Glory Global Solutions – an Asian Perspective on a Global Company

Amongst the sector of the cash community involved in cash handling technology, Glory has led the way in teller automation and recycling systems, and although headquartered in Asia (Japan), has a global footprint. It stands poised to benefit from the new focus on sustainability with its technology, and is also positioning itself for the digital age, with a string of investments, partnerships and acquisitions in recent years to secure a foothold in the broader payments landscape.

The international arm of Glory is Glory Global Solutions, and Ben Thorpe, the company’s Managing Director for Asia-Pacific, has been with the organisation, and its forerunners, for nearly 30 years. Currency News™ spoke to him to find out more about the company, the specifics of the market in Asia, the importance of data, and how the cash cycle should come together to reduce costs and waste.

Ben Thorpe.

Q: Tell us a little about yourself.

A: I came to Singapore in 1996 as a De La Rue graduate trainee to do a very interesting market research project covering growth in South East Asia. Since then, my career has kept bringing me back to this part of the world. I’ve lived and worked in Malaysia, Australia and China, and now in Singapore.

My part of De La Rue became Talaris and ten years ago was then acquired by Glory Ltd, to become Glory Global Solutions (GGS). Today I look after everywhere from India all the way to Fiji, excluding Japan. We have offices throughout the region and strong representation in every market in Asia with the single exception of North Korea. I don't look after China, which is its own separate entity because it's a very different market.

In my current role on any given day I can be dealing with our long term partners in somewhere like Cambodia through to discussions around, or conversations with, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, bankers associations, major brand retailers and then engagements with the big name cash-in-transit companies.

Q: Can you provide an overview of Glory Global Solutions?

A: GGS is owned 100% by Glory Limited and is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with 11,000 staff in more than 28 countries. Turnover is approximately $2 billion. GGS employs around 4,000 people.

GGS is Glory’s international arm for sales, service and distribution outside of Japan. We have over 2 million cash automation devices around the world processing billions of notes everyday with banks, cash in transit centres, cash management companies, retailers and everybody in between. I run the Asia Pacific operations of that for GGS.

We are the market leader in two key areas - branch cash recycling and retail cash recycling. We are number one not just in Asia but globally in every performance area. We tend to find that that puts us in a very strong position because of the reach that we have, not just in terms of geography dealing with multi brands but also the type of equipment and software that we have, ie. everything from a basic counting and sorting device through to fully comprehensive branch transformation solutions.

That allows us to be highly competitive, as we have proven solutions that support customers whatever their specific cash automation requirements may be.

Q: How does Glory define Asia?

A: That’s a really interesting question because there’s such diversity in the region, from the high end of GDP like Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, through to the extreme opposite, countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Bhutan. There’s everything in between that's emerging, rising or falling.

There are parts of some of our countries like India and Indonesia, that are so big in themselves that their regions are bigger than other countries; for example, in India, Uttar Pradesh has more than 200 million people. In addition, there are huge urban-rural divides. Around 70% of Indonesian ATMs are in Jakarta. So clearly most of the major capitals and urban centres have a big impact on how cash is processed.

However, we live in a more connected and globalised society than 25 years ago, when the differences were much more visible. If you go into any reasonable urban centre across Asia, you will now find similar, if not the same, fast food restaurants and coffee joints that everybody is used to. Our customers in the region want the same results and experiences because they are generally experiencing the same kinds of customer pressures.

As a result, there is no such thing as intermediate technology in the cash handling space.

Q: If parts of Asia are absolutely first world and parts absolutely reliant on cash, presumably it is just the amount rather than the type of equipment that they require?

A: Around the region we are seeing big differences in how much cash is being used, bank contact time with customers and the need for automation. Even in places like Indonesia, Vietnam and India the cost of labour is increasing. In first world economies there is a huge pressure to automate as much as possible to release staff to add as much value for customers as possible, and this now applies elsewhere.

We have organisations - cash management companies, the CIT sector, branches - saying we want to automate as much as possible. People come to them for a customer experience rather than counting or handling cash. It works both sides of the counter, the staff need to be really good at what they are doing and to engage with customers, but the customers coming in are time poor. They're not there to watch someone count money, they want financial advice, insights, and to be in and out as quickly as possible.

High quality customer service is incredibly important for our clients. We spend a lot of time with them talking about how we can help their staff deliver that experience. That's definitely changed in the last five years.

Q: And is that the same with whether you’re in Asia or in Europe?

A: Ten years ago a lot of institutions looked to North America and Europe for best practice, but now many Asian institutions are looking amongst themselves, breaking through technological barriers and saying ‘we need to be true to our own countries’.

Whether they are innovating around automating the customer experience, vault management for processing, branches operations and layouts or assisted service, they're much more confident in what they need to do, and we’re certainly seeing innovation come out of Asia where branches are being rejigged.

Indonesia is a great example. Bank Central Asia have spoken about their experience putting in teller cash recyclers. They wanted to massively shorten customer queue times service time and boost their tellers’ productivity. All of which they achieved, and they've been incredibly successful. As the first bank in the world to implement Glory teller cash recyclers as a customer-facing solution en masse, their attitude was, we ‘don't care if no one else has really done it. We are rolling out 2,000 devices and this is how we're going to do it’.

I think other people now look at BCA as an incredible bank taking the lead and initiative. Equally, DBS announced record annual profits of S$6 billion this month, and is often voted the most digital and innovative bank. Clearly Asian institutions are able to take the lead.

Q: Looking at it from a European perspective, bank branches are closing and increasingly the cash is moving to the retailer. Is that the same experience in Asia?

A: It very much goes back to the comment about the diversity, because you have countries like India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam that are still really underbanked. Their opportunity to get financial services to the unbanked is often both digital and physical. They're not exclusive. It's not everything moving to a mobile phone. Organisations are still putting physical bricks and mortar infrastructure out there.

At the other end of the spectrum, countries like Australia, New Zealand and, to a certain extent Singapore, have rationalised their branch networks and seen a European-style decline in those numbers. In response they're moving assets around and repositioning their footprint to meet the requirements of the population.

Q: How would you categorise your customer profile and where are you strongest?

A: We were primarily a commercial banking-oriented business. But in the last ten years our retail business has grown from strength to strength, not just in Asia but globally, and that business is now turning over hundreds of millions of dollars. These two businesses are now equally sized.

Our banking and retail teams are usually separate, but this varies by country. We're seeing growth as new technologies are introduced. During the pandemic many banks looked at their branch strategy again and decided where automation can play a significant role in the future. That has become an area of strength for us, and throughout the pandemic we've been rolling out technology around the world and certainly here in Asia in the bank space, driving growth.

We are least engaged with central banks because we are not in the high-speed large sorter business. While we value our relationships with central banks and we engage with them on some projects, we’re typically far more engaged in the post issuance side of currency management. We work with all the major CIT companies in the region such as Brinks and Prosegur.

Q: Presumably you’re selling not just hardware but machines that are networked and connected with a high level of sophistication?

A: You are 100% correct. A long time ago a lot of currency technology was basically just counting banknotes, and then it moved to sorting and now it's recycling and connected devices. The increasing instrumentation and sophistication of the devices themselves and the always on connectivity has opened up new software-enabled value for our customers.

When it comes to recycling, there is a huge amount of valuable real-time information that you can get from recycling notes, for example how much cash is in the owner’s inventory by denomination. It allows them to decide what needs to be collected and delivered, what type of transactions are being carried out, how busy sites are, what staff levels they need etc. It is an old saying, but data is the new currency.

Being able to monitor and share this type of information using the digital versions of our devices is hugely important. Increasingly we find we are able to work with banks and cash management companies and then retailers to significantly compress the cash cycle. From a green perspective, if you can avoid wasted cash-related trips and have optimum route planning, pickups and drop offs, then everybody benefits.

The devices themselves are getting much smarter, and last year ago we announced the roll out of UBIQULAR™, which is a platform that pulls that data together. It can be networked if the institution wants enterprise insights across their infrastructure. It's definitely a growth area.

Another important element is authentication using machine readable features. It is worth noting that when it comes to machine readability generally, we are very much neutral in that space. We like to work with the banknote community in terms of embedding security into notes, for example. We have relationships with a number of parties to help test and provide feedback on what makes a note truly machine readable. I think because we're not a printer and don't have skin in the banknote design game that a lot of people come to us for honest information.

Q: What about digitalisation of banknotes?

A: You cannot undertake a digital transformation journey unless you've digitalised the banknote.

Every time a banknote or coin goes through one of our devices, we can process and digitise it. We look at the features and we make a digital twin of that note or coin. The digital twin we capture creates the potential for a digital transformation.

We talk about this all the time, but customers, even people who have had their devices for long time, forget this.

Q: What’s your USP in the market, what makes you special over your competition?

A: I think we would always go back to quality. A range of devices built to last so the lifetime ownership costs are minimised and their return is maximised. We take huge amount of pride in our engineering, but it's also the quality of the people being able to deliver those systems around the world.

We do all of our own R&D and design and build all our own machines almost entirely, including developing our own recognition and authentication technologies which we then packaging into solutions, sell and service ourselves. It’s almost from cradle to grave all the way through, so you're going to be dealing with the same organisation. We have customers who come back time and time and time again because they trust us to deliver the performance that they need.

When dealing with someone else’s money, accuracy needs to be beyond six sigma. I think that's what our customers love - our commitment to quality and engineering all the way through from cradle to grave.

Q: When you talk to your customers is sustainability a bonus?

A: In the last five years we’ve seen more queries about power consumption, energy efficiency and how are we disposing of those machines, as well as our adherence to global standards and interest in our approach to corporate social responsibility.

When we're talking to customers, they are interested in the benefits and the efficiencies in terms of minimising interventions and maximising up time. In the last two years organisations are also looking to increase the lifetime of their assets, and that goes back down to the elements around quality, so they are really built to last. We see this area as one of our strengths.

We have developed our ability to redesign equipment. There are a couple of examples where desktops sorters have been shrunk in size, increased their speed and reduced their power consumption. Our engineers take a great deal of pride in trying to get the very best out of what we can do, and that means that often you're getting significantly more performance for lower total ownership costs.

Where labour costs are low, as in India, our smaller devices need to provide significant value time savings. To succeed, we design our equipment to operate in the challenging circumstances and we have over 300 field service engineers in India allowing us to support customers in every major town.

Q: You’ve made a number of acquisitions and investments over the past couple of years in fintech related organisations…

A: We’ve invested in OneBanks in the UK, SoCash in Singapore, and we now have a strategic partnership with PaySafe. We are working with cashier-less technology in Japan, a company called TTG, which is more retail, but we’re also working on buyer pay solutions there too. All these things are around the cash space or around where our customers are working.

We’ve also acquired Acrelec, one of the leading suppliers of kiosks and kiosk technology, just before the pandemic started. We're seeing the space between retail and banking greying, and how people are using technology, playing front and centre in some of our investment strategies.

Late 2021 we announced investment in Revolution in the US, and the important part is not just the very strong position they have connecting retailers and banks together in terms of retail cash management, but also the digital platform that brings that together, so helping provide provisional same day credit.

These are all things that we believe are bringing the banks and retail worlds together.

Q: Finally, if you could ask the banknote community for one change in the banknote/coin and one change in the cash cycle what would they be?

A: With central banks it's a straightforward request. The templates that sit in our machines, that detect and determine the notes, are what makes them intelligent. In order to develop those templates and finish them on time, earlier access to new notes before they’re released would allow us to support the release of new currency much faster and more smoothly.

For the cash cycle as a whole, I think the change I would ask for is members of the cash cycle to work together more for local recycling. One of the big wastes is the significant cost of taking cash from one location and delivering it to someone else maybe 50 yards down the road. We believe that local recycling and working together could really reduce the costs, improve the benefits and have a significant green advantage as well. That's people being willing to work together. It's not about compromise but about recognising where value sits and where risk sits.

It requires the cycle to come together, and one of the big things we’re doing with UBIQULAR and our same day value software and treasury management services is being able to say, ‘how do we get an overview, make sure the data is moving securely, and who takes ownership when’.

In most cases it adds significant competitive advantage to all the parties involved. It’s not new, there's some very good examples in the US where that's been happening for a long time, but there's still a long way to go in many other markets.