YPB Group says every business needs to be QR code ready in 2021

YPB Group Ltd (ASX:YPB) is well-positioned to benefit from the predicted major change in business operations post-COVID-19 through its YPB CONNECT Platform and enhanced CONNECT 2 functionality to support QR code functionality and contact tracing. The company believes that the pandemic will result in governments and businesses having to work closer together, with long-lasting consequences for how we all move, work and live. Founder, chairman and CEO John Houston, who has more than 40 years of experience in building successful businesses across the globe, provides insights into the importance of improved contract tracing technology, such as that being developed by YPB. His thoughts are supported by experience as more than a decade ago, he recognised that more and more brands would need to utilise brand protection technologies and got ahead of the counterfeiting tsunami by founding YPB. YPB Group chairman and CEO John Houston. COVID-19 preparedness Houston believes that current contact tracing, which is done manually in Australia, is unscalable unless governments adopt a more centralised system. While the Federal Government has built the COVID SAFE app and state governments are building their own apps, he said unless there was a mandate that all the data was centrally available, the question regarding manually cross-matching data in case of a big outbreak would remain unanswered. Houston said: “According to UNSW, every person with COVID-19 will have 10 to 20 contacts to trace, which means if a state has 100 cases a day, you need to trace 1,000 to 2,000 contacts within 24 to 48 hours or you risk losing control of the epidemic. “Any sort of major outbreak will be devastating for Australian businesses and communities, and we need a unified approach for the years ahead.” According to Houston, most people had never experienced a pandemic like this in their lifetimes and everyone, including authorities, had been caught off guard. “And no one knows what the future is going to look like even with the vaccines. “My humble opinion is that COVID-19 is going to change the way in which we behave as a society for years to come, vaccine or no vaccine, and governments and businesses need to be prepared.” YPB contact tracing YPB’s existing QR code systems were built for marketing purposes, but with security and protection at the centre of its technology. While the YPB CONNECT Platform helps businesses meet their mandatory contact tracing requirements, the enhancement of the platform to CONNECT Sentry could also help governments control outbreaks and keep communities safe. Houston said: “We are the leading QR code platform solution in Australia and six months ago no one had really heard of using QR codes on a mass scale in this country. “We’ve been doing this since 2016 mainly around export and in Asia, and we’ve got a really robust highly capable and scalable platform that works in an Amazon Web Services Cloud environment. “To date, we’ve issued 175 million codes with our YPB CONNECT Platform, and we have very quickly enhanced it with a range of features to help health systems streamline COVID-19 contact tracing.” CONNECT Sentry The CONNECT Sentry enhancement enables contact tracing teams to see an individual’s venue and location history in real-time and see their check-in journey on a map view and can also produce heat maps and analytics for quick detection of possible clusters. This is built on a proven system – YPB CONNECT – and so can be rolled out immediately and scaled up to cover the entire country if needed. No room for complacency The chairman and CEO said that in 2021 complacency would be the biggest enemy. “COVID-19 and its impact on how we move through the world will be with all of us for years to come, so we need to get ahead of it now while we can. “We need to put our guard up and protect against the uncertainties of the future.”