French Tech Podcast - London

CAFE SERRE - 1 Entrepreneur - 1 Hour - Live 

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Adrien ZANELLI, Co-Founder at Retail VR is in conversation with Sebastien PAILLET, CEO of Earlymetrics and Board Member of FTL

"When all can see retail is profoundly changing. Stores must rethink how they can meet objectives to thrive in a world where e-commerce is growing ever prominent. Consumers need a more fulfilling shopping experience, whatever the channel. Virtual and augmented reality is the perfect way to address these challenges.

New, richer experiences will give retail the boost it has been desperately looking for. Too often seen as niche, virtual and augmented reality will prove a game changer when used efficiently. By putting emotions at the heart of buying.

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La FRENCH TECH London is relaunching this short and intimate format. This is a full replay of the conversation we had. 

April J. Rudin is widely acknowledged as a top marketing strategist for the financial-services and wealth-management sectors. 

She founded The Rudin Group in 2008, a firm that designs bespoke marketing campaigns for some of the world's leading wealth-management firms, fintechs, and family offices. 

April clearly distinguishes herself by her ability to forecast and leverage critical trends, and by her expertise in digital and traditional media.

Check out : https://therudingroup.com

She is in conversation with Helene Alunni-Botteri, Board member of La French Tech London and Senior Vice President , Innovation Group Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator - EMEA

Ian Hollowbread was appointed Head of RegTech Labs, in January 2019, he is globally responsible for RegTech within ING Labs, with a focus on supporting and investing in early stage companies to help address regulatory compliance and pro-actively protect the financial system at large.

Ian is an accomplished change manager, with over 15 years’ experience across service,operations and regulatory environments. He also brings a wealth of experience and knowledge of post-trade infrastructure and innovation.  

Ian is an active member of ING UKs Innovation Council and has had responsibility of defining strategy and transformation under ING’s Chief Administrators office function. Most recently, Ian served as Chair to the Association of Foreign Banks RegTech Group and he promotes ecosystem building efforts to help solve some of the fundamental challenges to technology adoption.

Shruti is the Head of Fuse, Allen & Overy’s tech innovation space which she helped set-up in September 2017. 

Fuse’s philosophy is to identify legaltech, regtech and dealtech companies relevant to A&O lawyers and their clients and to find ways to start working together. Fuse is instrumental in driving the adoption of technology within A&O and more broadly, within the legal sector. The Fuse 4th cohort was launched in June 2020. 

Prior to launching Fuse, Shruti was a Counsel in the Derivatives and Structured Finance group. Shruti was the first person at A&O to have directly been promoted to partner into its Advanced Delivery offering. 

Outside of Allen & Overy, Shruti is a mother of three children, an active angel investor and has built a sector-agnostic portfolio of private investments, many of which have a tech focus. Also, she sits in the LawTech Delivery Panel, an industry-led, government-backed initiative, established to support the transformation of the UK legal sector through tech.

In 2019, Shruti won the Asian Women of Achievement Award in the Professionals category, and was included on in the HERoes Role Model List and the Financial Times TOP 10 legal entrepreneurs. During the course of 2018, Shruti was awarded a TechWomen 50 Award and a Fastcase 50 Award and was also included in the following lists: Lawyer’s Hot100, Brummell Magazine’s 30 Inspirational Women, Management Today’s Power Part Timers, the Inclusive Boards 100 most influential BAME leaders in UK and Innovate Finance’s Standout 35 Women in FinTech.

She is interviewed by Helene Alluni-Botteri, Board Member of La French Tech London. 

Anthony is a regular presenter at industry conferences and has become a recognised thought leader on the application of blockchain technology to the regulated financial services industry.

Having spent most of his career with large banks collaborated with a multitude of FinTechs and high growth companies as a Banking CIO - he was leading Société Générale 's innovation function in the UK until March 2020 - , Anthony recently took the opportunity to work independently with a small number of high potential companies that he really believes in. 

These business have some common characteristics - Highly credible leadership teams; a strong vision; disruptive business models and the ability to deliver.

Anthony is now Head of Business Development for Ownera, and on the Board of Advisors of Secretarium. 

As part of our FinTech podcast series, he is in conversation with Helene Alunni-Botteri, Board member of La French Tech London, and Senior VP Innovation Group for the EMEA startup Accelerator of Wells Fargo, the world's fourth-largest bank by market cap.

Anja Elkær is a digital transformation strategist with comprehensive experience from digital change projects and positions in banking. 

She has a passion for combining customer insight and tech insight to solve real customer problems, smarter and faster! 

For the last 5 years she has been an ambassador for promoting more strategic partnerships between fintechs and banks – for the benefit of both parties – and especially the customers... 

She has been involved in several accelerators in the Nordics and in London and is mentor in Copenhagen Fintech in Denmark. 

She has international outlook and seek inspiration for new  - data-driven - customer value and new digital business models on her travels to US and Asia. She recently left banking and is now involved in 2 startups and allows herself a couple of months with what she describes as an experimentation and learning leave.

Check out the Mad LANGER concert in closed Coppenhagen airport mentioned by Anja ;-)

Matching tech talents with the right projects to build a smart technological future.

French Tech London and French Tech Barcelona join forces to welcome David THUILLIER and Anthony BLOMET, respectively M.D of M.A. and M.D of M.A. Barcelona. 

M.A. is an enterprise staffing technology staffing company previously known as Montreal Associates established in London in the late 1970's by John BOWYER and Louis ALEXANDER. 

David and Anthony are now leading the growth of M.A. as an international actor servicing clients ranging from Start-ups to Listed Companies. Growth you said? Over the last 4 years M.A's operations grew at the steady pace of 20 to 30% yearly.

From Anthony's epic 6 weeks to set up M.A's first European office in Barcelona to their recent Team Building day under lock down, M.A. is never short of inspiring stories.

They are being interviewed by Mathilde Bacholle, Community Lead for La French Tech London.

Visit: www.frenchtechlondon.com     |      www.montrealassociates.com     |      www.frenchtechbarcelona.com

A serial entrepreneur, Karim co-founded VIRTUO in 2016 with Thibault Chassagne, after the neowebcar.com they had founded together had been acquired by Groupe ARGUS in 2015.

VIRTUO is a 100% mobile car rental service head-quartered in Paris that is reinventing the car rental industry, getting rid of all that is wrong with it: high hidden fees, unavailable cars, long queues. The company is combining technology and its own fleet of Mercedes cars with the aim of giving incumbents, such as Avis, Europcar, and Hertz, a run for their money.

Karim is interviewed by Raph Crouan and Mathilde Bacholle, respectively President and Community Lead for La French Tech London. 

He comes back on his early years growing up around cars, how he came up with the idea of Virtuo and on the challenges he faces as a leader and as a CEO:

"A roller coaster of emotions and a very moving thing for which there is no training to what needs to be done (...) you try and identify what your role is through the different stages of your company and having the ability to fire yourself from one position and transfer yourself to another position that isn't filled is probably the biggest challenge"

Discover Virtuo : www.govirtuo.com

Founders Factory's mission is clear: POWER to FOUNDERS! "build, fund and scale ambitious startups worldwide."

Cynthia is MD Fintech at Founders Factory, London. She leads a team that creates and invests in seven startups a year for Aviva to unlock their competitive advantage. 

She coaches founders across 40 companies. 

Cynthia is passionate about innovation and driven to build long-lasting partnerships.

She sits on multiple boards, was nominated for Best Female-Led Angel Investment 2018 award and is on the Joint European Disruptive Initiative executive committee.

She previously worked for Markit now worth $27B+. Her experience combines investment and scaling a successful business.

On this episode she accepted to share some of her stories and precious mentoring tips with Helene Alunni-Botteri, Board Member of la French Tech London and Lead on the Fintech group.

Their conversation is followed by a Q&A session with some of the volunteers of la French Tech London.

Find out more about Founders Factory & la French Tech London 

Vincent is currently the Chief Investment Officer of a new investment fintech company called Clim8Invest that endeavours to allow retail investors to put their savings and pension money into clean and renewable assets.

Vincent has been active in the field of energy finance for nearly 3 decades. After studying in France and Germany, he worked in Eastern Europe right after the Berlin Wall came down. He then moved to work for the EU Commission as a consultant in the early 90s before joining finance. 

Over the last 3 decades, he has been on both the buy-side and the sell-side of energy and infrastructure investment. Between 2006 and 2010, he was a senior partner of the UBS Infrastructure investment fund in both Europe and the Middle East. In the last decade, he gradually focussed on renewable energy and wrote a number of ground-breaking research notes on batteries and solar. 

He left the traditional banking industry in mid 2019 to focus on other topics including being an expert by the EU Innovation Fund.

Learn more about Clim8invest, the platform for environmental investments including clean energy, clean technology, sustainable food, clean water, smart mobility and recycling.

He is interviewed by Helene Alunni-Botteri, Board Member of La French Tech London and Lead on the FinTech Group.