputy of Optimus Communications’ Executive Committee. Before that, Rui was the Consultancy Director at Hewlett Packard Portugal, following a career at Telecel, which then became Vodafone Portugal, heading up their Infrastructure, Operations and Help Desk Department.

In 2010, Rui won the Best Leaders Award for Wedo Technologies, and in 2017, he received the Tech Personality of the Year Award by Exame Informática.

He is an experienced Board Member with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. A strong business development professional skilled in Business Process, Marketing Management, Negotiation, Business Planning, and Requirements Analysis. He holds a post-graduate degree in Management and Administration from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, as well as a BSc in Applied Mathematics

The potential behind the problem Wedo is solving triggered me, hence I invited Rui to my podcast. We explore the growing challenges companies in the Telco industry face around revenue leakage and fraud and how their platform approach is enabling the business to stay in control. We also explore the magic behind Wedo’s ability to constantly stay relevant as a business software vendor in an industry that’s changing at the speed of light.

Here are some of his quotes:

One of my last jobs was being the CIO of a telco company. One of the things that we faced at that time was, we have the main building blocks, which are typically the ERP, the billing system, the CRM. But all the additional tools that are in the middle of that normally they have to be developed from scratch in each of the implementations in each of the operators.

That takes time. That means the cost of maintaining and support and evolve. All of that was a nightmare.

We created a technology, Raid, to validate all the integration between different applications and guarantee that the customer, at the end of the day, is not losing money, which means that without having more sales or being efficient, they can improve the bottom line directly.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. How to stay relevant with a platform approach – both in terms of its’ ability to meet constantly evolving industry requirements as well as being industry agnostic to scale out.
2. Why a customer-cooperation-strategy is a very effective approach to win the hearts of 80% of the market, and never lose a customer ever.
3. What are the 8 secrets for a software business to stay as relevant and as fresh as the moment you were founded – in Wedo’s case – 18 years ago.