Aaron Kelley: The shipping industry is in the midst of a digital transformation. While tech startups have flocked to the sector, there are a handful of incumbents that have been helping Ship Owners, Charterers, and other stakeholders chart their digital futures for years, including Veson Nautical. TradeWinds Content Studio caught up with CEO John Veson and members of his team at their Boston base to learn more about the company’s roots, its plans for the future, and the tech scene at large.

Aaron Kelley: So tell me about yourself.

John Veson: Well, I got started in the shipping industry really the old fashioned way. My father started a business in the early eighties, and he’d take me along with him to the office on the weekends, that’s where I learned coding growing up.

John Veson: Veson has always been independent. We see ourselves primarily as a technology partner and we provide solutions. Those solutions are really built by our team of global professionals, some of which come from the industry, some of which just love technology, but all who share a passion for the ocean, for shipping, and really for an opportunity to influence how global trade is conducted.

Ignacio Labarthe: We pretty much serve the entire marine industry, from chemical to crude tankers to dry bulk.

Chris Mrozek: Charterers, Owners, different players in the industry, different commodity types.

Per Ostman: Every kind of client, every organization, is a little bit different.

Ignacio Labarthe: I think that’s, at the end of the day, what makes Veson so special, is that we have a very robust platform that kind of caters to the entire industry.

Aaron Kelley: Beyond passion for the ocean, Veson’s team is driven by a set of core values that drive the business forward: Do the Right Thing, Take Pride in Your Work, and Move Forward.

What does it mean to do the right thing?

Ignacio Labarthe: Doing the right thing, for me, is working collaboratively with clients so that they can get the most out of their investment, right? It’s building big strategic projects that are going to allow them to really optimize their operations.

Kathleen Shediac: Doing the right thing is really us engaging with our clients on a daily basis, understanding what they want from us, and how we can kind of fulfill their overall needs.

Ignacio Labarthe: At the end of the day, that’s also doing the right thing, is delivering the absolute best solution they can get.

John Veson: It’s the companies that listen to their clients that succeed.

How does Veson support client success?

John Veson: Change management is a classic issue where you get used to doing something a certain way, and sometimes you can become really resistant and you can cause a project to fail.

Chris Mrozek: Our clients come to us because they have issues with workflows or inefficiencies that they’re kind of trying to solve, and I think with proper change management practices, we’ve been pretty good at helping them to find optimizations and better workflows.

Brian Berry: Once folks like Chris in our Professional Services team have done their role, it comes to the support group. In Technical Solutions, we like to make sure that there’s a smooth transition so that when the customer leaves the consulting team, they feel in safe hands and they’re very comfortable using our product to run their day to day operations.

Ignacio Labarthe: Engineering and product and account management and services and consultants and all these people come together to really come up with the optimal solution for our clients.

Per Ostman: Some of that happens by instituting new processes, either through workflow or some other functionality that we currently have in the system, and sometimes it’s building a new product, and that’s what gets really exciting for the Product and Engineering group where we get to provide new solutions to these problems that come up in the business.

What is your vision for the future of Veson Nautical?

John Veson: So where we see our role is continuing to evolve our platform.

Per Ostman: When we talk to clients, the number one trend in every single one of those conversations is sustainability.

John Veson: Today, I think we’re seeing things like the Sea Cargo Charter that are providing clauses where companies will share information around environmental impact so that Charterers can actually make the right sustainable decisions. What we still haven’t seen is a true standard for some of that information, and so that fragmentation of “what’s a port call?” “what’s a berth?” “what are these locations?” that other industries have standardized some time ago, within shipping, we’re still sort of in early changes where we speak different languages.

Silvia Tower: And I’m really excited for this because it’s the culmination of a trend that has been happening for the past decade of digitizing a lot of these processes, and now we’re like, “Okay, we’re finally collecting all of this data, which is really exciting. How do we use it to better report on sustainability or set sustainability metrics? How do we use it to make our voyages more efficient?”

John Veson: Ultimately, we see ourselves as a partner to the industry and in areas where we can help accelerate some of the changes that we think need to be made for greater efficiency.