ALL COMPANIES WILL BE 100% DIGITAL !

Profile

Florent Soland is the Chief Information Officer for Natixis in Portugal. As the Director of the Atlas program, he is in charge of the implementation of Natixis IT Center of Expertise.

Florent did a Master degree in Information Technologies from the European Institute of Technology and has over 15 years of experience in Digital Transformation, IT Engineering, IT Operations and Application Development.

In his last position, Florent was based in New York, where he was Chief Information Officer for Natixis CIB Americas, with the responsibility of the delivery and support of all technology services for the Americas platform.

Before, he held various positions in Natixis CIB Americas: VP of Windows Services, Director of Client Infrastructure and Chief Technology Officer.

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In a VUCA world as we’re living, thank you for the opportunity to share with you some thoughts and ideas, starting our conversation by understanding a little of your current challenges.

What are the main challenges of your current position as Natixis in Portugal CIO?

Growth!

Natixis in Portugal is an IT Center of Expertise that provides innovative solutions to support Natixis business operations worldwide, in 38 countries. We’ve started our activity in Portugal from scratch in March 2017, only 2 years ago!

Our implementation plan included an ambitious “ramp-up” plan, so we could finish 2019 with almost 700 employees with a deep expertise in various IT fields.

We are now more than 500, but we still have a lot of work ahead. My main challenges are promoting Natixis reputation as brand and an employer brand, attracting talents, but retaining them as well.

The tech scene in Portugal – and specifically in Porto – is super dynamic and has grown a lot over the past few years, and we need to differentiate ourselves with a unique culture, making sure that we stay competitive as a best-in-class employer.

To have happy and engaged employees is our main priority!

In your industry, which tech trends would you highlight?

As an IT Center of Expertise, we cover such a broad scope of technologies that it’s hard to single out a few of them, but I would say that Time to Market is one of our main focus, so Agile and DevOps are obviously one of the main trends, along with the “Cloud-First” approach.

Another one I would mention is Smart Automation, from “simple” RPA to more advanced automation with applied AI.

And last, but not least, Blockchain is obviously getting a lot of attention, being very promising for our industry.

In your perspective, what’s the main factor that distinguishes companies in their relationship with the clients?

From an IT perspective, to me there are two main factors. UX (User experience) is obviously the most important one: if you have the best product to sell, with the best features under the hood, everything is meaningless if the interface is not efficient, simple and intuitive.

The second factor is Trust, with all the privacy concerns and the various data leaks that have happened over the past few years; to me, this is becoming a critical factor in the relationship between a company and its clients, and it will definitely turn clients away.

In the context of Business Analytics (BA)/Business Intelligence (BI), what is the relationship of your company with data and critical business information?

It is a love/hate relationship!

On one side, we try to have a data driven approach in everything we do, and we put data at the heart of most of our projects.

We have teams of data scientists that help our business get the most of our data with as much analytics as possible, and present it to them in the trendiest way as possible, with all the latest BI tools at our disposal.

On the other side, our industry is heavily regulated and data quality always is one of our main concerns: we spend tremendous amounts of time checking and conciliating our data, back and forth many times.

What will be the impact of BA/BI in the companies and people?

In my perspective, this is the key to the future.

Many people now consider “Data” as the most precious commodity in the world; some of the biggest multinational companies have it at the heart of their business model and make much more money out of it than any other firm in any more “conventional” business.

As for the people, the real concern about this situation is privacy: as I mentioned above, this will also be a key aspect of the interaction between clients and companies, as clients need to trust that these companies will not do anything wrong with their data, and as such harm their privacy.

GDPR is one of the first significant law frameworks in the world that is trying to address these matters, but we need broader application, covering all the countries.

For you, innovation is…

A collective effort!

Ideation and collective intelligence are key to pursue Innovation, which is why we, at Natixis, are always putting our employees at the heart of all initiatives around Innovation and Transformation.

In 2030, how will companies be like?

2030 is so close…

I cannot imagine that companies will be that much different from today, but in a not so distant future I would imagine that all companies will be 100% digital (not just in a “paperless” sense, but also in terms of operating model), all interactions (orders, receipts, payments, contracts, etc.) between all companies will be based on Blockchain and employees will be able to work from anywhere in the world for any company. Wouldn’t it be a nice scenario?

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Natixis is a French multinational financial services firm specialized in asset & wealth management, corporate & investment banking, insurance and payments.

A subsidiary of Groupe BPCE, the second largest banking group in France through its two retail banking networks, Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne, Natixis counts nearly 16.000 employees across 38 countries.

Natixis in Portugal is an IT Center of Expertise that provides innovative solutions for Natixis business operations worldwide. In just two years, the company has hired 600 employees and aims to create, by the end of 2019, more 100 new jobs in the areas of information technology.