Interview with Martin Štubian, Director of APIS
Q: Can you give us a brief history of APIS?
MS: Its history begins sometime in the 1970s. The original collective was formed on the ground of the Heavy Engineering Plants Slovenská Ľupča – ZŤS. The main milestone was the year 1989. We as socialist children were brought up to work. Work was the key thing for us. We founded a private company. We were so-called cubes, programmers, computer centre. We had one in the bunch who worked in the State Bank of Czechoslovakia and had a huge problem with counterfeit money. The borders were opened and the flow of counterfeit money increased. At the turn of 1991/1992 the number increased from 80 to 3000.
Q: What could be done about the increased number of fakes?
MS: We found out that we need some kind of expert computer system in which the problem areas (e.g. printing errors, false watermark, etc.) of a captured counterfeit $100 bill would be detailed and graphically presented, including the location of the occurrence, for example in Banská Bystrica. We would process it into some logical system and allow it to be shared. At that time, computers did not have graphical operating systems. We started working on it. But we had no idea what capitalism was. Socialism wasn’t that sharp. There was no competition, commercial or industrial espionage. We invented the system and the National Bank of Slovakia asked us if we would give the system to them as a free gift, to 8 central banks and even to Interpol, on the occasion of an international conference. Subsequently, a foreign private company was interested.
Q: You seem to be ahead of the world technologically.
MS: Yes. We said to ourselves that there must be something good about our system if Interpol and our main competitor are interested in it. As a result, today we process the whole world of payments on a monthly basis. We have also processed the complete world of personal documents, passports, ID cards, technical licenses, driving licenses. These are all valuables that need to be protected. This means that they contain different types of security features, such as anti-counterfeiting protection.
Q: Particularly with money, security features are very important.
MS: For example, a new series of euro banknotes is now being prepared. There is a new series of euro banknotes, which is being launched now. We are talking about European culture or rivers of life and birds. Central banks need to have a head start in time and technology against the other side, the counterfeiters. Because if you give them time and do not update the banknotes, the counterfeiters will produce them so well that they can easily get them into circulation.
Q: Where in the world do you have clients?
ME: Anywhere. For example, national banks or other banks, for example in China. We also have the Ministry of Interior in Saudi Arabia, where the border guards need to know when they enter the country whether the document is genuine and the person carrying it is the holder. It’s built on the latest web technology. We have clients who have been with us for 25 years, whether they are central or commercial banks, the Government Office, the police or border guards.
Q: The dollar is the same in the United States and China. What is the secret of your system?
MS: That it is an expert system, linguistically adapted to the region. If it’s an Arab user, it’s in Arabic, if it’s an American user, it’s in English. These are interesting stories because it’s not that easy to build an expert system in Arabic. There are technical terms like watermark in Arabic, gravure in Russian, or hologram in Polish. For example, with Arabic, we were lucky that our colleague Salem Shubair graduated in Slovakia and coincidentally lives half a year in Dubai and half a year in Slovakia. He has a mother who was in the creation of codified Arabic. So sometimes you get that. We even got a thank you letter from the Ministry of Interior saying that they haven’t had such good Arabic, so professionally well-versed, for a long time.
Q: So identity has become your denominator.
MS: Sometime in 1995 I heard the word biometrics.
I phoned the general number at the Home Office, asked to be put through to someone in IT, and that’s how our journey with biometrics began. We started with the United States, which was the technological cutting edge at the time. In terms of commercial use, biometrics was the absolute top of the line. For example, the first ever commercial use of biometrics was hand geometry, used on Wall Street, to go into the stock market.
We put our heads together and started thinking. We created the software and today we have a whole package of modules that are based on biometrics and personal data processing. There are modules such as attendance, order, access, visit and catering, travel orders, electronic document processing, a whole package of modules on top of that hardware. For 10 years, biometrics was a novelty in Europe. Today, facial recognition, fingerprint, bloodstream or speech recognition is commonplace.
Q: Which territory is interesting for you from the export point of view?
MS: There are no restrictions for us. The only limit is language. You need to have someone who knows the language suitable for the territory.
Q: Artificial intelligence is not enough. In the end, it’s still about humans.
MS: We were very lucky to have a colleague. He was a linguistic genius, a polyglot, but unfortunately he has left us. He spoke different languages, all Slavic languages, and for example he learned Chinese on the way to China. He built us a language module. You need a mother tongue, a language core, and then you just build a language bridge, to a particular language.
Q: Can you tell me an interesting export case?
MS: Do you know how we got to China? In 2003 there was a conference that was organised by a very nice Jeremy Plimmer, an Englishman, and we sat down. I gave a talk at that conference. We were talking and he said to me: “That you want to go to the East, to China, and everybody else wants to go to the West. China is huge. Go to Shanghai, give a talk there and see.” I went. Jeremy, he had a perfect command of business moves. He advised, you have to meet the Chinese in person, you have to go to restaurants there for at least 5 days and literally sniff each other out and if you find that you fit humanly and there is a social connection, it will work. And it really goes, to date the collaboration, to mutual satisfaction, runs, without a contract, on a guy’s word.
Q: What do you think a good leader should have?
MC: A good leader is one who does not push, but one who pulls.
Q: What do you recommend to companies that want to export?
MŠ: Being one step ahead. For example, it’s extremely difficult to get ahead in our IT world today. I have to praise myself. For the last 5-6 years we have been building a group of 16-17 year old students. Their mindset is explicitly technological, they are ahead of us older ones in this. We are using brand new technologies, the area of so called free software, for example part of Progressive Web Applications (PWA), which is the latest trend in centralized applications, suitable for modern so called smart phones. And “our” young people are pronouncedly at home in this.
Thank you for an interesting interview.
Photo source: Eximbanka (Lukáš Klčo)
Photo source 2: APIS