MWC25 | Nicolas "Nico" Girard, OXIO

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Nicolas Girard

CEO

OXIO

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Nicolas "Nico" Girard, OXIO

Nicolas Girard

CEO OXIO

Nico Girard, CEO of OXIO, joins us at MWC25 Barcelona to discuss groundbreaking innovations in telecom as a service. In this engaging episode of theCUBE, hosts Savannah Peterson and Bob Laliberte explore how Girard and his team are revolutionizing the telecommunications industry by applying a vertically-integrated approach akin to AWS's impact on computing and Stripe's on FinTech. Their discussion delves into creating telecom environments rapidly, shifting traditional telco business models towards a more dynamic, service-oriented framework.

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What is the comparison being made between the approach of offering a service in the telecom industry and the approach being taken in another industry? add

What are the advantages of using OXIO SIMs for global travel as opposed to traditional international plans? add

What is the role of telcos in the current ecosystem and how are they evolving and converging with other services? add

What are the reasons for operating the network ourselves and the importance of data in the telecommunications industry? add

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Nicolas "Nico" Girard, OXIO

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, nerd fam, and welcome back to beautiful Barcelona, Spain. We're here midway through day two of our four days of live coverage on theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson. Really excited to be doing my first segment of the show with Bob Laliberte. Bob, how's it going for you? You've been a busy man. You haven't been hanging out with me on the news desk.

Bob Laliberte

>> I know it's been busy, busy. Lot of vendors to see, a lot of people to talk to. So great event so far. I can't believe it's only two days. It feels like it's been a week.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know. I feel like we've learned enough to have already been in a week. You're still smiling, so it's good. At least they're being nice to you in notice meetings. Very excited to welcome our next guest to the show. Nico, thank you so much for coming to hang out with us today.

Nicolas Girard

>> Thanks for having me.

Savannah Peterson

>> So in my deceptively many years in the technology world, I've seen a lot of things as a service. And when we were doing our homework on you we have telecom as a service now. So what is telecom as a service?

Nicolas Girard

>> The next frontier. So yes, everyone calls something as a service, so go with the wind. But sort of like how AWS converted compute and storage to a service. FinTech, Stripe, into a service. So we're doing essentially something before telecom and we are taking a pretty vertically-integrated approach to it where we're the network and then we offer that as a service. Whereas sometimes in telecom people always say, "I can sell you my plan," or, "I resell the plan." Now, here we're saying similar to how Shopify solved all the issues around e-commerce, it's sort the analogy for what we're trying to do with telecom.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. And this is not, I mean, creating telecom environments is not simple. It's not something you just spin up a telecom network the next day. But from our conversations we've had previous, you're able to get basically maybe an MVNO spun up much faster than ever before. And I'm wondering if you could share, the timeframes I remember was like 12 to 18 months down to eight weeks or something like that?

Nicolas Girard

>> Even faster.

Bob Laliberte

>> Even faster.

Nicolas Girard

>> Honestly, yeah. It depends on the use case. But we could have a meeting and set it up during the meeting and walk away with an MVNO instantiated. Of course, you need to work on the brand and the marketing and the distribution, but the technology itself, you could in an hour set it up, basically.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, which is crazy because ... And what you're talking about-

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow. An hour?

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's awesome.

Bob Laliberte

>> And so for what people are saying, MVNO, mobile verbal ... Mobile verbal. Mobile virtual network operator. Easy for me to say. Exactly, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> That was like a pun in itself, Bob.

Bob Laliberte

>> I know. So setting up an MVNO in just a couple of hours when it used to take so long to do that really changes the game. And that's what was so impressive when looking at the technology. But that's not where you start and finish, right? It's not just about enabling MVNOs. It's a little more than that.

Nicolas Girard

>> No, absolutely. I mean, the approach is Telco has been always very insular. If you think about it it's one of those industries where in each country different players having their own black boxes and-

Savannah Peterson

>> And sovereignty. Yeah, the governance there is insane too.

Nicolas Girard

>> And then meanwhile the world is going global and everything is connected. So you have more and more demand for connecting anything, from people to machines to everything in between. And the issue is the networks and industry is just not set up for that. The basic construct, we're just talking about it, 25 years ago is I buy a whole bunch of equipment, put it together, I build my network and sell you access to my network. Now the construct is the network belongs to someone, but the experience is somewhere else. So how do you transfer the experience? And then the issue after that is technology. We just announced our launch in partnership with AT&T in the US, their network is to service 120 million people in the US, first and foremost. So they don't like others to start coming into network as touching their stuff, reliability and issues like this. You've got to get a license, you've got to get . So it ended up every time you want to innovate in connectivity, it's an 18-months process. It's a lot of capital, it's a lot of convincing operator, it's a lot having to compromise on a number of things. We looked at that and similar to Shopify or AWS, there's a whole series of problems that are already solved. So solve that, take care of legal technology, regulatory, all of this, and let a company just take that as a service and then build upon it. And you see a lot of companies, I'll give you an example, Cubic Telecom, just SoftBank acquired them like a year ago. Their business is high-value asset tracking. But when they started you could not connect stuff around the world so they first had to build a network and then operate a global network, and then you build your value add on top of it. So for me, it's like the analogy with Uber where it's like if I want to build Uber, I need to build the roads first and then I will build a logistics portion. And so we're saying that, you know what? Actually we know how to build roads. So we'll build a road, maintain it for you, give you nice tools and APIs, and then focus on the use case on top of that. And that's how you kind of shave off the timeline.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, and it's these types of collaborations that are going to move the industry forward and give us that agility and scalability that we've been needing. I've got to ask you, just because I'm AT&T customer, does this mean that I'm about to have a better experience?

Nicolas Girard

>> Well, unless you move to one of our customers. But no, I mean, basically the thing in telco is layers and layers and layers. It's sometimes even astonishing that those things actually work. If you know exactly how that works, it's like . But it's also like legacy tech and us starting five years ago-

Savannah Peterson

>> Lots of legacy tech.

Nicolas Girard

>> You want to go to the cloud first, you want to go AI first. A company like AT&T or anyone else of their peers, it's legacy tech that's been built over the years. So basically the way it works is that we use their towers and then some countries we use multiple providers. But right now we just announced AT&T in the US. And so if you have an AT&T SIM, you get to the tower, you go to their network. If you have one of the OXIO customer SIMs, you go to the same tower, but you go to a different network, basically. And so everything that tends to be requiring a lot of customization, personalization, things that need to ... AI at the core, global scale, that comes to us and that's how we work together.

Bob Laliberte

>> One of the things that caught my eye was the fact that it's not just enabling network operators, but you're able to, because you've simplified, you've taken all of the hassle out of building this, you're getting retail organizations and others who are saying, "Yeah, we want to have this and be able to deliver it as well." I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.

Nicolas Girard

>> Yeah. And that's the thing, you come to a show like this and people will tend to think about MVNOs because Mint Mobile, Ryan Reynolds, just the whole thing. But the reality is most of the use cases are in the enterprise space on things that you would not necessarily think about. And the one that we're going to be launching soon is an enterprise MVNO for bankers, effectively. And the whole idea is they're in the financial industry, they're regulated, communication needs to be recorded for compliance. To me, it's a good example of the things that we solve that carriers cannot solve. Because today, let's say you're at Morgan Stanley, you get a SIM from AT&T but that SIM is not recorded. So then you've got to go download special apps that say, "Don't use WhatsApp, don't use the phone, don't use SMS, don't do anything. Go use this other app. If you use anything else, you are out of compliance." And then obviously just everyone is on a different app, so some employees slip and right now it's $3 billion in fines just in the US for the bank. And the issue is that the guys that are doing the compliance they cannot go around the world and start doing the integration 200 times, it costs millions of dollars every time, it's going to be a different integration. So it's just as a function of how the industry is structured, you end up having this really subpar solution for arguably the guy who's sitting on the money. So in our case, they came to us and then we're a global wholesale carrier effectively. So they do integration once, forward voice, SMS, and data, and then from there they're able to go and make sure there's a 100% compliance on the recording. And that same is universal. You can make it everywhere. So the only thing that changed at that point is the license in the country and the tower in the country. Everything else is exactly the same. It's something like this. Not really sexy, but those are the big problems that the industry itself has not been able to resolve, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, it's not sexy until you realize how much money and capital is wasted, how much innovation can happen, and how much that depreciates the quality of the community's experience.

Nicolas Girard

>> Absolutely. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> So I think all of those things are sexy. I'm going to counter you on that, Nico.

Nicolas Girard

>> Generally money is sexy.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Nicolas Girard

>> No, there's a lot of things, right? I'll give you another one where with eSIM now it's so easy to download, they're very cheap, so there's a lot of fraud with communication. And so you have guys that build incredibly sophisticated systems around how you hold your phone, how you speak today, intonation and all of this to figure out if it's the real person or not the real person. What you can do now is you can delegate that to an eSIM. So the use case is you bank with, I don't know, Bank of America, download an eSIM and every time you communicate with America it's a dedicated closed-loop network. So now they know it's you as a customer, you know you're talking to the bank, there's no phishing. So it's tiny little things like this where you actually save a lot of money on the other side because fraud is rampant and massive. And so for me, this is the kind of stuff I like in telecom because you really solve actual issues at that point, right? It's very deterministic, it's very concrete use case. And then everything in between. The MVNO around celebrities and brands and everything .

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. And a lot of this value that you're bringing to the market is due to the fact that you're on this modern, cloud-native, hosted in the cloud platform that you've built. I mean, I remember, what is it? 10 years or so ago coming here and everyone was just at the stage where they were trying to get off appliances and go software-based.

Nicolas Girard

>> Right.

Bob Laliberte

>> Right? And now in that such a short period, we've gone from that to the shift to the cloud and-

Nicolas Girard

>> It would be hard for us, as a startup it's already hard to compete in the telecom space because it's billions of dollars, giant companies, so you need to find your secret sauce somewhere that will create a differential advantage. Because you're not going to compete with Verizon or Ericsson. But this is where the cloud and AI give us the weapons to do those things. For us, it's a couple of things. The network is global. And we're not fully global yet, but that's the first time a network is on a global level. Because even if you take a Vodafone or a Telefonica, they're in 15 countries, they have 15 networks. The network in Italy is different from the network in Spain is different from network in France. In our case, the idea is it's a single entity, so you have to change all the rules around licensing and everything. So moving everything to a cloud, where we are today if we want to open a new country, we basically seek a license in the new country, we get a wholesale agreement, and then we're primarily on Amazon today. Amazon will extend the infrastructure into Amazon and then everything gets spun up basically overnight. If we had to do old school deployment in data center, it's not a job for a startup. It's just not.

Bob Laliberte

>> So in that case, when you're talking about setting up that global environment, if someone has one of the OXIO SIMs they can travel between country to country without having to pre-set up an international plan, do anything like that.

Nicolas Girard

>> You're not even roaming at that point.

Bob Laliberte

>> Right, you're not even roaming. So it's not like you're they don't think they're on someone else's network, they're just on the OXIO network or however it's branded network.

Nicolas Girard

>> I'll give you an example. We're about to launch a customer in the US who is focused on the Hispanic market. And as we know a lot of Hispanics in the US with family back home or friends or whatever. And so the idea is they're building basically a super app on top of our rails where it's combining telecom, FinTech, and content. They have a streaming platform on top of it. But what's cool is because we're a global carrier we're creating family plans but with numbers from different countries. So now the guys in Texas, they have the US number, the cousin in Mexico has a Mexican number, and the friend in Colombia has a Colombian number but everyone's on the same plan. And then there's no roaming, so you go to Mexico to US, or vice versa.

Savannah Peterson

>> No, that's really beautiful. First of all, it's just great from a family perspective in general. And I think that might sound like a small thing to someone who doesn't have a family plan, let's put it that way. That's actually quite a big thing when you're thinking about balancing your family's communications. I used to do, I still do a lot of work between here and New Zealand, and I know this dance so well. And it's always driven me quite mad that there wasn't a better solution for this. It's always felt like, and I say this with a lot of love, it's always felt a little bit like telco lagged behind in a lot of aspects, largely because of these political boundaries and literally geography in a lot of different cases. But I mean, I remember when leaving my county was roaming and cost a bajillion dollars when I was younger. We're at this really interesting moment where I feel like everything's starting to move together and accelerate in a way that is mutually beneficial for innovation. Since you're making these big announcements, you've got all these partnerships, Nico, if you could wave a magic wand right now and have the industry understand something, what would you want them to understand?

Nicolas Girard

>> I'm not the only one. But I think telecom, going back to your point, it's about experiences now. It's about digital experiences and it's tailored to how you work, the lifestyle, with who you interact. Your usage is very real. But I'll give you another one. A ton of students coming to States to study. Most of the time you've got to keep a line back home because the bank needs to send you codes, or things of that nature. Why can't I have just a one phone number that I can use for the stuff from back home? Or you go to New Zealand and that's the same number, now it's just a different country. So telco becomes ... this is where it's interesting. Telco become like a widget almost in someone ecosystem.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a good analogy.

Nicolas Girard

>> And then when Revolut launched at ECM last year, everyone was talking about it, Revolut is not a telco player. Revolut is known for being a FinTech. It's like, "Hey, I can help my customer with a pain point and why not, right?" And Nubank has done the same thing and others. So we see this convergence between telco and other services, but where telco becomes just a base widget really. And then the second thing is where we are today. The reason why we operate the network ourselves is, one, to have the opportunity to pilot it through AI. So the typical telco might have 10,000 engineers, we have an AI. It's also the value of the data. The data in the telco silos exists. Everyone talk about it. We're talking about it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Silos are quite the conversation, especially in this industry.

Nicolas Girard

>> I mean, 15 years ago it was like big data, big data, big data, but no one is really doing anything. But the thing is, if you're bringing telco into someone else's ecosystem, now how does telco help someone like a Revolut? Versus how someone helps Walmart, or how does it help all those things? So it's a data world. So network needs to be re-architected to collect the data. We're in a privacy first, so you've got to secure that data. Telco, it's 24/7 so it's a ton, ton, ton of data. So now you use AI to process the data and then just drop the one inside that makes sense at that point. So if you're a FinTech, might be a financial qualification. If you're retail, it might be about how do I compete better with my customer? In the case of that experience for Latinos, it is primarily content-based. So how do I monetize this audience better by knowing who they are? Because in the US, people tend to put Hispanics in one box. They're all very different, vote differently, buying powers are different, viewing. And so for them it's mega important and then you can find those personas from the telco usage. So this is where you create this kind of flywheel where telco is almost the source of information, it's the experience. But to your point it's not an industry. And this industry, it's not like a dedicated business that it used to be before.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. No, this integration is really cool. Yeah, you're making my mind go a lot of different directions, which is really fun. This has been amazing, and we are a little over time, but you're fascinating, Nico, so I really appreciate it. One final question for you. When we have the good fortune of having you back on the show next Mobile World Congress in 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say now?

Nicolas Girard

>> A lot of customers launching with really cool use cases that we cannot really talk about. And I get excited because I get to say that all those things are so different. It's the same platform behind it, so that will be exciting.

Savannah Peterson

>> Okay. Well, we look forward to meeting the customers who you get to show off with us-

Nicolas Girard

>> Look forward to showing you next -

Bob Laliberte

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Sounds great, Nico. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Nicolas Girard

>> Thank you so much.

Bob Laliberte

>> Thanks.

Savannah Peterson

>> And thank you, Bob. This has been blessed.

Bob Laliberte

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Always a pleasure. And thank all of you for tuning in wherever you might be on our beautiful planet. We're here in Barcelona, Spain, day two of our four days of coverage. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.