The LHoFT is excited to be partner & sponsor of the Paris Fintech Forum 2018, which will be held on January 30th & 31st, at the former stock exchange market in the very heart of Paris. We will be joined by a delegation of members and partners, including many key figures of Luxembourg’s financial technology ecosystem.
We asked each representative a few questions to help shed light on their work, as a part of our series of interviews: The Innovators.
This time we caught up with Christian Gillot, Founder & CEO of Tetrao.
“In Luxembourg, you live and breathe in a multinational, multilingual, collaborative and optimistic financial ecosystem.” — Christian Gillot
Could you introduce yourself?
Of course, well I’m a globe-trotting Frenchman with three passions since I was little: nature, languages and programming. I went on studying a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and worked in the industry where I faced problems that in my eyes Machine Learning could fix for good. That’s how Tetrao came to be, with a new technology that simulates the human behavior to collect, read and understand information from web sites or PDF documents. It is utterly reliable, adaptable and very useful for finance. It belongs to the broader sphere of Robotic Cognitive Automation.
Christian Gillot accepting first prize at the BNP International Hackathon 2017.
As European financial powerbase that is embracing innovation, which aspects of Luxembourg’s financial technology ecosystem have been most beneficial to your company?
In Luxembourg, you live and breathe in a multinational, multilingual, collaborative and optimistic financial ecosystem. On top of that, there are great private and public initiatives to help you such as Lux Future Lab, Luxinnovation and of course the LHoFT. It’s not just names but people that you get to know.
And finally Luxembourg has great access to all the other financial power bases of Europe. This is very important because a fintech company in Luxembourg has to be international from the start.
What do you think are the key challenges and risks for the different financial technology players in Luxembourg and in Europe?
The great challenge that lies ahead for Europe and thus Luxembourg is to conciliate regulation and customer protection with technological innovation and progress. There is a real possibility of losing business to financial centers that are out of the European Union.
Fortunately, Artificial Intelligence can mitigate the cost and energy necessary to implement regulation. This is what we clearly demonstrated during the International Hackathon of BNP Paribasby reducing dramatically the customer effort and the bank’s effort of opening a business bank account.
The Tetrao team at the BNP Paribas International Hackathon 2017.
Which trend in financial technology do you think deserves more discussion, and which less?
We hear about it a lot but I think Artificial Intelligence definitely deserves more discussion. We are just at the beginning of a trend that will change the world for better. We also need to talk more about customer experience, there is so much margin of improvement and it becomes a clear differentiator: the patience of customer is getting increasingly shorter. And any trend that divide us deserve less discussion.
What are you most looking forward to getting out of Paris Fintech Forum this year?
It is going to be the place to be in fintech for this beginning of the year so I look forward to meet with all the people that matter. It’s all about collaboration between start-ups and corporates but also between startups. I expect the participants to go back with a clear picture of the development of the industry for 2018. Finally, I expect to be surprised, one should always give some room for serendipity.
Any final thoughts or predictions for fintech in 2018 you wish to share?
Well, what I am definitely not going to make any prediction about is BTC valuation. My prediction for fintech in 2018 is that we will see Artificial Intelligence start-ups enabling scenarios that people in the financial industry thought would never be possible.
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