Confidentiality and discretion are among our primary criteria for providing professional legal services to our international blue-chip clientele. All our assignments entail dealing with sensitive information, inadequate safekeeping of which could seriously harm the interests of our clients. We have been seeking for years a reliable solution that secures not only our intra-team communications, but also voice communications with our clients. Thanks to CryptTalk, communication with our clients has become more frequent and we are able to respond to their needs more quickly and effectively. Using the service has also reduced costs and significantly cut time-consuming travel for in-person meetings. We, and more importantly, our clients have been very pleased with the operational flexibility and convenience offered by CryptTalk's secure mobile voice communication service, which allowed them to save time and cut costs. They regard CryptTalk as a differentiating value-added service provided by our firm.
One of the main challenges we face in the pharmaceutical industry is the protection of our proprietary know-how. Our company runs clinical research facilities in Eastern Europe, which means that we are the link between clinical research professionals and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Secure communications as well as secure and efficient administration of the results are critical success factors in our business. We have been seeking for several years a highly secure and cost-effective solution to this challenge. CryptTalk not only provides us with the security we have been seeking, but also helps us lower costs and manage projects more efficiently. We are not IT experts, so ease-of-use is very important to us: CryptTalk's highly user-friendly interface makes the service simple and easy to use on a regular daily basis.
Our activity in the energy sector attracts a lot of unsolicited attention from competitors. A trade or contract for us can involve tens of millions of dollars. Success or failure is determined by whether we have the right information and have the trust of our trading partners. CryptTalk helps us achieve both these objectives. It is also very important to us that CryptTalk is an independent company based in a country with strong privacy and data-protection laws, and that it has no links with any government agencies.
Our group runs a pan-European business, with offices and professional staff in 23 countries. Our corporate security policy specifies that sensitive matters may only be discussed during in-person meetings. After adopting CryptTalk as part of our everyday communication standard, we noted that our regional managers travelled less to HQ and as a result could spend more time in the field selling and promoting our products. In addition, thanks to CryptTalk's new secure conferencing feature, we have considerably reduced the need for frequent company-wide in-person meetings. Overall our travel budget dropped by 15%, and our executives spend more time with clients and sit less in planes. As an added bonus, we found CryptTalk's outstanding voice quality to be far better than our mobile or fixed-line services.
In private banking and wealth management, security, discretion and data protection are 'musts' for gaining and maintaining the confidence and trust of clients and partners. We made CryptTalk available to our premium customers at no cost to them. This proved to be a very astute decision because now we are able to have frequent verbal communications with our clients without security or confidentiality worries. In the past, before we introduced CryptTalk, the only opportunity we had for discussing investment strategies or taking orders was during scheduled monthly meetings. Thanks to CryptTalk we can have far more intense and productive interactions with our clients, frequently update recommendations and discuss and execute orders, confident that all discussions are secure from potential eavesdroppers.
Headquartered in Switzerland, our company recently concluded the acquisition of a distribution business in Brazil and Argentina. For this transaction we had serious competition and a complicated bidding procedure because the target was a listed company. We had to protect our bidding strategy not only from competitors but also from other investors who saw gains to be made given the special situation of the target. Our buy-out team travelled very frequently to Latin-America and the confidentiality of transaction-related communications was a major issue. Our security team recommended that both our deal-team and our management team use CryptTalk for all mobile voice communication. As our standard mobile device was not the iPhone, we had to invest in purchasing iPhones for our team members. Despite this extra investment we achieved overall cost savings because of reduced travel. But perhaps more importantly, our top management no longer had to worry about the security of mobile voice calls. After this positive experience, CryptTalk was adopted as the standard voice communication channel for our executive team.
As an advisor specialized in financial transactions, it is crucial that we have secure communication channels not only with our offices worldwide, but also with our clients. We originally tested CryptTalk in our main office in Asia. The results were so positive that we not only use CryptTalk's calling and conference calling service internally for out professionals, but we also recommend the service to our clients. CryptTalk provides reliable and effective 24/7 customer support, which means that we can get assistance with the service worldwide any time, should we need it. In addition, our legal department validated CryptTalk from a regulatory point of view and we are able to use the CryptTalk service in most of our offices worldwide.