On Trust Faster | Alex Martin

Dani Ng-See-Quan: Hello and welcome to Trust Faster - a Clearspeed podcast. I’m Dani Ng-See Quan, and I’ll be your host this season as we take a look into the ways that risk and trust intersect in our day-to-day lives.

When we talk about trust - especially when it comes to the relationship between citizens and governments, or between consumers and companies, or even between employers and employees… a lot of the time what we’re actually talking about is a trust gap.

We live in a time where technology is allowing everything around us to move quicker than it ever has before. The world is a global marketplace where commerce and community happen online… and yet sometimes it feels like we trust each other less than we ever have.

Our interactions with authority or security or even with each other often start at a place of dis-trust. Just think about the last time you applied for a job or tried to cross a border. We know safety is important, absolutely, but… it seems like there has to be a different approach to navigating those moments where risk and trust intersect.

And that’s what this show is about - trust, risk, and those moments in our lives where the two meet. We’ve got an incredible lineup of guests, and we’re going to be challenging them to think big about some really important issues.

On the first episode of the show, we’re going to be talking with Clearspeed co-founder and CEO, Alex Martin. And I know it seems a bit on-the-nose to start a series like this by interviewing the CEO, but, I think in addition to providing some really crucial context for Clearspeed’s mission, Alex just has a really great story to tell.

Who he is and how he came to co-found the company informs a lot of what we’re trying to do. And that’s to change the scale and the speed at which we’re able to assess risk.

Alex got his start in the Marine Corps, and I think that’s really where he learned what it means to be a leader - the person who’s able to not only identify risks, but also takes responsibility for knowing what risks to assume and when. Leadership is also about building trust - a team can’t function if it stops trusting its leader.

So, in this episode I’m going to talk to Alex about his journey from the Marines to entrepreneur. You’ll hear about the real world experiences that drove home how critical trust is, and how narrowing the trust gap can - hopefully at least - make our lives safer and more efficient.

So, let’s get into it. I started our conversation by asking Alex how he defines trust.

Alex Martin: I think of trust in two ways. I, on the one hand, trust to me means reliability and confidence and integrity in character. Trust means that when I show up and say I'm going to do the thing, I do the thing. So it's more than words, it's actions.

But then as a consumer, trust means that I have an expectation that the reliability and the safety and the confidence I have in the thing that they say they're going to do or deliver for me happens. And that's really important, right? Because inward am I trustworthy. Am I a person that people can trust? Are we building a company that exudes that as a fundamental value, but then also outside of our organisation as a consumer, as a person that purchases insurance and uses it? Or as a person that uses banking or deals in companies, like can I trust that company to do the thing they say they're going to do?

And that's, you take a risk. I believe that when I click the Uber app, it's going to deliver the car on time. I believe that when I hire a nanny took after my twin daughters, he or she is going to be reliable and be a safe caregiver. When that trust is broken is when the chasm begins. And the chasm is you lose trust in systems, in governments, organisations. And then what happens is deep cynicism.

And so if you look at the world today, you could either be wildly pessimistic and it is to a certain extent oppressing. You look at our own country and the riffs of the gaps and the chasms between Americans just as an example. And how do we bridge that? We either build walls and citizens becomes hatred and fear or you build bridges.

So there's a moment, now there's not an inflexion point that's the wrong word, but it's a crossroads. And the crossroads is trust is ancient. It's the currency that we deal in on a daily basis. And if you don't trust this processes and the people that enable transactions or the flow of any exchange, you have nothing. And you look at the world today and you say, how do we want it to be for the next generation? You want to leave it better? We need to start taking the steps now to do it.

It's hard to get up every day and have the courage to meet the day and ask yourself, how am I going to feed my family today? How am I going to start a business today? There's a hope in the American experience that could be a thing that happens. And right now it's a crisis because people I don't think believe that anymore. And so we have to pick our head up, understand and be a leader, not an America leader. I'm talking about a community, a global community. Be a leader in this crisis management perspective from a trust basis. Everyone can move to fear. Everyone can move to threat. Everyone could say this is why all these people are bad actors and the proliferation of fraud and national security and fear-based tactics, but that's going to continue to drive wedges between people's value systems.

So the intersection of different opinions of how to do things matter less than an alignment around the end, what the end in mind is, and the end in mind should be a society in which we have confidence and trust in a system that delivers the thing that says it's going to do with equity and fairness. And there's just great promise in that and it's technology’s promise to help from a social justice standpoint and from an equity standpoint and just the ability to advance everyone at the same time, who's willing to step up and take their own courage to make these things, that to me is wildly exciting. And that's why clear speed is here to be a part of that story.

DNSQ: I mentioned at the beginning that Alex got his start in the Military. He’s a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School, and Naval Command and Staff College. He was in active service from 2004-2011, where he served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a small unit commander in infantry, reconnaissance and special operations units. Since then, he’s been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Reserves. I asked Alex what he learned from his time in the military.

AM: What the Marine Corps is so good at is taking disparate groups of people of all colours and shapes and sizes and indoctrinating them into a culture where trust is fundamental. If I could distill Marine Corps values into one thing is I trust my teammates to do their thing every single time. That's how it is.

They trust me, I trust them, and lives are on the line. So there's no more incredible experience to be a young 23-year-old second lieutenant than to get the honour of leading a rifle platoon in combat period. And the only way to lead those men was to sign up and do the things that you’re asked to do with them.

I don't know how well I did overall, I don't think I didn't make any records or win medals of valour, but I showed up and I learned, and the experience was deeply enriching. And in one such experience where you're relying on your teammates to do their tasks, to provide security, to keep communications flowing, to make sure that the next corner around the block there wasn't someone trying to ambush the platoon, there's moments in which you have to give some trust on the benefit of the doubt to local forces you're working with.

So you're enabling and equipping these folks to work alongside you. And when trust is broken there, when the systems that you count on to be reliable, to give you confidence that the folks you're working with are not bad guys. They're not working for Al-Qaeda, they're Iraqis trying to rebuild their country when those break lives are lost. And I lost a dear friend who on such an attack, we call 'em green on blue attacks, insider threat.

And in this instance, my buddy Captain Warren Frank was killed by an Iraqi soldier and it was devastating because what were the systems in place that I had confidence in that allowed these Iraqi soldiers to work with him and who was vetting them? And it wasn't a failure by the counterintelligence team. These guys are brilliant. It wasn't a failure of lie detection technologies that were meant to ascertain who's bad or who's good. What it was a failure was ultimately, fundamentally at a broader level of the culture to look at the problem and say, maybe we should rethink how we're doing risk on the edge, on the battlefield.

So when Warren Frank was killed by an Iraqi soldier who was unvetted, my first question was, why? How did this happen? What went wrong? And so the learnings of that, the findings that I had from that kind of postmortem was there was no good way to assess risk in people on the edge at scale. We're not going to serially line up thousands and thousands of soldiers and polygraph them or lie detect them. So it's like we were using the wrong tools to do the wrong thing and there were no tools that existed. The fundamental problem isn't finding the needle in the haystack. It's clearing the hay.

DNSQ: After Alex left active duty, he founded a private maritime security company based in Oman. He also lived and worked in rural Kenya for two years as the Team Leader and Country Manager for Nuru International, a social enterprise dedicated to ending extreme poverty.

Military service to private security seems like a pretty straightforward path, but moving from there to farming and social enterprise seems like a bit of a left turn.

But to hear Alex tell it, all of those experiences are part of one slightly winding road towards his current work at Clearspeed.

AM: My professional life in three parts, marine entrepreneur, farmer and entrepreneur, 1.0 farmer. So experiences as a marine, the learning from that was trust is fundamental to the execution of a mission. Mission success. The premise is if you don't have trust, you fail. That was the culture. And when the systems break, you lose trust and you have a crisis of faith like I did.

So I made the decision to start my first company, which was a security company. And in that couple years, the experience was I can't operate. I was overseas, we were operating in Yemen, we were working in the security world, in logistics world, I couldn't hire people because I couldn't run background checks.

I needed a tool to be able to get me there. I lost confidence in the ability to run a business on the edge. My competitors and my other entrepreneurs in the similar space would just underwrite that risk. We just say then we're just not going to run a background check. We're just going to hire you. Because people were motivated by greed. And that wasn’t me.

And then the third chapter as a farmer, a social venture, new international's mission was let's go to the hardest places to enable and equip small shareholder farmers to give 'em access to capital, deploy best agronomic practises, give them the application of healthcare and financial inclusion and allow them to lead a community of change. So not west coming in, do these things, but rather what's your problem? What do you need to solve it? Tell us, provide capital and scale, community led, local based, all with the idea of if this works, I don't become a terrorist, I don't become a Somali Pirate. I'd actually rather just be a farmer, a meaningful choice. And the problem in those things were exactly the same. Well, how could we deploy capital here and how can we hire here? And I don't know if we can trust these people. So in these three experiences from Marine and kind of entrepreneur to farmer, I looked at the totality of this and with a group of other co-founders and we said, something has to change.

No one's doing it. You look around, you go, no one's solving this problem. I had to do it. We had to do it. And so the bridge from identification of problems across three chapters of my life to I've got to go all in and do this thing and dedicate my life to building a company that solves this problem is what we've done.

So the bridge that I personally crossed was one of looking around and saying, no one's going to solve this problem and it must be solved. And I'd rather fail trying than stay on the sidelines.

The problem Clearspeed is solving is there is no good way to assess risk at scale in humans. There's databases that have profiles of people, and often those databases are incomplete or outdated or expensive to get. There's humans that can look at a human and they're incredible at making a decision of is this person trustworthy or not? But those humans don't scale and clear speed comes at this intersection of human judgement and providing an exponential component to the ability for that high demand, low density resource to actually do the work on the people that they need to. What I mean by that is most people are stuck at this intersection of trust and risk. I could trust everyone blindly and have a very efficient process in terms of fluidity. Like I can pay every claim, I can underwrite every loan, I can complete every transaction. The problem is I'm going to have rapid fraud. On the other hand, I could pay no one. I could not grow my business and have no fraud, but simultaneously have no business.

Everyone hates you. This is a terrible experience. Right? So how do you solve that? Well, with clear speed, you think of this kind of tension between speed and security. How fast do you move through a process versus how much security you putting against that process to make sure you're either safe or reducing the fraud you see? And the way that the markets were approaching this is from the bottom up until we flip the equation, we say clear speed, asked ourselves what's beyond fraud detection? What's beyond lie detection and what's beyond fraud detection? What's beyond lie detection is an assessment of risk, the application of an unbiased, scalable, automated tool that provides a data point that doesn't exist. And that's fundamental. If you think about databases, and you're not running a FIO score in Nairobi to give a loan to a business owner, you're not running a background check in Yemen.

It just did not. It's impossible. In more advanced economies, you're doing those things, but there's a lot of bias in those models. So if you're a person of a certain gender or ethnicity makeup, you may not get the right trust score or risk score. Well, there is no trust score. Enter clear speed, a way to assess risk, where you arrive at a trust score that allows people to opt into a process to get to trust faster, to get a loan, to get paid, to get a job, to get hired, to be validated. And in that way, the invention becomes the innovation, the invention of using voice analytics to assess risk and speech is incredible technology, but the innovation is the application of this as a trust platform to allow people to opt into a system that didn't exist. And the very simple example would be you're either waiting in line at an airport or you've opted into a process where you could be fast tracked.

That's a decision people make that doesn't exist in banking and insurance and in the enterprise. And so we're creating that fast track lane. And I think in that way it becomes quite revolutionary because markets could get unlocked, people will have trust because they're opting into a system and process that they didn't have before. And businesses can expand to regions and markets that they couldn't before. And so that's where clear speed exists at the intersection of trust and risk, where we use speed as our security and we allow people to move through processes with unprecedented speed. And I think speed's the name of the game here with trust.

DNSQ: Speed and safety often seem like they’re at odds with one another, but with Clearspeed, Alex is trying to flip this paradigm on its head. It’s a tech solution to a very human problem: how do we narrow the trust gap?

There’s a counterintuitive thing that happens in traditional risk assessment - you know, like our interactions at the airport or when we file an insurance claim.

It can feel like everything starts from the assumption that you—the individual with basically no power and no agency in the situation—are not and should not be trusted. And that’s sort of baked into a lot of human-based risk assessments. Who are you, where are you going, why are you going there, and so on.

Alex’s idea is that by making the first stage of risk assessment more of a formality - a kind of procedure that we can get through quickly and in a neutral way - if we can do that then we can clear low risk people quickly and efficiently without the traditional bottlenecks where everyone goes through the same rigorous screening process.

In a nutshell, you answer a few simple yes/no questions, a voice analytics algorithm does its thing, and the result is either an “all clear” or a flag to do some additional screening. Ideally, it means more people are able to move through this process in a much shorter amount of time.

You’ll hear Alex refer to it as “exquisite tech” - that’s shorthand for “highly sophisticated” … it’s a way to attach some special significance to it.

AM: The early thinking from a security and fraud and risk management perspective is we're going to go to the source to conduct fraud or lie detection. We want to ascertain are you committing fraud or are you a risk? And so we're going to have an exchange human to human. And in the consumer world where there's no polygraph, like you're basically doing a human-based lie detection approach and as the consumer that in exchange doesn't feel great because you're being assessed where your trust has been discounted from the start. So the transformation is then actually let's not use a human first. Let's use a piece of technology. And that technology will interact with you when you want it, how you want it. And with your consent, you'll know the questions ahead of time. They're questions you were going to be asked anyway. And the incentive to taking this step is a couple minute automated questionnaire, the incentive is you're just going to move through that process faster.

Like you'll get paid and if for whatever reason this technology alerts to risk, you're going to do the normal thing. There's no harm. And that's fundamental. I used to lose a lot of sleep thinking if someone uses tools without a human at the end of it to make a decision, that's a bad world where AI is making risk decisions for us blindly. I don't want to live in that world. But in a world where AI in other exquisite technologies and clear speed is augmenting a process to say, go through this other thing, but then if you don't do it, here's the normal thing, now you'll have the exchange with the human that's you're used to, you're accustomed to now lie detection becomes risk assessment. And the risk assessment first approach is something we're innovating on. No one else is doing that. When you apply for a loan or whatever, they're running an untold amount of checks on you, you don't even know it's happening.

And they're looking at your credit history and your background check and scores and your profile and maybe how you typed into the automated platform. And they're using all these tools. And a lot of these are great technologies to say, is Alex trustworthy? Can we make this decision or not? Then the human's going to call me and they're going to shake me down and we're going to have that lie detection experience or the fraud detection experience. And so end to end, it's a rough customer experience. And if you're the business, it's expensive because you're doing data calls, you're doing expensive. And so that's just not going to work because on the one hand, you're applying these new technologies to try to help lubricate that process. But on the other hand, the sophisticated fraudsters or bad actors are using those same technologies or variations of them to attack you.

And so what's stuck in the middle are consumers with degraded experiences who are disappointed and lose trust in your ability to give them what they want you to have. And on the other hand, the business is saying, I cannot underwrite this. It's too expensive. I can't throw more people at the problem. And that's again, that is where clear speed plays. And we look at this and say, we want the first point of touch to be an experience where on your terms with your consent, you're pushing yourself through a process that wouldn't exist without us. We're doing it right now. The hurricanes just hit. People are devastated. I can't imagine what it would be like to lose your home or to be displaced in this way. These people are suffering and the carriers are responsible and they're thoughtful and they want to help, but they can't throw humans at this problem. We're injecting into that process today in real time right now, and we're helping victims of catastrophic events get paid faster. And to me, that's really inspiring.

Speech is incredible. There's an arms race and voice right now like Microsoft, Google, Apple, everyone has a voice strategy and you can glean incredible things in speech. Dr. Rita Singh at Carnegie Mellon. She's a genius. Go on YouTube, check her out. She's incredible at what she can do. The Voice Language Institute of Carnegie Mellon, amazing. What they can do to understand disease or any untold elements of your background, they can tell you things you would never imagine. All within speech, also in speech are artefacts related to risk. So what we do is we detect these artefacts, we quantify them, and they're universal characteristics. So whether you're in Somalia or Silicon Valley, Nairobi or New York, these things are present or they're not.

If we detect that risk in speech, we don't know who you are. We don't know your gender, we don't know your race, we don't know your age, we don't know your identity. And we're not running biometrics. All we're doing is detecting these characteristics. And so the bias is free starting from the questions. That's one. If you have a biased question, you're going to get a bad response to the questions. The second is the technology was built underpinned from understanding these universal characteristics.

So like a heartbeat. If I put a stethoscope on your chest, I don't know you're a female, I don't know that you're your age. I don't know that you're from Canada. I just am listening to your heartbeat. And a heartbeat is a certain pace and sometimes it's accelerated and sometimes it's down. And as a doctor, a practitioner, I might say, you have an elevated heart rate, why?

And so from the dataset to how the tech was built and conceived from the perspective of risk assessment of lie detection to how it's deployed, all this bakes into, and our chief science officer will not let me say we have no bias. You can't say that. But what you can say is to date, we have a bias-free approach, and we're looking at it every day. We do not have black box ai. We know exactly the characteristics we're detecting, and in that way it provides our ability to have an unbiased approach to assessment of risk at scale.

And so when I think about people's AI strategy, if you're not incorporating clear speed, you have a critical blind spot. And that critical blind spot will represent a gap that will degrade your ability to scale and will harm your customer experience. That's where we come in. And that's the magic. The magic is the application of providing this data point which doesn't exist anywhere else, which is not a trailing indicator, which allows the consumer peers to be elevated at the same time, save cost and reduce overhead and expense. And as a resource allocation phenomena, that's where we're running towards like triage resource allocation, the exponential underwriter, the exponential claims handler, the exponential counterintelligence operative. Take these humans who are so smart and well-trained and allow them to have incredible exponential scale. And it's all about triage. That's the innovation.

DNSQ: A recent survey showed that 84% of business leaders believe their companies are highly trusted. That same survey showed that only 27% of customers actually feel that way.

To me at least, that’s a pretty clear trust gap. And that makes it an interesting time to be working in this particular marketspace - to be a company trying to facilitate smoother, more efficient interactions between customers and companies by shrinking that trust gap. And it’s not just company-customer relationships; again, it’s governments, it’s sports integrity, it’s your relationship with your insurance provider.

So, I wanted to end my conversation with Alex by asking him about the future - both of Clearspeed as a company, and where he sees this whole market segment heading.

AM: The evolution from exquisite technology to product platform is where we're at now. So how might clear speed engage, interact with trust events at scale in the financial services sector, in human resource allocation, human capital in government, defence and security. And for the consumer, that's where we're going. A platform where a PhD in India could opt in to have his or her resume validated where three out of every four resumes are fraudulent to rise above and get a job because he or she actually got the degree or world in which a caregiver could opt into a process or anyone in the gig economy can opt into a process, say, I'm exceedingly more trustworthy to carry your mother or your daughter from A to B.

You can trust me. Would I pay a premium to have someone carry my mother from her home to her medical appointment? Of course I would. Every day, all day. People are willing to pay a premium where trust is at stake because it's, it's not even emotional. I mean it's everything, right? When you talk about your loved ones. And so this is everything. And so where Clearspeed is going is to be the name where we're used as a verb. Did you Google it? Did you Clearspeed them?

Like that's it. When an insurance company said, did you Clearspeed them? They didn't say, did you shake 'em down? Did you put 'em through a three hour process in the banking industry? They didn't say, did I put you through a three hour call because I want to approve your wire transfer when you're hiring someone. They didn't say, come in for the eight hour interview so you can prove to me that you did these things in the sports economy. They didn't say, did you put 'em through the drug test, the invasive drug test, and did you take their blood and did you take a urinalysis sample? And did you look through all these expensive things to say, are you a bad actor? What they said was, did you inject a very quick automated process that allowed me to say, yeah, pay it, do the thing, move 'em, clear 'em.

You think about where Clearspeed is going as this platform, like what I see is where the evolution becomes the revolution. I see what I call a risk reformation. I see people moving across borders seamlessly. I see loads of data and identity being held in a blockchain. And I see people moving from Kenya to Kansas in a day. I see people flowing across borders. I see markets moving. I see emerging economies being underwritten and loans being granted. I see people getting the ability to have capital to start businesses. I see these things with a tool like ours because that's possible when you trust a tool that provides a human, the ability to underwrite a decision that they couldn't do before. So the imagination goes crazy when you think about trust as a platform and clear speed as underpinning that as an engine of risk. Again, not to find the bad actor, but to clear the low risk folks at scale.

That's it. That's everything. And so the ubiquity here, the play here is we have to collaborate. Forged from this beginning. We started talking about leadership. We'll end with talking about leadership. Technology is table stakes. Exquisite technology is table stakes. Everyone's expecting these things to happen and they will. And brilliant people are inventing brilliant things rapidly. But what people forget is human nature is human nature. So as technology evolves with more rapidity than ever before in the entirety of the human experience, humans are still humans. And I can say as a student of history, that this is something I'm confident in. And if I'm confident, I'm long on human nature, I know there's good actors, there's bad actors, and there's folks in between, and they're going to make a choice. Am I good, am I bad? And the intersection where technology plays into human nature is where clear speed is. And that will move us from crisis management to trust management. We have to.

DNSQ: Thank you so much to Alex Martin, co-founder and CEO of Clearspeed for joining me on the first episode of Trust Faster. I’ve been your host, Dani Ng-See Quan.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, and that you’ll join me for the rest of the season. I’ll be back next time in conversation with Tonia Reis from Edelman to talk about how trust can be turned into data that reveals fascinating insights into the world around us.