Technology now touches almost every journey people take, from buses and taxis to trains and airports. In this bonus episode, Dr. Kaan Yildizgoz sits down with Bill Delaney, Chief Executive Officer of Modaxo, to explore what it takes to build and scale a global technology business dedicated to people movement.

Bill explains why Modaxo deliberately avoids centralising its more than 40 businesses. Each one keeps the independence to serve its local market, and just as importantly, to develop offerings for narrow or specialist parts of the market rather than a one size fits all approach, while still sharing best practice across the group. He discusses Modaxo's expansion beyond traditional public transport into aviation, parking and traffic management, the company's commitment to never selling the businesses it acquires, and the growing gap between fast-moving technology and slow procurement cycles.

Whether you lead a transport authority, an operator, or a technology business serving the sector, this conversation offers a candid look at how one of the industry's largest players thinks about growth, autonomy and long-term commitment.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome

00:41 Meet Bill Delaney

01:45 Bill’s Path in Transit Tech

03:17 What Modaxo Is

04:49 Global Scale, Local Autonomy

07:39 Ecosystem Across the Journey

10:53 Two Billion Journeys Goal

12:18 Aviation Expansion

13:13 Forever Home Promise

14:40 People and Leadership Growth

17:05 AI Strategy and Procurement

19:07 Mobility 5.0 Vision

20:12 Favourite Modes and Integration

22:21 Close

Connect with Us:

Website: https://mobilityredefined.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mobility-redefined/

Mobility Redefined is brought to you by Modaxo https://www.modaxo.com

Host: Dr. Kaan Yildizgoz

Producer: Mike Cartmel

Executive Producer: Darren Turpin

Special thanks to:

Brand design: Tina Olagundoye

Digital Media: Belén Iturrioz Campo

Marketing content and Mobility Redefined newsletter: Mike Cartmel

If you have a question or comment, email us at [email protected]

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Modaxo Inc., its affiliates or subsidiaries, or any entities they represent (“Modaxo”). This production belongs to Modaxo, and may contain information that may be subject to trademark, copyright, or other intellectual property rights and restrictions. This production provides general information, and should not be relied on as legal advice or opinion. Modaxo specifically disclaims all warranties, express or implied, and will not be liable for any losses, claims, or damages arising from the use of this presentation, from any material contained in it, or from any action or decision taken in response to it.

Thank you for listening to Mobility Redefined, brought to you by Modaxo. For more insights and information, please visit mobilityredefined.com. That is mobilityredefined.com. Welcome to Mobility Redefined. Today we have a special edition. We have a special guest, and as well a different setup. We are recording this video at a bus depot, so it's a very important setup for the Mobility Redefined audience. And also, it's important for me, because I'm a son of a bus mechanic who spend almost all his childhood in the bus depots in the past.

So my special guest today is Bill Delaney, who is the CEO of Modaxo. Bill, welcome to Mobility Redefined.

Thank you, Kaan. It's great. It's a great pleasure to be here.

Thank you so much, Bill, for accepting to be part of Mobility Redefined, and I am very sure that that will be a great conversation.

I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you. I mean, Bill is leading Modaxo. Modaxo is the global family of technology companies focusing on mobility. If you are riding a bus today, if you are hailing a taxi, paying your parking ticket, or waiting for a tram and checking the information, there is a high likelihood that there is a technology behind it, provided by a Modaxo company. On this note, that's what we will be talking with Bill about today - all these topics. But before we discuss Modaxo and its companies and its technologies, I would like to start by talking about Bill himself. And Bill, you spend most of your career in different continents in people transportation. I wonder what was the driving factor for you to join people transportation, and what keeps you in the industry?

Well, you know, I hail from Queensland in Australia, and my first real job, I guess, was working in ambulance and helping deploy communications systems for ambulance. And that gave me the bug of applying technology in places where you really can see the difference that you're making to the community that you serve. And if the system doesn't work, it has real life implications. And so as I expanded my career and moved into public transportation, that whole effect expanded even more. You know, I get a real buzz out of visiting cities and seeing buses and taxis and metros and trains moving around - the lifeblood of the cities and towns that people live in - and being able to see our solutions in real life. You know, our equipment on the vehicles, the signage on the street or on the rail platform. So seeing, working in a technology field where that technology is not hidden in some back office, but manifests itself really out on the street - that's a big driver for me. I guess we get a big kick out of it, and I know that that's the same for a lot of the people who work in the various businesses that are part of the Modaxo family. It sort of gets into your blood, and that drives me still today.

That's excellent. That's excellent.

Well, you are now in the CEO seat of one of the very largest technology companies in the transport industry, and Modaxo is a relatively young brand today, but the companies of Modaxo are very well known as well. So I would like to ask your opinion - how you prefer the sector to know Modaxo, and what Modaxo stands for.

Yeah, we established Modaxo back in 2020. But the reality was, our parent company, Constellation Software, which is listed in Canada, has been investing in technology companies that deal with the daily mobility of people for, at that stage, 25 years - now 30 years. But they were spread around different portfolios in Constellation, and the decision was taken to bring them all together under one umbrella. That umbrella we named Modaxo. Each of the businesses has their own brand, their own leadership, their own independence. But by having the umbrella of Modaxo, it gives us something that they can all rally around, and it's a mechanism where we can support best-practice sharing across all those businesses. There's more than 40 businesses today around the world that sit within the Modaxo family, and that's how I think of it - as a family of businesses where we share best practices, we learn off each other, and we're able to deliver things that individual businesses couldn't contribute or deliver on their own.

And Bill, mobility technology has to work differently in Chicago than how it works in London or in Singapore, then how it works in Abuja. And Modaxo is a global organisation, but it has businesses all around the world. How do you balance this global and local thing?

Look, it's a great question, and it's something that we're often asked. And for some people it doesn't seem to make sense, because they would expect that we would roll everything up and try and derive synergies. We don't think of it that way. So we really value the independence of our businesses, and our businesses are geographically dispersed - and that's really important to them. So if we've got customers in, say, Brazil, there's no way that I, sitting in some citadel somewhere, know what a customer in Brazil really needs. But we have our businesses in Brazil, as one example, who not only know the customers there, but they know the culture. They know what our customers' customers really need. And that's what we try and make sure that we put at the forefront of our dealings. We want our businesses to be of a size that they're very focused on a particular customer set in a particular geography, and that those customers can go to those businesses and hold them accountable for what they're delivering, and that they can't say, "Oh, this decision was made by head office somewhere else in the world." So that's fundamental to our structure. It doesn't make sense to a lot of people - they think we should be creating some sort of synergy - but we much more believe in the power of distributed autonomy, and what that brings to and can deliver for our customers. Of course, on the flip side, those businesses can then tap into our global expertise. So we're hoping to get the best of both worlds - that local focus on people living in the towns and cities that we serve, but being able to tap into shared learnings from our network and family of businesses all around the world. And that's why we bring our people together quite often, to share those best practices.

The local authorities are looking for - they want local, I mean people that they can work together with, but they want also these local people to be empowered by global knowledge and best practices.

And you know what some people don't realise is that our planning and scheduling system in Latin America works differently, sometimes, to what's required in, say, Europe or in the United States. And, you know, if we tried to build one system that was one thing for everybody, we think that would end up with an inferior solution. So we very much like the notion that we deliver solutions that are relevant to the geographies that our individual businesses serve.

And then, I know that you have businesses in different sectors. You have businesses in terms of taxis in Dubai providing service, or travel in Melbourne, or buses in Singapore. Can you paint a picture for us - beyond Modaxo, how does it look for your whole ecosystem of companies, and what is its role in people's daily life?

So when we established Modaxo, our mandate was to acquire, strengthen, and grow technology companies that enable the daily movement of people. And those words are important to us - that's what defines what we do get involved with, and what we don't. And then we had to expand beyond our traditional view. Our traditional view was very much what you would know as public transport - bus systems, tram systems, rail systems, moving people around the city. Whereas we took the view that we wanted to expand our scope into the journeys that people take between cities and across their cities, and therefore, we need to embrace and understand what happens with private transportation, and how private vehicles move around the city.

That's what authorities are doing also.

Exactly.

They are going beyond the traditional public transport - covering also other parts of the journey. So you are also moving in the same direction.

Because all these things are interconnected, right? A person doesn't travel to a parking station - a parking station is a point along the way to enable them to maybe park and get on an aircraft or get on a train, because it's a part of their journey; the journey is not to a parking station. But all these things are interconnected. And when you look at clean air zones and congestion zones, they're part of managing the traffic flow. And when you look at red light cameras and speed cameras, that's about safety for people moving around their cities. When you look at parking and on-street parking in major cities like LA, now an element of that is congestion management, and all those things interconnect. And they also share a lot of the underlying data about a city - how traffic flows work, what gets impacted. And for us, they're all points along a journey that a person takes. So we're not there yet, but, my vision is ultimately we want to be involved in every element of technology that touches a person as they move around their city. And that can be for work, for schooling, to get to medical appointments, even -

Ambulances.

Exactly. So, you know, it really is about the lifeblood of cities. And when you talk to transit agencies - at a state level, or at a large city level - government authorities, on behalf of their citizens, are investing billions of dollars in infrastructure to build these systems. There's hundreds of thousands of people that operate them. Like in this bus depot that we're in today, there's lots of people that are responsible for making sure that these services work. Our technology plays a relatively small but really crucial role in that. And so, you know, I get a big buzz out of the fact that we're part of that, in terms of scale.

You know, we set a goal, back in 2020, when we established Modaxo, to touch 1 billion journeys every day.

Fantastic.

Which everyone thought was sort of crazy at the time.

Crazy. It's a fantastic ambition.

Well, I can tell you right now, we're close to 700 million.

Congratulations.

This was by 2030, by the way - that was our goal. So we've reset that goal recently, because we were getting too close, and it was becoming achievable. Our goals need to stretch us. So we've just reset our goal to seek to touch 2 billion journeys every day by 2035. That's what the next 10 years holds for us.

That's a fantastic target, because, as far as I know, with the traditional public transport, like buses and rail, there is around 1.2 to 1.3 billion trips per day in the world.

Mm-hmm.

But now Modaxo's focus is not traditional public transport only. We are focusing on inter-city transport, even the transport between the countries with your aviation arm, and as well for traffic management and so on. So there is a big figure there that Modaxo will be addressing, and 2 billion makes sense from this angle also.

Look, it's about journeys as well, right? So you might make more than one journey in a day. I think we've already made rapid expansion into parking and traffic management, and we're a significant player. We're still early in our expansion into airports and aviation, but we're making good progress there.

Well, there's a lot of similarities, but a lot of differences. So, if you think about airports, they're very much like a large railway station, right? There's lots of people coming - they need to find their way around, they need to get on the right flight or train. Of course there's many great differences too. But I joke a lot that many of the aircraft are called Airbus for a reason, right?

That's a very good one. I never use that.

Very good. You know, they're moving lots of people in a common transport vehicle - it just happens to fly through the air. But there are very important differences, and that's why we brought on industry expertise to join Modaxo, to help us expand into that space. But airports also have major parking facilities. They often have rail and public transport connections. So for us, they're all part of a journey that a person takes, as they enter within that city, and between cities.

That is one important question I would like to ask you, and that's the question I sometimes receive as well. Modaxo is providing a forever home for the businesses that you are investing in. What does this mean for transport authorities or operators in practice?

Yeah, look, I think that's a very good point. When we invest in businesses - by which I mean we acquire them - you know, we're not holding them for five years and then pumping them up to resell, like some private equity used to do, or do. We own and hold those businesses forever. We have a mandate that we will never, ever sell businesses that we acquire. And that's great news for the industry, because it means we're invested forever - in the industry, with our customers forever. We want our products to evolve over time, and we want our great people to be with us for the long term as well. So we like to think that we think for the long term, but that we act with urgency to meet the demands of today. And, you know, I think that's a very important thing that people can understand - that we're not going away. We're building and building, and growing and growing, but we're here forever.

That's very important for the resilience of the solutions that we're providing as well.

It really influences everything we do, right - how we think about our investments, and where we have people in different countries. That's why we're quite happy to build out bases in different countries, because we're taking a very long-term view.

And Modaxo is a global software business, but you are touching every day the people - I mean communities, families, new technology. What do you think about the people side of Modaxo?

I know we'll talk about AI, but when I think about the business, we're trying to make a business impact - which is an impact to the industry. The only way we can do that is if we have strong intimacy with our customers. And when you think about our customers, who are essentially transit authorities and operators who service those authorities, and airports and aviation with a similar nature - their customers are all of us, as we move around our cities and towns. So we can only understand what we need to do for our customers if we understand what they need to do for their customers, which is the communities that they serve. And that's where we live and work, and their communities are the communities that we serve. So I think of us as serving the communities that we live in and work in, and that's the way I seek to connect what we do. And again, it comes back to that notion that what we do is out there on the street. If the bus doesn't arrive on time, or the train doesn't run, those things are real, and they impact people's lives. And we have to have that at the forefront of our minds.

And as far as I know, your people are also very important for yourself and for Modaxo. How do you view people development inside the organisation?

We are growing a lot, and one of the biggest constraints for us growing is having the right people who can lead and grow our businesses. So we invest a lot in leadership development - not just within our businesses, but looking at people who've grown up to run a business: how do they take the next step to oversee some businesses and help us grow beyond that, and become leaders of leaders? And that's a really big shift in capability. And so we invest heavily in that sort of development. Each of our businesses invests within themselves in developing everybody within those businesses. At the Modaxo level, we look at how we each develop leaders across Modaxo, so that we can promote them into businesses as we bring new businesses into the family.

And Bill, I mean, when I am having you here, I cannot conclude any discussion without asking you about AI. You already touched on AI a little bit, but I wonder your opinion, and Modaxo's approach to artificial intelligence - how was your approach, and what you are doing in terms of artificial intelligence now?

Look, I think we've been through a similar cycle to most people. There was some scepticism early on, but then we really quickly understood the huge potential for AI in our industry, and we've been investing accordingly. We've established a centre of excellence at the Modaxo level, so that each of our businesses doesn't have to learn it themselves.

This may be a benefit of being part of the bigger family.

Yeah, we can do things at the Modaxo level that our individual businesses can't, and this is one example where we do that. And so we've created a team - a growing team - who are out there helping each of our businesses, so each of them doesn't have to learn individually. And we're also learning from each other what works and what doesn't work, and we're sharing that. We're also looking at an investment at the industry level - what sort of tools can we build that step away from traditional views of software that meets the needs of various departments, and really looks at the ecosystem as a whole, and lets us answer questions that our customers may be asking, that also break down even their own thoughts of what is a department within a transit authority. I think the challenge we have in our world - and I've spoken about this at some industry events - is our technology cycles keep on getting shorter and shorter and faster and faster, but procurement cycles seem to be getting longer and longer. And I think that's a real problem for the industry, and it's something that, you know, we're advocating something needs to change there. Otherwise, by the time you go through a multi-year procurement cycle, what you envisaged has evolved multiple times in the meantime.

I fully agree. I fully agree.

And then, actually, you are making a good connection to my next question. Last year, when we were at the UITP Summit, you made a presentation, shared your view and vision about Mobility 5.0. And when we look from this perspective, how do you see the sector from now, and what needs to be done in terms of reaching the objectives of Mobility 5.0 that you were presenting?

So much has changed since then. In our world, particularly from an AI perspective, I think it comes back to that same question. How do we align the progress of the technology with what our - mostly government - customers are able to do, in terms of how they acquire that capability? And I think that's something that we need to work with industry to find ways where we can bring new technology to the table, in a much more timely manner than is possible with today's procurement processes.

Thank you so much, Bill, for joining Mobility Redefined.

And before we conclude, I would like to ask you one personal question. You work across multiple modes of transportation, and I wonder what's your favourite mode of transportation, if there is any?

Well, you know, when I moved to London four and a half years ago, we gave up cars. My wife and I don't have a car. And London is a great place like that. So I really walk a lot.

There aren't so many leaders in the transport industry who don't own a car.

No, it's -

A very good role model.

Actually, it was quite a psychological thing to get over, because I think that's part of the issue, right - a lot of it is bound up in our ego about owning a car. And I don't even think about it now. So I use buses all the time, but I've got to say my favourite is trains. I'm being careful about that, because we are sitting in a bus right now. It's very close-knit. But I guess, I use the Tube in London, I use rail services in London, but I also use them to travel across country, here and in Europe, and elsewhere. And I just find their efficiency is unparalleled.

But I'm sure that all these modes are like your sons and daughters.

I don't think - and you know what, that's a good question. When we're planning to go somewhere, we don't think about, are we going by bus today, or train today. We work out, you know, we plug in the destination, and we may well use a whole variety of different modes. And here in London, you can do that seamlessly. And, we're looking forward to making sure that that's possible in every larger city in the world.

Sometimes I'm receiving a question in different cities about whether the BRT or bus is better than rail, or the other way around. And I tell them: it's a question like asking a technician whether a skilled driver is better, or a hammer is better - they have different functions.

Yes.

They each have a role, and it's important what you need, what kind of solution you're needing in your city. And the most important thing is having an integrated solution.

But I'm a bit of a transport geek these days, so even when we go on holidays, we tend to use the local public transport - in the past, I wouldn't even have thought of doing that. But it gives you such a view of the local city that you wouldn't get if you were just doing a normal tourist trip.

Thank you so much, Bill, for joining Mobility Redefined for this special edition. It was an excellent discussion that I have had with you, and I'm inspired by your dedication to people's mobility.

Well, look, you know, really, it's all the team members who make up the Modaxo family that do all the hard work. There's, you know, over 3,000 of us in 35 countries around the world, and what our people do is really what makes all this happen. And I'm so proud of them. So, it's really down to them - I do very little of that.

And thanks to your teams as well, for empowering the daily journeys of people all around the world.

Exactly. Let's look at getting to 2 billion in the next 10 years.

Hopefully. Hopefully. Thank you, Bill.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to Mobility Redefined, brought to you by Modaxo. For more insights, visit our website at mobilityredefined.com, or follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favourite app to stay updated with our latest episodes. Thank you for tuning in, and we hope you enjoyed the conversation.