After a successful decade-long partnership, Naissus technologies sat down with GBI's Vice President of Technology to talk about our mutual growth.
It’s been over a decade since we started our journey together with Gold Bullion International. We may have started small, but the ideas were big and there were a lot of goals ahead. Now, 10+ years into the partnership, we wanted to reflect on our ups and downs and talk about our collaboration.
A few weeks ago, we sat down with Daniel Rapaić, a GBI Vice President of Technology, and a former NT employee. Since he has experience on both terrains, we took the opportunity to have a chat with Daniel about our previous and future milestones and the collaboration we have.
We talked about our challenges and how we managed to overcome them, the simultaneous growth of our businesses, and what the future holds for us and our decade-long partnership.
Well, first of all, thank You Daniel for taking the time off of work to indulge us in this interview. Can you please describe your company, your role, and your position at GBI?
GBI is a provider of global solutions for precious metals, digital currency, and digital assets. We have a platform that is allowing our clients to connect to a lot of liquidity providers, like dealers and such, through our platform. They are integrating with us and we are allowing them to access our pricing and products. That way, they can buy, sell, and order deliveries of any asset that we are offering.
We started with precious metals, and the main platform was built for precious metals trading. The original platform, built by the founder of Naissus tech was allowing the retail or institutional clients to use our platform to buy, sell, or deliver precious metals. I am a VPT and I lead several teams, one of them being the team that is working here in NT. We are improving the platform that we have been developing for the last ten years.
The other part of my work is to maintain day-to-day technology operations and to make sure everything is working on a daily basis. I’m also maintaining the technical infrastructure of GBI and discussing how we can improve that over time.
How long has GBI been working with Naissus?
From the beginning. One of the owners actually started this, the whole GBI effort, along with Peter Custer, our CEO, about 10 years ago. So I would say that the cooperation has lasted for one decade plus.
What is your personal experience of the GBI-Naissus tech collaboration?
I actually became a GBI employee through Naissus tech. So I cannot say the cooperation is bad – it’s excellent, to be honest.
So you have experience from both sides.
Yes, pretty much.
One of the main concerns is always the time zone difference, how does that affect our collaboration?
It’s always challenging, but we’ve been able to overcome that part since the beginning. The good thing is that you can arrange what needs to happen during the overlapping period between – I’m speaking EST – between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m.
You can have meetings with the guys, agree on what is needed for the next day.
In some situations, this is very good because you can ask that something happens tomorrow, and they will have enough time to go working on that while we are sleeping, so that part is good.
How did you overcome the challenges we had?
Cooperation. Every time we had something that was not working well we would discuss the problem, cooperate with other people, and resolve that one way or another. So that’s it, just the cooperation and communication, of course.
One of our goals was to go beyond our client's expectations and needs. How did that go when it comes to GBI?
The key people are always available. We will work our working hours, and we will be available after hours to help if needed, and this is the key to this cooperation.
According to you, how successful is the process of defining requests and needs between GBI and Naissus?
We’ve moved to Agile now, so we will work towards better defining requests in the future. That means helping engineers by defining more precisely what is needed and helping product owners by explaining what is being built. It is a process, and it is challenging, but I am sure we will get there.
Does GBI trust Naissus to finish the projects, meet the deadlines, and meet the requests?
We have a stable team that is acquainted with the complex system we have created, and we are constantly working on making estimations as precise as possible.
How much has Naissus technologies contributed to the growth of GBI?
We actually grow together. Well, GBI started with one single person from Naissus tech and that cooperation still continues after a decade. GBI has a lot of different projects now. On the other hand, Naissus tech has become a very comparative company, so growth is actually seen on both sides.
What do you like most about working with Naissus technologies?
People and commitment. This is what I like a lot with Naissus tech.
Finally, what do you think we should improve?
It’s a good question. The most critical is to try to find people with expertise, knowledge, commitment, and eagerness to gain new knowledge. So, cultivating that kind of people is something that I really appreciate when it comes to Naissus tech.
There is nothing we are more proud of than the transparent communication and cooperation we have developed between the teams over the decade. We are certain that the Naissus tech - GBI partnership is a rock-solid one, and will last for many years to come.
