4 March 2019
Gilles Réant joined the Lemonway team as Chief Product Officer in February 2019. Prior to this, he worked for nine years at HPS Hightech Payment Systems in Casablanca, where he successively held the positions of R&D Project Manager, Head of the Mobile Payment Department and finally Head of Innovation at the company. This technology aficionado is behind many innovative projects in the field of mobile services, meeting needs in the realm of financial solutions such as mobile banking, mobile payments, money transfer and mobile payment terminals.
Gilles Réant brings this technical experience in payments to his new role managing the innovation department of Lemonway with the dual objective of:
‘In this, I am lucky to have the support of an experienced team of about 10 experts in the fields of development, product design and project management.’
After participating in the launch of a national mobile payment ecosystem in Morocco, bringing together banks, telephone operators and transfer companies, Gilles was looking for a new challenge. Lemonway was the trigger ‘I had the opportunity to address new issues while continuing to work in a profession similar to what I did as an expatriate. Returning to a company on a human scale was one of my goals, and I couldn’t have wished for a better opportunity than to join the leading French FinTech.’
‘My first challenge will undoubtedly be to remember the first names of the company’s 70 employees! More seriously, I had drifted away somewhat from European regulatory news, so I have taken advantage of the last few weeks to update my knowledge and review the latest directives concerning payment (PSD2) and respect for the confidentiality of private data (RGPD).’ The next step will be innovation, with the preparation and release in 2019 of very ambitious and disruptive products focusing on artificial intelligence and combatting fraud, in particular.
Sometimes it’s not enough to be right. ‘Coming from the world of engineering, predominately based on calculations and measurements, I used to think that it was enough if the results were correct. With time, however, I have learned that social skills, personal skills and diplomacy are just as important as technical expertise. It may seem counter-intuitive, but in this case being right is not enough and it is necessary to take things a step further.’
Gilles is passionate about new technologies and still participates in writing software to this day. Proving that you can be a geek and a sportsman, Gilles plays badminton… and loves to surf! ‘Morocco gave me the chance to get into this sport, with some, if spotty, success. I will probably find it a bit more difficult to find a good spot in Paris!’
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