jeff (00:00)
This is Jeff Rittner, and you are listening to episode 36 of Rittner Reflections, a forum for making sense of the dynamic and complex world of cross-border trade, and a space to explore the cultural forces and personal experiences that shape how we live and lead in uncertain times. Welcome back if you had a chance to listen to

Episode thirty-five, you heard a great conversation with the leaders from WIT, Northern California, TTRA, and PAEI. Let me remind you that the Global Trade Compliance Best Practices Conference is now just two weeks away.

If you haven't registered yet, I'd encourage you to do so now. It's one of the few places where practitioners can compare notes, get practical guidance, and hear what's really going on across the trade community.

One of the themes that came up in that conversation was burnout. You know, not just personal burnout, but but the kind that comes from trying to navigate today's environment with systems and tools that were built for a different era. A lot of teams are running incredibly hard, but they're running on infrastructure that slows them down. And when you combine that with a trade landscape that keeps shifting, plus

A wave of AI tools that promise a lot but still leave people wondering where the real value is. It's no surprise that so many professionals feel stretched so thin. This is why I'm excited to have Matt Bell join me today. Matt has spent his career helping companies turn regulatory complexity into practical decisions. He's seen firsthand how teams struggle with outdated systems.

Unclear tools and rising expectations. After a tremendous career as a trade consultant, Matt next builds something that reflects that reality. He calls it Matt's list. It's his way of mapping the trade tech landscape while giving professionals a clearer view of what's out there. Matt understands the moment we're in, and he understands what's coming next.

So I ask, are you trying to figure out your ever growing options in the trade compliance software market? Do you wish they were all listed in one place with real user reviews? Then this episode is for you, whether you're a developer, vendor, a buyer, or just a trade nerd who is curious.

jeff (03:21)
Matt, welcome to Written Reflections. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Matt Bell (03:26)
Hey, thanks, Jeff. It's great to be here. I've been a listener from episode one, so I'm excited to to be a guest today.

jeff (03:33)
I was just thinking back as I prepared, how long have I known you and where did I first meet you? And the only thing I could think of is that we must have I think we we were speakers at a conference, I think might have been when I first met you, but I don't know if you recall.

Matt Bell (03:45)
Yeah, I think we crossed paths at conferences, but I think when ACI had us be on a panel together was really when we got to know each other in those prep sessions. And then I recalled a future conference, we actually filled in for a speaker who didn't show up on China export controls and they came to you and I and said, Hey Matt and Jeff, you got an hour, can you cover this slot? And so we took their slides and prepped and I don't think anybody in the audience knew. We didn't know fully what we were talking about. We did a did a good job of covering the topic.

jeff (04:13)
Absolutely. I think we got the highest ratings on that one.

Matt Bell (04:15)
Yeah, it was a good one.

jeff (04:17)
I don't know. But anyway, I do remember that was quite interesting. Yeah. So those things happen. Matt, you've been in the in this trade profession for a long, long time. you've advised a lot of people. but recently I learned something You've been in real estate.

And you now are getting into the Airbnb business. And now I I had a whole episode about my Airbnb experience, but I'm just curious about yours and how that's going.

Matt Bell (04:40)
But yeah, a friend and I got involved buying rental houses a long time ago. I think twenty fifteen's when we started buying together. That turned into RV and boat storage. I've now sold out of that business and I've still got some rentals myself. But the yeah, the new adventure is Airbnb turning a log cabin that overlooks kind of a historic downtown in Alabama into an Airbnb and

You know, listened to your podcast and you and I talked about it and got some learnings from you and lessons. But yeah, it's a that's one of the new adventures I'm working on.

jeff (05:09)
Yeah, and I learned recently you told me of even a bigger adventure where your log cabin had a massive log come down. Fortunately not on the log cabin, but

Matt Bell (05:18)
Yeah, about a

hundred plus year old oak tree they estimate, six feet across. it was struggled to find somebody with a big enough chainsaw to even get it off the driveway, but you know, you overcome obstacles in all things and that was a a new one I wasn't expecting.

jeff (05:31)
That's great. Well, you show me pictures. It looks like it's gonna be a beautiful place. And once you got it all up and ready to go, let me know. Maybe I'll come explore Alabama. I've never been to Alabama, so it might be kinda fun. Yeah. Absolutely,

Matt Bell (05:41)
Yeah, you can come be one of my test guests to give me all the feedback on what I need to fix.

jeff (05:46)
yeah. Well then then I'll have to have you join join ours in North Carolina and you can let us know. You know, it's it's always an interesting experience. I'll tell a quick little story. I had someone contact me this morning and they wanted to know, do we have a pack and play? And I said

Back

and play. Yeah, I think we have one. Sure enough we do. Then I got thinking, wait a minute, we don't have any betting for it. I so I I made sure they knew and they were they were happy with that. But anyway, you just never know what happens. Things just pop up. So it's kind of interesting. So I'm curious, you know, both of us seem to be on a similar journey. I left Intel after thirty-four years in November twenty-four, and and you left your consulting practice, which I think you'd been doing for

Multiple, multiple years, I think early twenty twenty five. So, what are you up to now? What what's keeping you busy in in addition to your real estate?

Matt Bell (06:38)
Well, one of the great things about leaving consulting, maybe similar maybe to leaving Intel, you a nice healthy severance, but I got what they call garden leave. So they pay you to not work during your non compete period. So that was an opportunity that I took to

kind of enhance my educational knowledge on the subject of AI. Right. I had been consulting with people, looking at tools and realizing, you know, this obviously is not a fad. This is something that is in going to change how we operate in the international trade space. So I went and got a graduate certificate kind of degree program from the University of Texas in applied AI for business.

I had to learn basic Python coding. I had to really dig in, create my own neural networks, really understand the architectures that are out there and the different tools. And so that's kind of what drew me into what I'm doing now, which is I was looking at all the use cases and then realizing a lot of people have already built them. And there's some really cool companies out there who have built some great products that I'd never heard of, and I considered myself fairly well connected within the trade world.

jeff (07:43)
So you created what is known as Matt's List and I've had a chance to go out there and look at it, but I'm just kinda curious, what sort of gaps did you see in the market that prompted you to put together a list

Matt Bell (07:56)
Well, I think the fact that it didn't exist. When I started realizing my AI use cases had been built by these different companies, I started s wondering where there was a list or a database where I could kind of look through all the different companies. And really nothing existed. And so there was just two options kind of Google it, research it,

Go past the first page on Google, which nobody ever does, and you find some of the small and medium companies maybe. Or you kind of asked around within your network. You talked to people who, you know, are in the community of trade compliance and said, Hey, have you heard of a tool that is really good at export classification or has done this deeper due diligence or has connected these dots? And so when I realized it didn't exist, I started kind of doing some market research and I would talk to lawyers and consultants and in-house leaders and say, Hey, how do you find your next software?

How

do you know what your options are? And that really drove me to say, this needs to be built, if nothing else, just as kind of a passion project gift to the trade compliance community, like let's all put this in one place as a starting point.

jeff (08:56)
Right.

Right. Right. No, I've been out there and I've looked at it. And it's interesting, Matt. I I have clients and I have a client just last week that we were talking about their systems and they were they're struggling because they're gonna be going through a major transition to one of the the common, you know, SAP GTF systems. And but yet they have certain tasks like screening they need to do and I found myself saying, you should go to Matt's list.

'Cause you can find all the tools, but then I thought, well, I don't even know how how does it work? How would they do that? So k help me understand what what should I have told them how they could use Matilist?

Matt Bell (09:33)
Well, we hope it becomes fairly intuitive, but once you're on the website and the website is tradecompliance dot software.

Real easy to remember. I didn't even know you could get a.software domain, but you can. So it's tradecompliance.software.

jeff (09:43)
Okay.

Matt Bell (09:46)
And you can just simply go in and filter by category. So for example, they're looking for screening. I looked this morning. There are 90 listings under the restricted party screening category. Now that might be companies who only do screening. It might be companies who do almost everything, including screening. Right? So you can search that way. If you have two or three companies in mind, there's also a compare feature. Right at the top, you can click compare.

compare and then it'll let you choose you know multiple vendors that you may be aware of to kind of see what the what options they have, what their pricing model looks like, you know, different

you know, security standards, things that may be relevant to your procurement process so you can compare and contrast. And then ultimately what we hope people will do is put reviews. Because the idea is there really were no reviews out there for these companies. You kinda had to just know somebody who knew somebody and in a back room would tell you what they thought about it. It's like we're trying to break through that to get more transparency.

jeff (10:42)
Yeah, I mean that's how I always kind of navigated this this area is, it was like who I knew in the network that was using a tool and how is it? Does it work for you? What are the things you like, you don't? So a lot of times it was for me anyway, it was it was sort of word of mouth or who you knew. And so this this sounds like this would allow you to probably find tools that you'd never even imagine, right?

Matt Bell (11:02)
I

would have thought if you asked me how many of these trade compliance tools are out there, thirty, forty would have been maybe my guess. I I asked a lot of people and I kind of got varying ranges from ten to maybe fifty. Very few thought any more than that. There's over two hundred companies in our database right now. and some have multiple products, some have a single product, some haven't fully published their products yet because they're new. I've discovered probably ten since we launched a few months ago.

I also discovered about 30 zombie companies I called them. So they showed up in the research.

jeff (11:32)
Okay.

Matt Bell (11:34)
They had a website. It looked like they were active, but I couldn't schedule a demo. I couldn't get them to respond to an email. I tried calling a phone number if they had one listed and got nothing. So I think there's so much happening in this space that that's the other thing is just trying to keep it curated

for people to know who's

jeff (11:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Bell (11:49)
really active. And there's acquisitions happening. So as that happens, I've got to kind of consolidate listings as you see people kind of bought up.

jeff (11:57)
is there anything else about the market that you might want to describe for us? How is it different than than it used to be? I know I like we talked about the fact that you can you can now actually see a whole list of compared to who you know. But is there anything else about the market that you're seeing that would drive someone to use this tool?

Matt Bell (12:13)
Well, I think it's dynamic and changing, right? It it used

jeff (12:16)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Matt Bell (12:17)
to be honestly fairly static. Early in my career, you know, there were four or five players and maybe I didn't know everybody, but there weren't that many new entrants to the market. And when there was, they were bigger companies that were, you know, trying to break into a new area and so they had the funding to be at conferences and to do the advertising. But with the AI tools that are now available,

I mean, some of these companies are single person companies that were started, you know, from their home office using some some very basic tools to build out something that is useful, that is, that is a capable product. And so that's the big difference, is it's changing its dynamic. And so trying to keep up with that is what of i view we're doing, you know, with Matt's List and and our company is to try to help you keep up with those things because AI is the hot topic and

85% of the products listed, I kind of did this analysis, are either claiming AI native or AI enabled. Those are two different things. Native means it's built on AI architecture. Without AI, it falls apart, doesn't work. AI enabled is you probably have some older architecture and they've added on some AI capabilities, usually just adding a language model to you know narrate the output to tell you interpret what the data system is telling you.

in a cohesive way, co coherent manner. So you gotta be careful because they all advertise AI. So you really gotta dig in and see what type of AI and it's not the end all be all for everyone.

jeff (13:45)
Yeah, no, that that's a great point.

I have been saying for a while now there's probably two topics that are probably the hottest topics in the world right now that you hear on almost

Matt Bell (13:55)
Mm-hmm.

jeff (13:56)
every day, every newsfeed. International trade and AI. I mean, those are just two topics. And so here you've got a situation where the trade community is ripe for AI.

capability because the the trade community in and the whole practice is built so much around data, right? And that's what AI is just absolutely at this moment so good for. And so you take those two together. In fact, Matt, I I would be willing to bet that on any given week, I receive a LinkedIn request, I receive an email from somebody that's developing an AI solution for the trade community and they want to get

my

insights. I I have met with so many people giving them kind of and and then eventually a several of them have turned out to where I actually am being asked to be on their advisory board to to help them. Cause what I'm finding, Matt, is that as you said, a lot of times there are these are people that see the technology and they see the solution. Right? I'm an engineer, I develop software, I can see how AI would really help the trade. I mean trade's in the news every day. The problem is they don't know anything about trade. And so

they're struggling because they in order to really build a a tool that's gonna be useful, you've gotta have some kind of understanding of how it all works, right? And how the trade gets gets done. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or you've seen something similar to as you've had conversations with some of these folks.

Matt Bell (15:24)
Yeah, we must be on the same target list because I get similar requests regularly. And what I

jeff (15:28)
Right.

Matt Bell (15:28)
see is you've got some companies that are primarily technologists without trade knowledge. And

jeff (15:34)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Bell (15:34)
and they can build really cool things, but they don't know exactly how to apply it, how to market it, exactly why they're solving the problem they're solving and and how to sell that. But I see the opposite too. I see some trade professionals trying to jump into this space without the

jeff (15:46)
Yes.

Matt Bell (15:46)
technologist partner to really help them do it correctly. And so you need both.

I've had several ask me to be on the board. My position has been no because I want to try to stay independent. I want Matt's

jeff (15:55)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Matt Bell (15:58)
list to be kind of an objective place to go and not, you know, something where I have some strange incentive because I'm advising one company versus another. So but I've advised them all. Go find people like you. sometimes I've even

jeff (16:10)
Ha ha.

Matt Bell (16:11)
given your name out, so maybe I'm responsible for some of those. Sorry if you're getting too many,

jeff (16:13)
that's it.

Matt Bell (16:14)
but I've said you need that knowledgeable person who knows the subject matter.

To one, give you credibility when you are trying to sell, but also just to make your product work effectively. And and and you see these, you know, screening we talked about, but another big category we're seeing is anything customs or tariff related, right? Tariffs are all in the news. There's billions of dollars of recovery out there to be had. And so people see billion dollar markets, they start investing in those tools. And so that's the second largest category after screening is customs compliance tariff related management. 63 companies in the list.

That's their primary category. Now you can be in multiple categories, but that's their primary. And so y you kind of see these driving factors. What's in the news, like you said, trades all over the news, specific

jeff (16:57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Bell (16:59)
things in trade are in the news.

jeff (17:00)
in your tool, how do you differentiate, those that are successfully, putting forward solutions versus those that are just ideas and so on? Is that clear when you go in there or is it something you just have to find out?

Matt Bell (17:12)
So one way we do it and we're not evaluating them all and trying to give our opinion, but we do include the size of the company.

jeff (17:20)
Okay.

Matt Bell (17:21)
Right.

So you can look and you can say, this company is, you know, hundreds of employees. They're a more mature, established player in the market. You can go see some that are what we call micro, one to ten employees. Right. And it doesn't mean that they don't have a good product and it may not be something you want to be a part of, but it gives you that at least flag to check to say, okay, when I talk to this company, I like what I'm seeing and hearing in their marketing material. How many customers do you have? Are any of them my peers? You can ask those questions and you have a starting point at least to know what size company.

they are how long they've been in business. We have the year founded right for the companies as well. So those are just indicators for you is to say how mature is this company and you know bigger multinational companies probably are going to tend towards the more established companies. You know, small and medium companies might be more open to kind of the entrepreneurial model of really building a product alongside your vendor and letting it be dynamic to your needs.

jeff (18:16)
do you do any sort of categorization on the cost? 'Cause that's always the big question that people like, I I don't have the budget, you know, and so then they go and they end up building their own thing 'cause they don't have the budget.

Matt Bell (18:27)
We we have some of those features, but I need the data, right? And it's not all publicly available. The interesting

jeff (18:31)
Right. Right.

Matt Bell (18:33)
part doing all this research is I think I looked only five companies in our database right now publish their pricing just transparently.

Most of them are, hey, you got to call to get a quote. It might depend on volume. And those tend to be the smaller, newer entrants to the market that have just set flat pricing based on certain volumes. We want to get there. We want to have pricing tiers. We do have some questions about timeline to implementation, which is also a key factor sometimes in your decisions. Security standards, which your IT team may just nick somebody if they don't meet certain standards. So we tried to think through those kind of touch points that are outside of trade within your procurement process.

to try to gather that data, cybersecurity standards and things. But we need the input from the vendors, right? So the vendors can claim their profile. It's absolutely free. I'm not charging them to claim their profile and get their information correct. I did my best with the tools I had available, but they should all know their company better than I do.

jeff (19:29)
Right. Right.

Matt Bell (19:29)
Right. So that's what I really

need is vendors to update their profiles with that right information and that'll bring more transparency. And then over time we need user reviews to say, here was my experience, here's where it's at. And there's some questions in the review process about, you know, timelines and costs, not specific dollars, because that's more proprietary, but at least ranges to give us

an idea of, you know, like we all see when we go to restaurants, right? How many dollar signs is this restaurant? Okay, that's four dollar signs, that's the anniversary restaurant. That's not the f you know, Thursday afternoon.

Baseball restaurant, you know.

jeff (20:02)
Yeah, no, that's that's kinda I was thinking of. So let's let's let's talk about vendors for a second because you know, w we've talked about the users and how they might want it, but the vendors it's an interesting situation. So why would a vendor want to be on your list? What what value do they and what are you seeing? Are they are they coming to you? Are you having to chase them or how's that working?

Matt Bell (20:22)
It's a combination, right? I think the bigger companies are less interested because they're already spending so much money on Google ads and conferences and they got a lot of visibility with the audience they want. I think, you know, even just below that, and of course the small and medium startups, they they all want to be on there. They wanna be listed. That's why some have just come out of the woodwork and said, Hey, I'm not on your list. I should be. I'd like to be. I think the value is that it's it's all in one place and it's a very niche market, right?

We don't have a lot of random people who are in the trade compliance world searching through our website. Right? You know, within the first six weeks of launch, we had over 3,000 unique IP addresses visit the website. I'm guessing the vast majority of those are some of my LinkedIn contacts and things as I pushed it out there and things, but that's predominantly trade compliance professionals. And so when you explain that to some of the vendors, they're like, well, that's the audience we want. Like,

That's the whole synergy here is I want the same audience you do. I want to show them their options. You want to sell your product. Like we're in this together. So I I've got to prove the audience first, right? And so we're we're doing that this first probably year is proving, hey, people are coming to the website. Here's the search terms they're using. Once we have enough of those analytics, then we can share them with vendors more strategically to say, hey.

This is the type of person coming. Here's the search terms they're using. Here's the categories that get the most traction, et cetera. That's what I gotta demonstrate, is that I have their audience.

jeff (21:51)
Yeah, that could be super valuable. How are they reacting to the idea that they're being rated? I don't think software companies have typically ever been rated before

Okay, I see.

Matt Bell (22:00)
Y well, we'll see 'cause right now there's only a handful of reviews on the site. I really want

that's what I need the listeners to do. It's go out and tell all your friends to go review some software. And you can do it anonymously.

We do verify who you are on my end and make sure

jeff (22:15)
Okay.

Matt Bell (22:15)
that you're legitimate and you're not just out there talking bad about a competitor or something. Like there's some vetting, but we don't have to publish your name and your company if that's sensitive for you. But we we all want that. We

jeff (22:24)
Right. Right.

Matt Bell (22:26)
all would love that. And some of the vendors

are very excited about it because they feel like that's how they're gonna stand out is they have passionate users who love their product. I'd say some of the more legacy vendors aren't interested because they don't necessarily want the feedback. They don't want to manage the reviews and the and the struggles that maybe they faced in the past and they're improving on. But I think to me, that's what I would be looking at as a buyer is, hey, some of these companies are pretty big and they have no reviews. That's strange.

jeff (22:58)
Right.

Matt Bell (22:58)
you know, and then some of these small and medium companies have, you know, hopefully start building up the reviews, which is really right now I call it the cheat code. There are paid levels, we can talk about that in a minute. But

jeff (23:08)
Yeah.

Matt Bell (23:08)
if you just want to show up higher on the list right now, go get reviews because the algorithm weights reviews pretty heavily

jeff (23:13)
Is right.

Matt Bell (23:15)
in how it selects who shows up.

jeff (23:17)
Right. Right. So so that's helpful because it's like i all the other businesses, if you're an Uber driver and you've got a four point one versus four point nine, So I I can see how that could be very motivational to try to get that out there. So you mentioned, tiers and and and so on. How how do how do you then get paid? Is it a subscription? Is it a one time fee, or how do you how do you manage

that? Subs yeah, okay.

Matt Bell (23:41)
Yeah, it's it's subscription based. there there's

two different tiers and it's just you know there's a banner on the front page that you know cycles through the the paid tiers. So right now we

have three that are on there. And clandedly they didn't actually pay me. There are three that are smaller companies, they're not huge, but I wanted to do a free trial for them just to show them. Hopefully they can get more traction, they can get more interest in their product, and then you know.

There's different there's two different tiers they pay. a lot of companies want to do referral. hey, if you send us a lead, we'll send you a commission check. one, I don't really want to keep up with it. We may end up doing that at some point. So far I've said no,

because like I said, I want to keep it as objective as possible.

And and for a small company, that's not the same fairness as a large company because the cost of the software. I would get a much bigger check referring the big guys.

And and to me, that's not the incentive I want to create. Because I really view this as, you know, I joke this is my passion project to help the trade community. My wife hopes it has a profit at some point, at least to cover the development costs and some of my travel costs to conferences and things. But I just wanted it to do it because it needed to be done. and when I talk to consultants and lawyers, they love it because they're concerned about recommending a particular company, and then if it doesn't go well.

implementation or the outcome. So they would love to just defer and be like, hey, go to Matt's list. Hey, look over here. And so that's kind of the whole thing with the reviews. The vendor relationships I think will be better with the the consultants and lawyers if everyone just kind of buys into that ecosystem.

jeff (25:22)
Yeah, no, absolutely. I can I can say and vouch for that because as a as a consultant myself, that's exactly what I found myself doing. They're struggling with a particular application and well hey, let's go to Matt's list and see, you know, th they've got good data out there for you to look at. You know, one of the things I've also found, as I consult with companies, and I l I I experienced this when I was at Intel, is that most of these companies that are doing trade today, they already have like a corporate ERP.

Right. And oftentimes I ran into, well, we already have a system, you know, why do I need another one? So how in your experience and just looking at companies and how they practice trade, how how do how would you kind of advise companies who have a an ERP that maybe does some trade functions but doesn't maybe give the the trade community what they need?

Matt Bell (26:12)
Well,

I think there's two ways to look at it. The traditional ERP, which it's about figuring out what you need it to do, right? Really defining those activities or those outcomes that you need out of the system. And then working with your IT to see if that's possible. What I found historically with traditional ERPs is it wasn't possible once you really gave them the to do list. That would help break the ice into getting an outside, you know, tool. What I see with more modern issues is the AI challenge.

Somewhere your executives have chosen an AI horse to run this race with, whether it's Copilot, whether it's Claude, whether it's anthropic, whatever it is, right? You've got all these tools, Grok for some. And that is the end-all be-all. Hey, we chose this AI platform and this is what's gonna solve our problems. And so now you have to prove that that AI tool is not capable of giving you reliable answers in the trade compliance space, and that you need a bespoke tool.

That also claims to be AI native or enabled. And so there's a lot of political capital now put into which AI tool your company chose. And when you show up and say, Yeah, that tool doesn't work for my purpose. I need a different AI tool, that's now the bigger hurdle. And I've talked to a lot of these vendors just meet and greet calls and explaining what we are, but hearing from them what they're seeing in the market. And that hurdle right there is one of the biggest challenges because

i it's you don't need to rip out the other AI tool. You don't need but it's justifying a new one and that the the other one that they chose wasn't fit for your purpose. And that's a challenge. Because AI

is less defined as to what it can and cannot accomplish. Whereas the old ERP systems there was maybe some structural reason it couldn't do certain functions. It didn't have the data, it didn't have those, you know, thinking capabilities. Whereas in theory, with enough data, enough time, enough training, every AI tool can do everything.

And so trying to disprove that in a specific use case I think is a challenge.

jeff (28:13)
Yeah, no, that definitely is. And you know, one of the things that I've I struggled with when I was running the compliance org was in order to full to have a full effective compliance program, there's multiple parts, you know, you have to classify. And today, you know, classification when it comes to tariffs becomes huge, right? You have country of origin, you've got on you've got sanctions and making sure you're not dealing with someone that's on a list, you know, you've got all these different parts and

Typically the ERP tools that have been around a long time, they developed a solution to cut to cover all of those. Right. And so today what as you think about your list and you've you've got you know screening tools and you've got classification, the problem I see going forward is how do people get away from having five systems? I have this tool over here that does this the screening, I have this tool that does classification, and we got to make sure they all work together. I mean, what you have any insights on how how do companies manage that?

Matt Bell (29:09)
They're

not managing it all very well. and I think part of it is embracing that you may need multiple tools. I I don't

know that there's the single perfect solution that addresses all of those issues, right? the tool that's gonna be best for let's say export classification, which is much more challenging in my view than HS classification, is probably gonna be a company who focuses and invests specifically on that issue. Right? That's their core knowledge and capability, but what you're seeing in the market is

It was there's broad-based tools that have a module that does that, but it's one of ten modules, and it may not be very good if your complex products are involved. Right. But if you're investing only in export classification, you're not gonna be great at screening. And so that's where maybe what we'll see is consolidation, right? I th there are so many companies out there right now that I think we have to see we've seen it over the years, right? With with Descartes as one example, buying up multiple companies.

Visual compliance and OCR and and data mime and all these things. Like you may still see some of that. And and part if I was still in house, my hope would be somebody goes out there and finds the best in each of these sub specialties and puts them under one roof, but lets them continue to invest and operate, you know, those products. Because a lot of times what

you see is the investments maybe not always there, right? And so then they start to fall off. But that's it's very dispersed.

where that expertise is within these products. And I think that's the challenge is, okay, we convinced them the ERP won't do it. We convinced them, you know, co-pilots not maybe not the right answer for this use case. But now I've got four other use cases that might need their own products. Like that's that's just such the challenge. So it's it's risk balancing, right? You

as a chief trade officer at Intel, there was problems you needed to solve, but there was priorities for those problems. And so I think that's where people are really looking at is what's the number one or two or three

top priorities that we need a tool for and the rest will make do with what we have, even if there's a better tool out there for priority number seven. We just aren't gonna get there. And I think that's the reality of some of these companies doing a really good job on a particular issue. They're not high enough up on the priority chain to sell that unique bespoke product.

jeff (31:23)
that's so true, Matt. I live that. You know, we had we had things we definitely needed. And you had to go at in a large company like Intel, you had to go through an IT prioritization process. Unless your item somehow got above the tax issue where they were gonna say billions, or got above, you know, some sort of internal tool.

you you missed out every year on the prioritization and so you just had to suck it up and live with it, right? And I I think that still exists. I think that's still a challenge. And today with AI and everybody spending on AI, if you can't if you can't demonstrate I got a need that's gonna rise above that priority, that it's gonna be difficult. That's that's just

Matt Bell (32:01)
Well, and I think

the internal AI teams are going to catch up on these issues, right? And I think that's

gonna be the interesting battle within the market is a lot of companies are just investing in their own internal AI teams and as they start moving down that priority list 'cause they accomplish the tasks, you know, trade becomes top of that list and you're like, Okay, we need something that can help us with, you know, forced labor due diligence and we need something that can help us with this classification or

this

screening, we need a different level of ownership knowledge. And here's a database we can connect to. Can you use the just the data, which isn't as expensive to buy, to then churn out the result or the analysis that I need? And so, you know, when I was in consulting, that was a big debate within the company for consulting, was should we be focused on building AI products and selling them? Or should we be focused on helping companies build their own AI product internally and then hand it off to their team to maintain it?

And that's the direction a lot of consulting was going was it's going to become an internal department that builds its own AI solutions. And and so maybe some of these companies are unfortunately short lived in today's world because eventually that capability's gonna get built in-house.

jeff (33:10)
Yeah, no, I no doubt about it. And my experience was that until the company had a financial I'm gonna call it impact, there wasn't a lot of interest really in investing. and so today I think one of the biggest financial impacts the companies are dealing with is the tariffs. I mean it it oughta be a lot easier to go to

your CFO and say, if we spent X dollars with this tool, we might be able to mitigate Y dollars on tariffs and so it justifies the ROI. And so I think that's what I always found is you had to have an ROI of some sort that, you know, benefited the company on the bottom line.

Matt Bell (33:48)
Well, you look at the the

most dominant categories are populated categories, right? So the biggest penalties we've seen exporter sanctions side is you're selling to, you know, a bad guy on a list somewhere or it's going to the wrong country. Number one category restricted party screening. Right. Okay, now you want to save money with tariffs and get it back. There's billions to be recovered or or or properly avoided, you know, with the right planning. Customs compliance and tariff management. Second biggest category.

Then you get into we can't physically get the product, supply chain risk, which is now the third largest category in our database of supply chain companies that now offer all these ancillary trade capabilities because they're so focused on whether that's forced labor risk, whether that's just disruption to the market, geopolitical risk of where you're sourcing from. Right? You know, US China's the big one that we think about, right? But now what's going through the Strait of Horn Moose? Where do ships move?

Right, all of these issues, that's in that supply chain category. And then what's interesting is the fourth one, data and list providers. These have exploded. There used to just be a handful that you would think to go to. But more and more groups are curating their own lists, their own databases, and they don't all match. They might say they're the same thing. Hey, we have fifty

jeff (35:04)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Bell (35:05)
percent ownership for STNs. But if you took the two lists, you know, from two providers or three lists, they would look drastically different.

And I always would warn companies when I was in consulting, they wanted to add more data, they wanted to get more information, better information. I said, are you prepared to action the outcome? Because you may have had a 50% ownership list for years. And when you switch providers, their list is different and you may catch stuff that the other one missed. Not because it was a bad list in and of itself. It's just these lists are ever changing and maintaining them is difficult. And so I always warn people before they got a new system or a new data set.

Are you prepared? Do you have the budget and the people to action what's gonna come out the back end?

jeff (35:48)
Yeah, no, that's that makes total sense. And just as we kind of get to the end here, Matt, what is any advice for some of our listeners who may be in this process of trying to figure out do I continue to build internally, like you said, with the AI tools, or should I go by and and so what you have any advice for these sorts of listeners?

Matt Bell (36:10)
Yes.

First all is know your options. So I think the proper use of Matt's list at this point is shortlist, you know. Create your short list of options. And internally building may be one of those options, but see what's out there, understand a few of the players, try to learn about them, see if you can figure out kind of what price point they're at or network the people who have been with them since we don't have the reviews in a fulsome way yet. But I think that's the right use is to know your options.

And to know that it may not be a long-term marriage to any option. Right? I think there used to be this idea that once you picked your trade system, it was yours for five, ten, fifteen years. Now it may be, hey, this is gonna solve our issue today and maybe for two or three years while we build an internal tool, while we learn from this tool to enhance an internal tool. And I think that's what's gonna happen in a lot of these cases is you're gonna have a tool, but the the relationship length is not gonna be as long as it used to be.

as others progress. And and and that's the key thing. A company that started five years ago, built on an AI native architecture, you know, like a KYG trade, who started a while ago. They're doing good things. I like as a company, I know the founder. But the person who starts today will be able to build the same thing they built in five years and maybe twelve months or eighteen months, right? That that ramp period is much shorter now because of how fast AI and other tools are progressing.

And I think the same thing will occur internally within companies as they get access to the external tools. They'll see the use case and what they could do internally to replicate it.

jeff (37:46)
Right, right. Well the the trade community is really fortunate to have someone like you, Matt, that's you know, taken your your passion and put it out there for people to use. I I think this is a incredibly valuable tool and I think as people get familiar with it and start realizing that it does give them, you know, an ability to to weigh out their options, right? And to especially in certain areas. So I I think it's fantastic. I mean where so as we end here, w where does Matt's list go next?

Matt Bell (38:15)
Well,

hopefully we we build up the user review. I mean, to me, the community needs to embrace it. And by that I mean the trade compliance community, vendors and users and potential buyers. If they'll embrace it, make sure the data's accurate from the vendor side. You know, make sure they have the right marketing materials in there. Users actually reviewing things and engaging and having it as a go to place to create that short list. And and I wanna be clear, this is a global list. Twenty eight different countries where these companies are headquartered.

Yes, it's dominated by the US, UK, and some European players. But you you see Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Brazil. You y

jeff (38:53)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Matt Bell (38:54)
it's all over the world. and that's what's interesting is how this grows is a lot of the newer companies I'm seeing are from outside those traditional dominant countries. And their user bases are very local, but they're growing more global. And so I think

That's really what I hope is that it's a global approach to embrace it, to do the reviews, and to make it the go to place instead of a random search on a search engine. I feel like it's a better way to do it.

jeff (39:22)
Right. Well, I can tell you that from the data, the listeners to this podcast are global. I found some listeners that showed up in Ecuador. Don't know how. But so they're global. So any what how can listeners, you know, whether they're practitioners or whether they're developers, how can they get involved with you in your list?

Matt Bell (39:44)
Yeah, so like I said, g go on the website. You can register for a free account. Share it on your LinkedIn, share it within your network. Just tell the other trade nerds that you know about this thing and and get on there. And I want the feedback. There's a way to send me emails and messages through it. The email's simple, it's just Matt.

at tradecompliance.software. Super easy. But just send me suggestions. Hey, I'd like to see this. Have you heard of this company? You and I were just talking, I think, last week or two to prepare for this and you mentioned a company I didn't have. And I reached out to them and said, hey, you should be on here. And they said, we agree. So they're in the process of, you know, building

jeff (40:17)
Awesome.

Matt Bell (40:17)
out their profiles. So as you see I'm missing something, there's no pride of authorship here. Tell me.

jeff (40:23)
Yeah. Yep.

Matt Bell (40:24)
But we want it it only works if everyone really embraces it and feeds into it and becomes that place of truth, on what your options are, how good they are, what they cost, who the players are. Like that's what was missing and that's what I'm trying to build. So I need everyone's help to do that.

jeff (40:41)
Yep. So all all of you out there listening to this podcast, episode thirty-six of Written Reflections, please go out and submit reviews. So many of you

Matt Bell (40:50)
Yes.

jeff (40:50)
are using tools already and they're on this list. And so submit the reviews. You heard what Matt said. The reviews will help make the d the data more robust, help people make better decisions. So please, if you're out there and you're hearing this, go out and and get and make reviews. That's I think that's that's what you'd want, right, Matt?

Matt Bell (41:06)
Absolutely.

jeff (41:07)
Great.

Well Matt, it's been great having this conversation. It's not a topic that people t talk about. Everybody talks about tools and systems, but I think we've had a very good discussion and I think you've done an amazing job of putting this together. And I I think it will be incredibly helpful in a in a time like this for our practitioners. I mean, so many, as I mentioned in my bi my intro, so many trade professionals are struggling. There's just burnout, there's just fatigue because the regulatory environment is just so dynamic and

If you don't have good tool and good systems and and ability and you're still working on emails and spreadsheets and the rest of it, I the the only thing that can happen is burnout, right? And so, you know, look taking advantage of the data that you've put out there, go out there and see what sort of things you might be able to to purchase or what sort of things you could be able to develop in house so that you can kind of get on top of all that's going on. So that would be my my my call to action for those who who are listening here. Matt, I would

love to have you back on this podcast again. One of the things we didn't talk about is you have an incredible story, experience that you can tell as you spent time in China, kind of helping through some enforcement issues. And I I think it would be just fantastic for our listeners to get your perspective and experiences and insights from your time in China. So if you'd be willing to come back and join me maybe in a month or so, I'd love to have you back.

Matt Bell (42:32)
Yeah, absolutely. I love discussing it. A lot of what I read in my free time is about China and the economy of China and the US and speak on those topics and my kids will be excited because they tell me I read the most boring books. So if I can tell I at least put to use and sharing it on your podcast about all my China knowledge. That would be useful 'cause they're always making fun of my weird China books that I read all the time.

jeff (42:55)
That's great. Well, speaking of books, in my next episode I'm going to be interviewing an author of a book called The Fragile Dragon. His name is Keir Gibbs. we're gonna talk a bit about China and then Matt, I'd love to have you back and get your perspective having lived there and having worked through some pretty challenging compliance issues, and so I think that'd be fantastic.

Matt Bell (43:13)
Yeah, I would love to.

jeff (43:15)
Okay. Well, thanks everyone again for listening. Thank you, Matt. I so enjoyed the conversation and we'll talk again real soon.

jeff (43:22)
Well, there you have it, an extremely helpful discussion exploring the uncharted waters of trade related systems and tools. Please go check out Matt's list at tradecompliance.software. That's tradecompliance.software. So you have been listening to episode 36 of Written Reflections, a forum for making sense of the dynamic and complex world.

of cross border trade and a space to explore the cultural forces and personal experiences that shape how we live and lead in uncertain times. Next month, US China. Until then, take care and talk soon.