In this episode of YS Up Governance and Boards Podcast, 3YS Owls Governance Consultants, Ainslie Cunningham and Deb Anderson interview Georg Chmiel. Georg is the Executive Chairman of Juwai-IQI, one of the largest end-to-end property market places in Asia. He is also Chairman of iCarAsia (ASX:ICQ), the number 1 online automotive marketplace for South East Asia and non-executive Director of Centrepoint Alliance Limited (ASX:CAF), a leading wealth management network across Australia, as well as Prop Tech Group.

We explore with Georg his wealth of experience working in South East Asia; online new and used car and property sales in South East Asia , iProperty, artificial intelligence, some of the challenges faced by start-ups, budgets and financial reporting, culture, the importance of a clear vison and AI.

"If you take REA's realestate.com.au, the number one reason why it was such a success is because there were newspapers. Newspapers are highly inefficient to search. I mean, you can't compare. It's only a subset of the total market in the newspaper, otherwise they will be that thick. And online allowed, for the first time, to really give full transparency and generate more and better leads, and balance the power in the industry. That is real disruption.

What is not disruption are companies like WeWork or others which try to apply a bit of the accounting standards and couple of other things and convert large long-term leases into smaller short-term leases. I mean, the only outcome of all of that was changes to the lease standards, and a lot of people who probably lost a bit of the belief in the technology and the disruptive community. But honestly, it really makes a difference.

It's also differentiating between countries. So, if you take a Western, let's say, European or Australian approach, technology is not unconditionally embraced. The first thing which comes to mind, particularly in countries like, let's say, Germany where I'm originally from, is fear. So, technology is there's something stored about myself, what will happen with the data, etc.

When you take an Asian approach, it's about opportunity, it's about how can this help me in doing things I wasn't able to do before. How do I, and this is not just online technology, how do I get access to medication? How am I able to follow a job when I'm quite remotely based? I mean, if you think of those countries, you've got 7,000 islands in Philippines, you've got 17,000 in Indonesia. I mean, logistically, a nightmare. So, the only way you can do it is by disrupting how you interact in these markets."
- Georg Chmiel

Summary of episode
· iCarAsia - online new and used car sales
· Budgets and financial reporting
· iProperty - Malaysia
· Juwai-IQI - end to end property marketplaces in Asia
· Artificial Intelligence (AI)
· Some of the challenges faced by start-ups
· Culture
· The importance of...