SPEAKERS
Rich Alterman, Elan Amir

Rich Alterman  00:04
You're syncing up and tuning in to The Lending Link Podcast, powered by GDS Link, where the modern day lender can dive deeper into the future of Data Decisioning and Credit Risk Solutions. Welcome to the show everyone. I'm your host Rich Alterman and today we're syncing up with Elan Amir, CEO of MeasureOne. MeasureOne was founded in 2015, by a team of people passionate about using consumer permission data or CPD to create opportunities for both businesses and consumers. MeasureOne promotes itself as the first true consumer permission Data Platform as a Service for automated access to any online consumer data including income, education, employment, insurance, brokerage data, and much more. Elan brings a unique combination of management strategy and technology expertise leading organizations from startup to scale. Before joining MeasureOne Elan served as Chief Product and Technology Officer at SpringboardAuto.com, a SaaS based auto finance company serving consumers and financial institutions and at Prosper Marketplace, a leading marketplace lending company. Prior to that, Elan served nine years as CEO of Bivio Networks, a cybersecurity solutions provider. Elan received his PhD and MS computer science and a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. In this episode, Elan, and I will touch on the evolution of consumer permission data and the value that it brings to both consumers and businesses. But before we dive into the interview, please head over to GDS Link, LinkedIn and Twitter pages. That's G D S L I N K, and hit those like and follow buttons. If you have not done so already, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen to your podcast. All right, now let's get synced with GDS Link. Welcome Elan, I hope you're having a great week so far. Thank you for participating in our podcast today. Where are you joining us from?

Elan Amir  02:00
It's great to be here. Rich, I'm joining you from San Francisco.

Rich Alterman  02:03
Right? And how's the weather up there some of the places around the country now we're really dealing with crazy temperatures.

Elan Amir  02:09
You know, I was joking with friends of mine just this morning, as I'm reading about crazy temperatures that for once the San Francisco fog is a blessing for enjoying nice, cool, crisp weather if you want to come and enjoy that in the summer.

Rich Alterman  02:23
Okay, well, good for you. Oh, Elan, you've been with MeasureOne for over four years now joining in November 2018. Perhaps you can share what initially attracted you to the company, and how some of your prior work experience may have influenced your attraction to MeasureOne.

Elan Amir  02:36
Yeah, so MeasureOne when I joined was a slightly different focus, but was primarily focused on education data and using education data to develop insights around the students that had education that that provided the data. What attracted me to MeasureOne was that I love data businesses, I believe that data ultimately provides opportunities and insights for obviously, the consumers that own that data. And so when the opportunity came, and the founder was looking to step back, and to hand over the reins, I saw it as a great opportunity to come in and help build up the company from that stage going forward.

Rich Alterman  03:20
So before we talk business, let's get a little personal. I understand that you grew up in Israel and moved to the Bay Area to go to UC Berkeley, what were some of the factors that drew you to California,

Elan Amir  03:29
You know, I applied broadly, California, obviously, from a weather standpoint, and from a just a general, kind of, I would say, quality of living standpoint was practive. But also, of course, UC Berkeley, given my interest in computer science and electrical engineering and kind of the technical aspects of of my academic interests, it was certainly as good a place as I was accepted. And so it was both a good combination of I went to the best place that accepted me, and also a pretty great place in the world.

Rich Alterman  04:02
Are there similarities in the climate in Israel in San Francisco that also were a factor?

Elan Amir  04:07
Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, I've always said I can't live, you grew up on the Mediterranean coast, it's pretty hard to live somewhere where you can't see the ocean even though obviously, the Pacific is very different than the Mediterranean. So having sunshine, having an ocean, and generally temperate weather definitely contributes to, you know, the feeling of familiarity that led to just coming here. And ultimately, of course, you know, never going back.

Rich Alterman  04:34
I know that you really enjoy outdoor sports and but you also enjoy playing classical piano. Who's your favorite composer? And have you actually written any of your own pieces?

Elan Amir 04:44
Yeah, well, we can get the second one out of the way. No, I am not a composer. And you know, it always amazes me frankly, those that can do that effortlessly. In terms of favorite composer. You know, it's always hard to pick after a lifetime of music but I definitely find myself always going back to Bach at any point in time, whether or not it's morning, evening, afternoon stress, no stress. I can basically sit at the piano and open up one of the many Bach books that I have and, and get into that Zen that that makes it so wonderful. So I'll stick with him.

Rich Alterman  05:19
I don't know if you're a fan of the TV show MASH. But there's a great episode where radar is trying to impress this woman, and she's really into classical music. And he says to a hot guy, what do I do if she brings up Bach? Let me just go, ah, Bach, ah.

Elan Amir  05:38
The good reaction?

Rich Alterman  05:39
Yeah. So great. Well, let's dive into business. And you kind of alluded to this earlier, but when GDS, we have a relationship, and we're integrated with measure one. And when we started, started first working together, our mutual client was leveraging your education verification solutions for student lending. And then sometime thereafter, we were on some calls with you all, where you had started migrating or complementing your existing service and started offering income and employment. And now you position yourselves as a first true consumer permission data platform. When you guys started, you know, was that the vision? Or was really your big focus on the education space? And then as you develop your technology, you kind of saw a door open?

Elan Amir  06:22
Yeah, I think you described it accurately. When we started, the focus was education. The good thing about education is it's a very complex set of data. I mean, unlike income data, or employment data that's relatively easy to standardize education data is much more complicated. There's a lot of different types of data. And when we're talking about education data, we're talking about transcripts, grades, credits, courses, the various structures of those. And so we're talking about academic records that are not standardized, highly individualized to the person to the institution. And so solving that problem really requires you to solve complicated data issues and complicated architectural issues, as we were working on that just the general way that I go about product leadership and company leadership. But you know, just because of my technical background, we started looking at, okay, how do we generalize all of this, always trying to leave yourself opportunities, good design, I like to say always that you build good design, not because you necessarily necessarily need it today, but to give you the opportunities tomorrow. And what we did was started generalizing what we knew from our experience in education in such a way so that if it came that we wanted to branch out of education, we would have the infrastructure to do it. And so it doesn't happen overnight. But it was a process. And then sure, as we started engaging in the markets, and saw the opportunities for what we were doing in other data domains, we were well suited to expand and of course, along the way, built up both the technology and the go to market and marketing positioning around the consumer permission data platform, which is now kind of core to our identity, our product and our go to market.

Rich Alterman  08:17
So for the audience, let's let's level set. What exactly do we mean when we talk about consumer permission data or CPD?

Elan Amir  08:24
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it'd be a shame if we went through all this without making sure people knew what that was. So yeah, so consumer permission data is the term of art, albeit maybe a mouthful, that for data that is shared by a consumer with a requesting party, that requesting party could be a university, it could be an employer, it could be a lender, it could be an insurance provider, it could be a health care provider, it could be an accountant, any one of those could be a requesting party, an organization or an individual providing products and services to that consumer. And the consumer permissioned nature of it is that the consumer is sharing that data through a intermediary. In this case, MeasureOne by providing access to that data that is sitting in there online accounts that MeasureOne that then extracts processes, interprets and then delivers to the requesting party. So the consumer permissioning of it is that unlike what we've seen, where data brokers will sell, and resell and aggregate consumer data without the consumers knowledge and without the consumers permission MeasureOne facilitates direct engagement between the requesting party and the consumer and gets explicit consent from the consumer to share the data on behalf of the consumer with the requesting party and that you know, we're not alone in this space, but we certainly are leaders in building out this workflow in various different industries?

Rich Alterman  10:07
So you kind of listed several different industries that that you work with today, a lot of our followers are from the lending space, would it be fair to say that as a percentage basis that use of your platform within the lending arena is potentially one of the bigger use cases?

Elan Amir  10:25
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, lenders financial services, clearly have a need for data in offering loans and financial products to to consumers, we today provide access to income and employment data, we provide access to educational data, which is used by some lenders to underwrite loans. And we also provide access to insurance data that plays a role in the auto finance base, specifically as it relates to lending. And clearly, access to consumer data that is provided directly by the consumer, from their online accounts, opens up data that isn't available publicly, to lenders to better their underwriting and increase their ability to provide services to those consumers. And so financial services and lending without question a key core and very large market for us and our products.

Rich Alterman  11:32
So, you know, historically, for some of the things that people would need to provide, be applying for a loan, they may have to upload some documents that in the old days, fax some documents and now they can upload it from the computer, but certainly part of the value of your solution is that you're reducing some of that friction by streamlining these processes, do you have any, any stats you can share on, you know, how the use of permissioning consumer permission data has helped with, for example, conversion rates for lenders?

Elan Amir  12:05
Yeah, I mean, I don't have direct statistics. But what I do know from experience is that at the point of origination, of course, and every lender knows this, the number one drop off in conversion isn't document production. And what we do is short circuit that entire point of conversion drop off by automating the acquisition and the processing of those documents. So it used to be a process of let me leave the funnel, let me go to my accounts, Let me collect the documents, let me upload them. And then of course, operationally, those documents then need to be either entered or digested into a decision engine like GDS Link for the purposes of ultimately, either underwriting or originating the loan. That entire process now is automated, the consumer in funnel, and, and with MeasureOne, the lender then keeps the consumer in funnel so that all those documents and in particular, the data in on those documents are digitally acquired and delivered into a decision engine, such as GDS Link, and reduces in that way completely what used to be the number one friction point to essentially a real time transaction. And so I don't have direct numbers, because the lenders don't tend to share with us that much. But we do know that, you know, we see, if you ask yourself, well, you know, are users, the big question for consumer permission data is always well, are users willing to engage in this way? Right? And are they willing to allow you to connect to accounts to share data? And the answer is emphatically Yes in 2023. And most of us have some experience with it, we've connected our bank accounts to services like PayPal, or Venmo, we may have uploaded documents, or connected our accounts for the purposes of doing our taxes, or for applying for a mortgage. And it is that experience is exactly what we see. And we see easily upwards of 80% conversion for users that have their data online, they are willing, almost universally, to share that data and engage in this way with measure one in between us and the lender.

Rich Alterman  14:35
It's interesting, I mean, throw out 80% It seems like high number, I've always felt that the use of permission data, that there is a generational aspect to it. Do you think that is true that you know as people that are older and maybe just haven't had the same frequency of, of use with things like Venmo may be more reluctant than the younger generations who this is now table stakes for them. So they may be more willing to do you think that the older generation tends to maybe be a little more suspect or questionable about using the token like this?

Elan Amir  15:10
Yeah, I don't know that it's an age related thing. And I don't know that necessarily the conversion segmentation falls on the line of reluctance without question inherently we rely on is that the data is available in an online account. I mean, that is the nature of consumer permission data, I mean, we have to access that data that the consumer owns for the purposes of course of the data sharing. So in the event, that the data is not available online, which could be for a variety of reasons, either the data is sitting somewhere that isn't online, maybe payroll data is not online, maybe employment data isn't online, maybe the insurance policy isn't online, the academic record isn't online, which of course, is over time going in our direction, because things are gradually becoming more and more online. But if that data is not online, then of course, we can't access it directly. Now, we have addressed that also in our product by enabling the data to be uploaded manually, but then you certainly could run into some of the same conversion issues that you would otherwise. So to the extent that a certain cohort of the population has data that is not available online, because your permission data will be less advantageous. And I think that it's always hard to predict what that cohort will be. But we certainly haven't seen necessarily that it falls on age, age may be kind of or, or it may be more of an indirect indicator of that. Because to the extent that people engage online and have their data online, we haven't seen a reluctance to share or engage in a consumer permission data exchange. And so and I like to think, and we certainly see this, certainly, as you get more digitally native services, as you get a population that demands that the data be available online. All those trends certainly point in the direction of a growing adoption, and a growing utility around consumer permission data.

Rich Alterman  17:23
And certainly lenders think about lenders, right, there's a way they can position, the value, not only in reducing friction, but hey, if you're willing to permission yourself to allow me to look at your data today, the probability that I could, if you're approved, I could put that that money in your account, that unsecured loan, tomorrow is a lot higher, right? If you're going to have to send me paper statements, I have to review them, then that's going to take a lot longer. So lenders can use it as a carrot. It's interesting, I've been with, you know, friends of mine. And I'll say to them, would you ever, you know, permission yourself to pull down your bank account data, applying for a loan? And some of them have said no. And then I'll say to them, do you use mint? And they say yes. And like, Well, for me, you've given up access to many, many accounts, not not only your bank account, but other things. Where do you have something through your financial planner, where you're linking everything, so they have a full picture? Right? So I think sometimes it's education. And people don't really think through the fact that they're probably doing it already, and maybe more of a passive way. So we're all familiar with you mentioned, you know, there's several permission solution providers out there. But maybe they're more pigeon in what they're providing the thing about, like Plaid, DirectID on open banking data, Argyle and Pinwheel on income data, and certainly the number is growing in that area. So, you know, how do you guys position yourself differently than a Plaid or DirectID as an example?

Elan Amir  18:53
Yeah. So Plaid is a good example, they really showed the power and the way for consumer permission data. I mean, consider permission data originally, prior to Plaid there was a company called Yodlee, which those of us that have been around for long enough can certainly remember that I would say catalyze the entire personal finance space, consider permission data really was focused only on banking data, until Plaid and Finicity and kind of open banking kind of came to be probably about, you know, I would say three or four years ago, and then a handful of other companies started looking into the adjacent market around income and employment. And you mentioned, you know, Argyle and Pinwheel as examples of that. We, of course, took a different approach that said, look, obviously, these individual domains are interesting for the users, excuse me for the requesting parties and the customers that need that data. But taking a step back, data is data and consumer permission data on its own is a workflow that finds itself as a value to many different industries. So rather than starting with a specific data domain and focusing all of our efforts into a specific data domain, let's treat all data as equal, and build the infrastructure to be able to incorporate consumer permission data into business workflows. And so the way that we distinguish ourselves is that we view ourselves as an infrastructure provider to our customers, and as a partner that provides them the data domains that they need, and the areas that we currently focus on, which are provide, which are, you know, education, income, employment and insurance data, but just as importantly, offer them with a path to expand into new data domains as their needs grow. And that is, we are the only company that has taken that platform approach, I like to say it's a lot easier to become a platform and PowerPoint than it is practice. And it took us a couple of years from saying that to actually living up to that, and we certainly live up to that. And our product is entirely structured, to be able to be scalable and expandable to essentially any data that a consumer has, that they want to share for the purpose of receiving a product or service from the from the requesting party.

Rich Alterman  21:40
Yeah, and picking up on that. Your website indicates that you're integrating with more than 10,000 unique data sources and more than 5000 unique payroll providers seems like quite an undertaking, you know, without sharing any secret sauce, can you share any of the technical aspects that are involved with, you know, having all these connections? It just seems so overwhelming?

Elan Amir  22:01
Yeah, I mean, well, that's where a lot of the you know, that's where a lot of the, of course, the secret sauce is the IP for us is in being able to take what used to be a engineering effort into nothing more than an operational effort to rapidly identify data sources, incorporate them in incorporate the acquisition of the documents, the understanding of the documents, the mapping of the documents onto the various data types, and essentially scale both in terms of the data types that we provide, and also the number of data sources. You're right that anybody could build a system to do this at small scale. But to do this at the scale, that we're doing it with, essentially unlimited scalability, both in data sources, and in data types and in document types and in data domains requires a underlying infrastructure that essentially can templatized and understand all these different data types in a way that doesn't presume any single type data type, but looks at all data equally. And so for us, a pay stub or an insurance policy, or academic transcript are equivalent concepts in our infrastructure. And to get there, of course, requires a fair amount of development that IP and that's kind of of course, where where we distinguish ourselves.

Rich Alterman  23:30
So one of the services that we offer at GDS is a credential bank attribution service, right? So we could take the raw data from wells, whether it's flowing in through Yodlee Plaid, and we can summarize it into meaningful actionable attributes with your platform today. Are you primarily just passing over the raw data natively? Or do you also offer some attribution where you're trying to turn that data into more actionable intelligence?

Elan Amir  24:03
Yeah, we offer both layers. So for us the data. So there's kind of three layers to our API. One is the underlying documents, which we call items. The other one is the ingested data on those documents, the digital representation of that data that we just call the data type, and then the layer on top of that, which we call services, our insights and services and ingestion of that data to provide a more streamlined way that sometimes can span multiple different documents or multiple different data types. So as a good example of that, is employment is somebody in employment status is somebody employed or not? Or is somebody enrolled in university or not. And so we may look across multiple different documents, multiple different items, and then provide a single API endpoint or a single status that allows the lender or the requesting party to utilize that a manner of interacting with us rather than having to, you know, look at all the data and try and figure it out themselves. Because of course, we have access to the data that we can just give a thumbs up or thumbs down, if that's the question being asked. And we add services all the time, depending on customer engagement, and they say, Hey, you know what it would really, really be great if you guys could give us this insight based on what you see, so that we don't have to kind of try and figure it out.

Rich Alterman  25:30
Interesting. Thanks. on the education side, I read that you guys covered 98% of higher education, US, Canada, UK, and India. Any insights on on how or why you ended up focusing on the India market?

Elan Amir  25:42
Customers! What better insight customers asked us it is a obviously a massive market, there's a lot of both internal and cross border commerce and exchange between in the students and you know, the global economy. So both companies that are selling into India that have needs for educational data from their consumers, and also US and international companies that want to be able to verify educational credentials from Indian students. That is what drove us to expand into India. Once you know, as you can imagine, once you've got an infrastructure like ours, we can do anything. But we can't do everything. Right. So at some point, you know, you have an infrastructure. And you know, I think GDS Link is similar, you know, you guys have built a very full featured, flexible, adaptable platform that could go anywhere. But of course, at some point, you have to sit back and basically let customers tell you what you should be doing. And that's, that's kind of the way that we have approached our product, we built the infrastructure, geography doesn't matter to us data domains don't matter to us. Data Types don't matter to us use cases don't matter to us, we can engage everywhere. And so now we're just letting customers tell us what their priorities are. And that's how we're advancing the product. That's why we went into Canada first. And it's why we went to the UK. It's why now we're going into India. It's why we, you know, moved into income and employment. It's why we moved into insurance. And you can expect to see some additional announcements kind of later this year of new data domains and new data use cases that we'll be going after that are purely customer driven.

Rich Alterman  27:28
Now, one of the things I picked up on your site, and I was curious about was it said that by interpret correctly, so the consumer can kind of control how much of the information that they're actually allowing to be released in I think that was an example of a payroll for payroll data, for example, can a consumer actually control within any one data source, which of the data for example from a payroll platform is available, and what's not available?

Elan Amir  27:58
So the way that we approach that problem is by serving the consumer by becoming a trusted partner to the consumer, right. And what I mean by that is that we receive consent from the consumer not to share the data that we pull, but to share the data that the requesting party is requesting. Okay. And of course, the underlying agreement is beat with the requesting party, is that the case is that the consumer has that they've been upfront with the consumer as well. So the assumption is, is that the requesting party has been upfront with the consumer. And therefore, when we ask the consumer look, are you okay, sharing your income information with the lender? Are you okay sharing your employment status with this consumer, and we receive consent for that. That is the only thing that we share. We do not share any data beyond the consented data today in the product we don't give just because it's not what either consumers or frankly, customers want. We don't provide a the way you describe that day, full blown interface of well share this and not that that and not this, because ultimately, it's very clear to the consumer that when we say employment status, that's going to be employment status. When we say income, it's clear what income is. What we will not do is for example, if we're trying to determine an employment status, we may pull multiple different pay stubs just to be able to figure out whether or not this person is employed or not. We will not share those pay stubs with the requesting party will only share it yep, based on what we see this person is employed. And so that's kind of the line between us being a trusted party to the consumer and ultimately, the requesting party. Being able to trust that what we're providing them is accurate information.

Rich Alterman  30:05
Right. That makes sense. So I'm at the top of the podcast, you had mentioned very correctly the use of educational data in lending. And, you know, we hear a lot about financial inclusion. The CFPB is obviously very focused on the unbanked the underbanked. There's several initiatives out there right now from the credit bureaus on thin no file consumers. So when we think about consumer permission data and the value that it can bring to those cohorts, can you kind of talk a little more about you know, your vision and how you see CPD, really helping bring that unbanked and underbanked into into the financial inclusion space?

Elan Amir  30:45
Yeah, I mean, it goes to what I said at the top right, as you as you referenced, data, ultimately, is a value to the owner of the data. And the biggest issue with consumer data is that consumers have no way or it's very hard for them, to provide that data to companies that are trying to provide them products and services, and in particular lenders. And there's a lot of data beyond the publicly available data, that if only consumers could share it, lenders would gladly take a look at it and be able to expand in that way expand access and expand opportunity and products to those consumers. And the way to do that is consumer permission data. Because consumer permission data. Fundamentally, even though we sell to the lenders and the requesting parties of the world, we fundamentally are operating on behalf of that consumer, allowing them to share that data that previously may not have been available to the requesting party, we're not trying to make available data that the requesting party could get otherwise, certainly, in some cases, there is data that we're streamlining and reducing friction and increasing conversion. That's the value of course for what it is. What we are also doing with consumer permission data is we are providing data that previously was completely not available to lenders and financial services providers, because the only data that they could rely on up until now was the data that aggregators and data brokers had collected and monetized to the detriment of everybody, because this data costs money. And as a result, there's in some sense a toll and attacks associated with it, the consumer doesn't know what is being shared the status of the data, whether or not it's accurate or not. And it's obviously limited to the data that's in these data pools. With consumer permission data, the entire online world of the consumer, which pretty much today for most consumers is pretty much all the data that is involved in their financial picture, all of that data is now available. And it's up to the requesting parties and the financial services providers, lenders, and others to incent the consumer to share that data so that both sides can win, consumers get more access to financial products. And of course, financial services providers get access to additional consumers.

Rich Alterman  33:28
From a fraud perspective, have you guys built two factor authentication into your platform, so that it's available for any any consumer that's, you know, being permissioned their data?

Elan Amir  33:39
We support all of the authentication methods for the consumer that that a consumer provides. So if they have multi factor authentication turned on, we support it, we support engagement and captures, we support all the major multifactor authentication providers and are regularly adding so we certainly provide the security that the consumer expects without requiring them to, quote unquote, turn off some of those features. Some providers early on, certainly, I remember when you tried to engage in observer mission data workflows said, well, sorry, you know, you're you've got security right now that we don't support, you need to turn this off if you want to connect your account. We don't do that. The way that you connect to your account is the way that we will ask you to connect your account and we will support the highest level of security and scrutiny that is necessary.

Rich Alterman  34:39
So I know you're not an attorney, you're not going to give legal advice on this question I'm going to ask but we're often asked even with banking data today, the use of it for turning down a loan. You know, can I give reasons because of your bank account information? Does that come into play at all when you're working with your lending clients for example, on any compliance things around how they can can use the data in their decisioning? I know once again, you're not an attorney, just curious whether that's come up in any of the conversations.

Elan Amir  35:09
I mean, we are ultimately a data provider. So clearly the data that we're providing is being used for decisioning, that data from a, you know, just from a regulatory standpoint, needs to conform to all of the usual adverse action and regulatory framework, we don't serve, we are not a CRA. Right. So we're not serving up the data from our from a different as an aggregator, we are just passing the data through. But clearly, just because we're passing the data through, we need to have a mechanism to ensure that if there's a question of what the data was, we obviously can say, no, look, this was the underlying data that we pulled. But importantly, we're not a data aggregator, and you know, but we play into, we certainly support the lenders in their regulatory and compliance tasks. And you know, where we fit right in with any of their, you know, with any of their other processes and requirements.

Rich Alterman  36:16
I'm going to put you in a in a roleplay. So, you know, we've read, we've read a lot of articles over the years published by are quoting Jamie Dimon, where, you know, he talks about, that the banks better be keeping an eye on these fintax. And you know, how they're advancing, and they're not, you know, they're not encumbered with technical debt, so to speak. So let me put you in the role for a few minutes as the CEO of one of the three national bureaus in the US. And as we think about, you know, consumer permission data, do you envision it potentially starting to erode the use of traditional credit reports? And, you know, if you are the product manager, or the CEO of one of those main bureaus, what would you be thinking about as it relates to CPD or consumer permission data?

Elan Amir  37:03
If I'm the CEO of a one of the three major bureaus, there is no question in my mind that I am not only knowledgeable about consumer permission data, but I am funding an active project in consumer permission data, because consumer permission data should, will and I am sure will be part of the offerings from the from the credit bureaus,

Rich Alterman  37:34
Right. And we know that the CFPB is working on a rulemaking section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection, which is about consumers right to access their financial information, right, and to share that with others. And right now, I think it's more focused on open banking data. But clearly, it's going to expand beyond that. So this is here to stay just like Chat GPT, it's going to grow and certainly keep an eye on understanding how it's going to impact your business is critical. So this has been really, really great. Let me kind of wrap up with a personal question. So you mentioned I know, you have some children that are not in the workforce yet. And you have a background in engineering, data science, and we're certainly seeing the world rapidly change AI and Chat GPT. And you know, as you're talking to your children about what type of careers they should be thinking about in the future, and for other people listening today that that have children, or even people that are deciding what their next career might be, you know, what some of the advice and guidance that you would give,

Elan Amir  38:41
As evidenced by certainly my personal background, I certainly value education not only as a path to jobs, or a job or a vocation, but I also value it just for the sake of education. So in itself, because I believe that ultimately, you know, a good education opens up opportunities, both, you know, at the professional level and is fulfilling at the personal level. So with that being said, clearly, AI and Chat GPT is upon us, I think that there are clearly segments of the workforce that will be automated. I don't necessarily share the some of the doomsday feelings around AI is going to make, you know, whole swaths of the population unemployed or unemployable. What I do think, is that like every thrust of automation, the workforce will be more efficient, we'll be able to do more. And ultimately, the probably the best characterization that I've found, is that around what the role is, and the advice that I would give to my kids, is that AI is not going to replace humans. Humans that use AI will replace humans that don't use AI. And I think that that is there's no question that being aware of the automation opportunities, whether or not it is in content creation, or whether or not it's an engineering, whether or not it's in medicine, whether or not it's in financial services, being aware of the, of the improvements and efficiencies that these new technologies bring will be core to any of these industries. But that doesn't mean that there will be no more doctors, no bankers, and even no lawyers or no content creators. But it certainly means that if you are going to try and compete without the use of these new tools, it's no different than any other automation throughout history, you're running up against probably a wall that and a door that will be closed. I would say the advice I'm giving my kids at this point, given that they're teenagers, if they listen to me at all, is keep learning, keep studying. And, you know, be aware, obviously, of all the developments, but I for one am not concerned for the human race as it seems to be that a lot of people are because we've got you know, these wonderful new tools coming online, Optimistic advice from Elan, for the day. And I hope you're right that it's not a not as dismal as some people think it might be. Well, this is Rich Alterman, and we've been syncing up with Elan Amir, CEO of MeasureOne. Thank you, Elan for joining me today and sharing more about MeasureOne, your offerings and insights on consumer permission data or CPD. We hope that you've enjoyed today's podcast. Please stay connected with GDS Link in The Lending Link to listen to future podcasts and catch up on the ones you've missed. Thank you and make it a great day. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you listen to your podcast. To be sure to leave us a review. Follow us on LinkedIn and connect with us on Twitter at GDS Link that's at G D S L I N K. Have a question for the show or have a specific topic you want us to cover. Hit the link in the description to drop us a note. Thank you for lending us part of your day. Make it a great one.