Please tell us a few words about FADEL

FADEL, a global provider of rights and royalty management software, has been an industry leader, working with some of the largest names in publishing, media, entertainment, gaming, advertising, fashion and hi-tech. As companies strive more than ever to deliver innovative digital content and products, FADEL’s native cloud solutions help organizations to grow their business and streamline processes by automating rights management, transforming royalty operations and protecting against IP violations.

How are you dealing with the Covid19 outbreak across your offices?

FADEL shifted to a complete work from home policy early on during the outbreak so thankfully all of our employees are safely and comfortably working out their home offices. To keep our spirits up and motivate the team, we have a 15-minute daily zoom break just to share positive thoughts. In fact, on one call, a FADEL team member shared a song that he wrote inspired by the crisis.

For our customers, we continue to support them uninterrupted. As a technology firm, we were well equipped with the infrastructure to support a remote working model. Additionally, our software and services are all native cloud and can be delivered remotely, so we are well poised to help new customers with their transition to digital.

What led you to decide to set-up in the Paris Region?

FADEL decided to open a wholly-owned subsidiary in Paris in order to accelerate our European expansion and best support our growing list of French customers including L’Oréal, Hachette Livre and Média-Participations. We felt it essential for customer success to provide in-country senior-level resources with local domain and language skills. As a major business hub, Paris is a great base to continue our growth into the French market and the rest of Western Europe.

What can you tell us about your business’ ecosystem in the Paris Region?

FADEL has been expanding its presence in key industries such as publishing, gaming, fashion and luxury, pharmaceuticals and consumer goods – all very strong markets in France. Our goal is to help major brands across all these industries to protect, manage and monetize their licensed content and intellectual property. Examples include managing licensing for digital content distribution (apps and e-books), traditional print, video games, medical devices, as well as advertisement licenses. France is a major producer and publisher of many of these items – from representing one of the largest video gaming markets in Europe to working with celebrity talent when advertising their reputable fashion, luxury and beauty products.

According to you, what are the keys to a company’s successful international expansion?

As we expand internationally it is essential that we approach the expansion from the perspective of the customer. There is an overwhelming desire by our customers to learn from our global experiences while expecting us to act locally. Therefore, we prioritize three keys to success. The first is to provide local resources with a strong understanding of local regulations, tax implications and other licensing business terms. Another is being able to combine global domain knowledge and strong subject matter expertise with local language skills. The final requirement is to be able to adhere to a country or region’s cloud security requirements such as being compliant with GDPR.

What are your recruitment plans?

Once businesses are back to being fully operational, we will look to bring on business analysts and senior consultants with financial and royalty accounting backgrounds, as well as experience working with packaged applications such as ERP software. We will also grow the local team with business development representatives that have B2B enterprise selling experience, ideally for ERP, digital asset management and other enterprise content and licensing systems.

How is the COVID19 outbreak going to impact FADEL’s long term perspectives?

We feel very strong and positive about our long-term perspective as many of the industries that we serve rely greatly on deploying cloud-based enterprise systems for rights & royalty management as they enter the race to digitize. This race to digitize content also drives complexity into the overall operations of a company. Business models are no longer represented by a one to one licensing relationships, product creator/distributor to IP Owner. Digital products are made up of multiple digital assets being licensed from many sources and packaged and sold in a variety of formats and channels. Companies also have to manage different types of sales from traditional POS to e-commerce and app subscriptions. And there are new ways to consume content, as well as new demands for financial processes such as royalty calculations, forecasting and financial reconciliation. FADEL is accustomed to delivering our native cloud solutions with remote deployment processes and can seamlessly work with clients to transform their rights and royalty operations to meet the demands of digital content distribution.