Tech Talks podcast, hosted by Neil C. Hughes, invited Trintech’s CTO, Derick Schaefer to discuss his views on the office of finance today.

As Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Trintech, Derick Schaefer is responsible for leading its software engineering, cloud operations, information technology, and information security functions. He has spent over 25 years in a variety of software leadership roles, including the last ten years running large scale Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) operations.

In the Tech talks podcast, Hughes and Schaefer discussed the impact the customer voice should have on innovation practices for organizations, RPA and technology advancements of the future and the social responsibility that Shaefer practices in his own personal life.

First, Schaefer and Hughes discussed the impact the customer voice should have on innovation. Schaefer stated his belief that SaaS companies especially should be deeply influenced and led by their customers. “[Trintech]’s goal is to listen to our customers,” Schaefer said. “We look at [our customers’ suggestions], take that idea, extrapolate it and figure out how to make that work across the countries, languages, and different accounting rules that we service. As well as add innovation to that and figure out how to make it better.” He also stated that in the market that Trintech occupies, ignoring the customer voices equals less setup for success.

Hughes and Schaefer also conversed about exciting new releases from Trintech— specifically, the new analytics product from Trintech. The newest component of Adra by Trintech’s financial close software suite will give their customers the ability to analyze their financial close process and its efficiencies to allow organizations to refine and improve upon their specific, close process.

“In tech words, we’d call that a Big Data play,” Schaefer said. “And we certainly are leveraging a variety of Big Data technologies on the back end and visualization technologies on the front end… we’re really excited about that.”

Schaefer and Hughes continued to discuss many other topics— specifically, how Schaefer contributes to environmental conservation through his cattle ranch in East Texas, his vision for how RPA will transform the office of finance in the future and how his own father became relatively famous in the accounting space for his hand in an innovation project.

Listen to the full podcast here.

Before joining Trintech, Schaefer led engineering, information security, and compliance for Silicon-Valley based Digital Insight (an NCR Company) who provided online banking and mobile solutions for community financial institutions. Schaefer received his bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Texas at Austin and his MBA from The University of Miami.

 

 

 

 

Written by: Ashton Mathai