Julia Chatterley of First Move spoke with Butterfield on Thursday.
Butterfield: Yesterday’s announcement was making it easier for people to send direct messages outside of shared channels. There was a lot of confusion. There was an unforced error on our part in the functioning of the communication system and it was confused with the ability to send the messages themselves. It is a double option on both sides, and people have full control over who can send them. So it’s actually a big step forward in terms of things like texting, WhatsApp, email and so on.
Butterfield: Absolutely. To be clear, you can’t get rid of email entirely, and we have no intention of doing so because it serves many purposes, but that’s the downfall in internal communication. But there are many – probably thousands of organizations that don’t use email for internal communication. But of course, they still need to use it to get receipts for online purchases and reset passwords and receive calendar invitations and stuff.
Emails remain incredibly vulnerable if hacked. Is this another argument for perhaps a system like Slack as an alternative?
Butterfield: Well, we are a very big target. We have an incredible security team and many active programs that, you know, work to prevent this. We work with governments in 20 different countries and large financial services companies and customers and are often chosen based on increased security. E-mail has the virtue of being a system that anyone can use, but it is a much more difficult system to control. There are problems with phishing and spam, and I think email is useful and will probably continue to be used for tens of thousands of years at this time. In this open and decentralized way, but where you have control and have the option of communicating that it is the internal case, people are much better off choosing a tool like Slack.
The absolute percentage of companies within some of the world’s largest indexes are using their services and paying for them. How high can these percentages reach? What is the ambition?
Butterfield: I think we can reach 100%. I mean – I’m not sure if we are for the USA. Maybe 70% of the Fortune 100, but it’s not just used by 156,000 companies worldwide, and obviously, there are, you know, 500 in this index and 100 in this index, and 156,000 is a much larger number. This includes all types of businesses. It includes people who operate small retail stores from, you know, plumbers, repairmen, but also the largest credit card issuer in the United States and the largest contract. And you are right to point to international growth because we had revenue growth this year. Fantastic result, but if you look at France, for example, it is 49%. If you look at Japan, it was 76%, and looking at customer growth, it was the main indicator of revenue in the future, much higher numbers. Australia: 93%, United Kingdom 94% and Germany 94%.