The Silicon Review | 50 Most Trustworthy Companies of the Year 2020

1. U.S. Special Leadership Technology CEOs News Business Features CIOs 50Most Trustworthy Companies of the Year SR2020 Secure your transactions and increase the processing speed with Euro Exim Bank’s cutting edge solutions Kaushik Punjani | Founder | CEO www.thesiliconreview.com

2. Skybridge Americas leverages disruptive technologies to deliver undeniably best BPO services T with teams across the world is also gaining significance. Accordingly, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has been growing in popularity. In almost every industry, businesses can now outsource non-core processes while they can focus more on the core business functions. The BPO industry is continuing to develop, and we should anticipate some interesting trends in this segment. BPO is basically a subset of outsourcing that involves contracting third-party service providers for various business responsibilities and operations. Businesses worldwide are embracing BPO because they make it easier for them to optimize the process management. In conversation with Andrew Bosko, CEO of Skybridge Americas echnology is developing at breakneck speed, so communicating and working a business process outsourcing company that provides customer care, sales, technical support, emergency roadside dispatching, back-office support, medical and appointment scheduling across all channels; inbound and outbound voice, email, chat, SMS text, USPS mail, and social media. With their cloud-based, virtual platform, Skybridge delivers a uniform experience for all agents and consumers within a stable, secure environment across all contact channels. By providing real, actionable data, Skybridge enables smarter decision making without CapEx Investment or other operational expenses so often associated with acquiring and maintaining technology. Skybridge’s “Agents Anywhere” platform allows them to recruit from top talent pools throughout Canada and the United States and enables them to ramp up and down seamlessly quickly. Businesses often fail to speak out with their target audience due to outdated or non-compatible marketing strategies. How do you help your clients bridge the gap between their brands and consumers? Skybridge has maintained decades- long relationships with some of the world's most beloved and iconic brands. We've stayed so successful because we've always taken the concept of partnership very seriously. We truly collaborate with our clients, and we're totally invested in their success. That's what separates us from most contact centers: that level of shared stakes, partnership, and collaboration. Our clients aren't hiring us just to deliver a script. They're relying on our BPO provides a high level of flexibility, improves cost efficiency, better competitive advantage, diversity in skills, and a more global presence. Skybridge Americas is Skybridge Americas was founded in 1953, and it is based in Minneapolis. “A long-standing commitment to process ingenuity, security and IT innovation that mitigates risk and ensures memorable customer experiences.” Andrew Bosko, CEO

3. agents to understand their goals, embrace their brand promise, and deliver superior customer experience. Our Agents Anywhere delivery platform allows us to carefully identify, recruit, and retain associates who fit the profile of a successful Brand Agent and show a distinct affinity for our client's product or service. This creates an intense passion for pleasing the customer on every call. Moreover, our clients count on our leadership team to share industry trends, provide key customer feedback, and be an active participant in their planning process. Everything we do is focused on helping our clients build up their brand equity. the customer care industry now. Today, if you don’t have in-house technology experts to monitor those developments and the financial resources to invest in the right ones – you run very real risks of failing to keep up with your customer needs. That fact was driven home in a very sobering way when COVID-19 came along. Skybridge Americas was one of the few North American providers who had already invested in total remote capability and scalability. So, our agents were already set up at home and fully supported by the platform and security technology they needed to provide seamless service to all of our customers. But when that happened, we pretty quickly recognized that we were in a position to share what we knew with other companies. At that point, we decided to help our own clients and any company trying to transition to at-home, retain their employees, and keep their business operational. Meet the leader behind the success of Skybridge Americas Since joining Skybridge America’s in 2016, CEO Andrew Bosko has been leading the company through a dramatic brand transformation. With 25 years of executive leadership experience in the industry, Andy has a clear sense of how customer care contact centers need to evolve in order to stay relevant and in demand. He has successfully overseen major technology and systems upgrades, redesigns of process and infrastructure, and the transition to at-home customer care agents. Prior to joining Skybridge Americas, Mr. Bosko held executive leadership roles with a number of sales and customer care organizations. He was a pioneer in the work@home movement as Sr. Vice-President of Sales and Marketing for Alpine Access, the contact center industry’s first pure work@home BPO Company. Most recently, he served as Chief Operating Officer at iPacesetters, LLC. Before earning his MBA from Northwestern University, Mr. Bosko attended Loyola University Chicago, on an athletic scholarship for swimming and water polo, helping his team advance to the NCAA tournament three times. Trust is a difficult attribute to measure and a delicate dynamic to maintain. How do you maintain this with your employees and clients? We build trust by hiring for integrity and promoting our capabilities transparently. We maintain trust through consistent, open communication with all of our stakeholders. That means we’re in continuous communication with our employees and our customers, using multi-level formal and informal communications. Whenever we find gaps, we make improvements and close the loop by communicating our actions. Do you have any new services ready to be launched? We’re excited to be launching our new conversational Artificial Intelligence solution. By mapping ideal call paths and using cutting edge speech recognition, we’re able to seamlessly route calls between IVR, chatbot, and live agent, based on call type and customer need. At any point, even mid-call, our virtual agents are capable of transferring the customer, along with all of the data collected during the call, to a live agent. This ability to automate simple and complex call types with teams of virtual and live agents has allowed us to deliver greater efficiency and productivity to our clients. How do you deal with the “never ending change” in digital transformation? There will always be newer, better technologies – and unforeseen disruptors – around every corner. That’s just the reality of SR

4. ‘Strategic Focus’: Pioneer Landscape Centers, a Colorado-based Leading Landscape and Hardscape Materials Supplier, Continues to Stick to Basics While Banking on More Inclusive and Transparent Innovation “We gave every employee a discretionary bonus as a reward to say thank you for how well they handled the pandemic through Q2 and changes in the business we’d made the year before.” Auckland, New Zealand. Fletcher’s 16,000 employees produce a wide array of products to support the building industry, including raw materials, concrete, wallboard, insulation, and laminate under the company’s subsidiary, Formica. At Pioneer, Adamson has taken the helm of a regional leader in quarry operations and retail for hardscape materials, which are the features of landscape architecture that augment the vegetation, such as pathways, walls, and rock beds. Although Pioneer had suffered some setbacks in years past, Adamson could see its potential. O pportunity: That’s what smart investors Mark Adamson, CEO seek, and it’s what Mark Adamson, a CEO and private- equity firm director, found in Pioneer Landscape Centers. “The hypothesis behind why we bought Pioneer is still a very valid hypothesis,” Adamson said. “People in the future are going to be spending more and more of their disposable income on outdoor spaces. That, combined with the changing climate and increasing water shortages, will mean that those outdoor spaces are going to incorporate more hard landscape versus green landscape than they did in the past.” Adamson understands companies like Pioneer that manufacture materials used in construction because he’s been CEO at four of them. Before stepping into the private equity world, Adamson ran Fletcher Building Limited, a $9 billion conglomerate based in

5. Today, Pioneer is well-positioned to leverage these trends. Established in 1968, the company is a leading distributor of landscaping and hardscaping materials in the western United States. With 35 retail distribution facilities and 20 company-owned and operated quarries and production facilities in Colorado and Arizona, Pioneer is uniquely positioned to serve industrial, commercial, wholesale, and residential customers. In a business like Pioneer’s, discretionary effort matters because there are so many employees who have touchpoints with the customer. Getting those employees motivated and having faith in leadership turns the dial on that extra-effort attitude. – everyone received the same discretionary bonus on top of any other bonus that employees were eligible to earn. Q. You said you’ve had revenue gains in your business. How did you achieve that? A. Again, it had to do with focus. For one thing, previous leadership had steered Pioneer toward do-it- yourself shoppers, but we realized that even if homeowners come to the store, it’s often their contractors who make the purchases. Q. What did you do to encourage employee engagement? A. I often say that our employees out in the field know more about the business than we do in the boardroom. In many ways, that’s the case, so we focus on two-way communication--up and down the corporate ladder. In dialogue with the CEO of Pioneer Landscape Centers, Mark Adamson We redesigned our stores and processes to help those key customers – small and medium- sized contractors – make the most of their time. For instance, we implemented Curbside Service, a system where contractors could select a product and pay for it without ever entering the store because we know time is money for these people. If they’re in the store, they can’t be on a job site. Q. What was the most important change you implemented when you first came to Pioneer? A. It wasn’t as much a change as it was the focus. This is my fourth CEO gig and I’ve operated across four continents. I specialize in helping businesses that have taken a wrong turn to get back on the right track. To do that, you need to reinforce the importance of engagement throughout the business. This is because engagement requires a virtuous circle of communication. It’s not a matter of me deciding what will happen in the Pioneer world and telling everyone about it. It’s me trying to find out what employees think should happen, running that through the filter or investment priorities, and then circling back to employees to say, “We listened to you. We didn’t take up every change, but we’ve taken a lot of it, this is what we’re going to do, and this is your role in it.” Curbside Service allowed customers to pay for products at a stationary outdoor terminal. When COVID-19 hit, we accelerated the development of systems that enabled us to serve the customer from any place in one of our yards. With Honk-For-Service, we now can come to the customer and complete the transaction on a tablet. Contractors tell us they can get a full extra visit into our stores each day. That enables them to spend time serving their customers and making money in their businesses. Most businesses turn a profit of some kind, but maximizing that profit relies on your ability to motivate that extra, discretionary effort an employee can give. What do I mean by that? Suppose you show up at a store and you need to buy something right as that store is about to close. But, the sales associate says, “It’s OK. Take your time. I’ll stay open.” Engagement also means training people to be successful in their jobs and then rewarding them when they are. We came through the first round of COVID-19 with revenue gains and improved margins, and we couldn’t have done that if we didn’t have a great group of folks. This past summer, we gave every employee a discretionary bonus as a reward to say thank you for how well they handled the pandemic through Q2 and changes in the business we’d made the year before. Store associates, quarry workers, truck drivers, management She wasn’t told to do that. She did it because she believed in the business, her team, the leadership, and the direction that her company was taking. The customer will remember it and come back. Q. What about the improved margins you mentioned. How do you achieve those? A. We’ve focused on leveraging our assets, such as our quarry

6. Five9 – The intelligent cloud contact center making customer service a more human experience M and call center software that can't keep up with the way customers and businesses now communicate. A cloud-based contact center is a modern alternative to on-premise contact centers using the latest in communications technology. It offers many benefits to businesses who want to meet and exceed their customers' expectations continually. With the rise of communications APIs for contact centers, however, contact centers are finally evolving. Building a cloud-based contact center with APIs is easier and faster than ever. You can add new features and channels as you need, in far less time than it takes to write an RFP. This type of contact center is built with APIs; the software " ost of the contact centers in operation today are running on old technology building blocks power modern communications. implementing, and supporting an easy-to-use, complete cloud contact center solution. The company's software is built on a flexible architecture that adapts to your changing needs. Companies can turn agent seats on and off as needed, avoid the hassle of maintaining infrastructure and focus on converting interactions into brand loyalty. Five9 is the leading provider of cloud contact center software. The firm is driven by a passion for transforming contact centers into customer engagement centers of excellence, coupled with a deep understanding of the cost and complexity of running a contact center. The firm helps contact centers of every size create powerful customer connections. Five9 software creates more successful customer interactions while increasing contact center productivity without the capital expense and premise-based systems' maintenance costs. With the experience of thousands of customer implementations, the firm is laser-focused on building, Path-breaking products and services offered by Five9 Cloud Call Center Software: Five9 call center software enables agents to be more effective when handling customer interactions, delivering a better service experience, or selling more. Smart We provide digital-first omnichannel experiences that route your customers to the agent best equipped to meet their needs regardless of the channel they choose."

7. The visionary leader behind the success of Five9 Rowan Trollope serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Five9. He is passionate about how digital transformation revolutionizes how we communicate, particularly how organizations bring personalized experiences to their customers. Mr. Rowan is a recognized Silicon Valley leader and has a depth of experience in software solutions and cloud innovation. He is a self-proclaimed geek and taught himself to program on a Commodore 64 at a local Radio Shack and holds several patents in computer security and operating systems. Before Five9, Rowan was SVP and General Manager of Cisco's Applications Group and an executive leadership team member. Under Rowan's leadership, he refreshed the entire collaboration technology portfolio, simplifying the product line and winning over 20 awards for outstanding product design. At Symantec before Cisco, he was Group President Sales, marketing, and product development, responsible for cloud security and the SMB market. He developed and grew its software as a Service strategy and expanded its cloud- based delivery and customer support models. Rowan Trollope, CEO Inbound Call Center: Five9 Inbound Cloud Call Center software delivers exceptional customer service by using the omnichannel routing capability by connecting a customer to the best agent every time. With Five9 Engagement Workflow route contacts to the right agents and automatically deliver customer information to them before they engage, to provide personalized service. Customers serve themselves through speech- enabled IVR and Visual IVR on mobile devices, freeing agents to focus their attention on high-value interactions. Five9 "screen pops" give agents the information they need to personalize the customer's Dialers give agents more time with live prospects. Intelligent Omnichannel Routing connects customers to the right agent. On-Screen Customer Info puts information at the agent's fingertips to personalize service. And everything is automatically logged to your CRM. Five9 provides everything you need to run an effective inbound, outbound, or blended omnichannel contact center, including interactive voice response (IVR), real-time and historical dashboards and reporting, telephony, workforce management, quality monitoring, CRM integrations, and more. experience, potentially turning routine service calls into revenue- generating opportunities. Digit-first Omnichannel: Customers expect options on how they contact your company, and they increasingly look to digital channels as a first choice. Five9 Digital Engagement is fully integrated with Five9 inbound and outbound voice to create exceptional digital- first customer experiences across voice, email, SMS, webchat, video, and social messaging apps. Move customers seamlessly between channels and engage customers within multiple channels in a single interaction to resolve issues quickly. SR 7

8. PitchBook – Providing trustworthy and revolutionary tools to analyze data in the private investment lifecycle F this data equips the user with real- time quotes and up-to-date and accurate financial information. The financial market data industry can be broadly classified into Terminals and Proprietary Data & Value Add Service Providers. Terminal businesses dominate the Financial Market data industry. These suppliers play a significant role in banking and financial companies' business data gathering to gain knowledge on market rates, indices, exchange fluctuations, and credit pricing, among others. They also play a significant role in analytics and chat support. Hence, the demand for financial market data is driven by investment bankers, corporate financiers, and portfolio managers who are top contributors to the annual demand increase during the past five years. inancial market data is a key part of the financial professional's workflow, as private equity, venture capital, and M&A markets with adequate data, technology, and services so they can make the most informed business decisions efficiently. It has its offices in London, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. Serving clients in 19 languages, the firm provides thousands of global business professionals with comprehensive data on the private and public markets to discover and execute opportunities with confidence. The firm also partners with industry organizations and business schools, giving them special access to PitchBook and supporting their events. of the companies, deals, investors, or individuals that you're looking for. Set custom alerts, so you're the first to know if a new company pops up, a professional connection changes jobs, or a competitor makes an acquisition. The company's Research Center combines Morningstar's thematic and company-specific equity research with PitchBook's own extensive PE, VC, and M & A research to provide a holistic view of the private and public markets. PitchBook Mobile: It helps to access curated news as well as the in-depth private market analysis straight from your phone. One can get the data you need instantly with advanced search and customizable alerts. Discover opportunities before your competitors with on-the-go insights and monitor your space activity, from significant deals to new hires. Work seamlessly across devices. Your search history saved searches, lists, and more automatically sync across PitchBook Desktop, Mobile, and Chrome. Evaluate targets, uncover critical deal details, gain competitive insights, or prep for your next Revolutionary products furnished by PitchBook Pitchbook Desktop: The award- winning software gives you access to the company's data and the analytical tools you need to get answers fast, discover promising opportunities, and more. Each feature of the PitchBook Desktop is designed to help you work smarter. One can leverage granular search criteria to sort through data and generate a tailored list PitchBook is a leading financial data provider covering the global venture capital, private equity, and public markets. It is also a research firm that works tirelessly to arm professionals within the global " We track every aspect of the public and private equity markets, including venture capital, private equity, and M&A."

9. John Gabbert Founder & CEO The formidable leader behind the success of PitchBook John Gabbert is the Founder and also serves as the Chief Executive Officer of PitchBook. He has more than 20 years of experience in building information technology products for capital market professionals. Before founding PitchBook, he was the Managing Director of Private Markets for Dow Jones & Company and VP of Worldwide Research for VentureOne, VentureSource, and The Private Equity Analyst. He has played a key role in six acquisitions/mergers (three as the acquired target and three as part of the acquiring/merged organization) by both strategic and private equity investors. meeting no matter where you are with easy access to in-depth, interrelated data on public and private companies, people, transactions, funds, and more. global public and private market data to streamline your workflow, create and update financial models quickly, and catalyze confident investment decisions. PitchBook's prebuilt templates give you immediate access to investor tear sheets, comparable and valuations whenever you need them. The data it pipes into the templates is dynamic and always up-to-date. Because variables can be manipulated to evaluate all possible outcomes, you can feel confident in your decision- making. Ensure efficiency and accuracy in your work by utilizing a formula builder to select the specific data you want to be populated in your models. PitchBook Excel Plugin: It helps to strengthen your analysis and build better financial models. Harness the depth of PitchBook's SR