“Content is key in our business development because every administrative document has his specific processes, legislations, archiving needs,” says Bram Lerouge. Bram is the CEO at Doccle and responsible for result driven and customer oriented in obtaining the objectives through collaboration and mutual respect.
Doccle is the largest and most innovative digital administration platform in Belgium and more than 2 million Belgians now receive, process and store documents on it.
Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Insights Success and Bram Lerouge:
What led to the inception of the company?
Doccle was created to solve a very generic problem for individuals (consumers, independents, small company leaders) : provide a secure content platform, easy to use, to handle the whole of your personal or professional administrative interaction with your suppliers for the exchange of important personal documents like payslips, invoices, tax documents, contracts to sign, insurance documents, …. In a time where we are used to connect and interact with friends through facebook, with professional relations through Linkedin, there was no easy solution to interact with the 40 to 50 suppliers everyone has a relation with. Describe the company and its extensive content services which address all the needs of its customers. Doccle is the only multisided platform in Europe for the exchange of important information in the context of our users’ personal administration. For our supplier community we are a technology platform they can connect to, to integrate all types of administrative technology in their own portals and distribution channels: payment technology for invoices, electronic signatures for contracts, legal archiving, Sepa Direct Debit activation, electronic registered mail. In short every technology to support an active administrative relationship with their clients. For our second community of individual users, we provide mobile apps and online solutions for the whole of their administration: paying invoices, signing documents, a personal archive for all your important documents.
“All your personal information in paper archives will be brought to live by Doccle through the digital relationships you create with your suppliers.”
As a content service provider company, what contribution the company has made in assisting its clients for achieving measurable goals?
Doccle has become the largest multisided platform in Belgium in less than 6 years. We have 2 million users, which is about 41% of all households that have created a digital connection with their suppliers. Our supplier community has grown to more than 10.000 companies using our platform with marketshares of above 80% in HR&payroll, Social security for independents, utility companies like water distribution companies, healthcare with mutualities and hospitals, Telecom, Government. For suppliers we reduce late payments of invoices with 50%, increase traffic to their portals by 17%, increase the NPS with 10-15% and reduce churn of customers.
How does the company’s content service differ from the other companies’ services?
The main difference is not the individual technologies like payments, signing, but the fact that we provide one technology platform with open API’s that combines all the necessary technologies to support an innovative administration with the exchange of administrative data and documents. We are unique in the creation of an ecosystem where individual clients connect to their suppliers once and from then on, all administrative content is put directly in the personal administration vault of the users. Our solution is patented because it does not require any addressing information to invite companies clients to connect.
Give a detailed description of the featured person’s influence over the company and the industry.
I was working for a large HR & payroll provider when Doccle was created as a spinoff based on Corporate venture capital. As the initial creator of the idea, together with a group of innovative intrapreneurs of the first organizations in our ecosystem, I focused that roadmap and the developments onto the idea of a connected platform that digitizes client supplier relationships.
Describe in detail about the work culture and the values that drive the company.
Our company has a culture where hard work is combined with an open and agile work culture where there is room for informal events with our team. Our values are about being extremely privacy focused given the confidentiality of the information, but also being innovative and creative in realizing high growth and network effects through mobile solutions with great UX and high simplicity.
What is your vision for the company? And what would be the best roadmap for getting there?
It is our ambition to become one of the largest platforms in Europe. We believe that simplicity and high growth should be possible without jeopardizing privacy aspects by selling data or pollution of personal administration with commercial campaigns.
Administration is to be organized as a connected network : we bring the simplicity of social network concepts to your administration.
The documents in your administration will disappear and become information. Augmentation this information is key to create an administration that is not only simpler, but also proactive and intelligent.
We believe that simplicity will become a commodity, and trust and privacy by design will become a differentiator. The Doccle platform will become a “Trusted” platform where the one version of the truth about a user is archived, but also shareable with others only after explicit user consent.
We have a unique business model with a community of organizations that benefit from growth and a community of users.
Technologies that will facilitate this evolution will be new interaction paradigms like chat and video calls, AI technologies to enrich personal information into an intelligent personal archive that assist our users in tasks they need to perform before they even knew that needed to be done. A true Do It For Me platform where consent based automation will drive your personal onboarding and administrative interactions with suppliers.
