Olivier Berrouiguet, CEO, Synertrade
It’s time to meet Olivier Berrouiguet, CEO of Synertrade, the leading global provider for Digital Transformation of Procurement: a reliable and orchestrated Source to Pay platform.
Over to you Olivier:
Who are you and what’s your background?
I have 25 years of experience in management, business development, strategic marketing and sales, in various industries such as pharma/chemicals, automotive, embedded electronics and digital transformation. I’m a specialist in transforming how companies operate and accelerating growth.
Before I joined Econocom (Synertrade’s parent company) in 2018 as Director of Strategic Affairs, I spent 6 years at Capgemini in charge of a Global Strategic Account, and a further 6 years as Chief Sales Officer and Manager of the Oncology Business Unit of Voluntis, a global pioneer in the use of software medical devices in digital health.
My experience in healthcare shaped my approach to business: diagnose the issues and understand the causes before prescribing treatments. You get the best outcomes for everyone that way.
What is your job title and what are your general responsibilities?
I’m the Chief Executive Officer at the Synertrade Group, a subsidiary of Econocom. I’ve been in this role since 2021 and I’m responsible for leading Synertade’s operations and driving transformation for its customers, owner and employees.
Can you give us an overview of your business?
Synertrade is a full source-to-pay (S2P) SaaS software solution, assisting enterprise clients around the world to maximise efficiency across their procurement process. We provide a complete solution which helps them to manage supplier relationships and keep costs under control through digitising everything from evaluating new suppliers, contracting and onboarding, to lowering risk, improving ESG and managing budgets.
We’ve been operating for over 20 years and have over four million suppliers on our network. We’re not the unproven new guys on the market, but we’re still nimble and agile enough to adapt to a changing world.
Tell us how you are funded?
We’re part of the Econocom Group – Europe’s first general digital contractor. It designs, finances and facilitates the digital transformation of large companies and public organisations across 16 countries, with revenues of €2.7b.
What’s the origin story? Why did you start the company? To solve what problems?
Synertrade is the result of a merger back in 2005 between two companies – one French (SynerDeal) and one German (Trade2B) and was then joined by a later acquisition by Econocom in 2015.
That means that, as a company, we’re just coming up to our 20th anniversary which is a great milestone. SynerDeal and Trade2B were originally founded at the beginning of 2000 and 1999 respectively and both had a specialisation in e-sourcing and the upstream part of the procurement process.
There was a strategic opportunity for such similar companies to merge and pool their talent, which then made them strong candidates for integration into the Econocom Group of companies.
Today our mission is to help procurement evolve and realise new value for the businesses it operates in. As the name says, we help find the Synergies in your trade for better outcomes.
Who are your target customers? What’s your revenue model?
We target enterprise customers that have complex supply chains that are both evolving and need to generate more value.
For instance, it’s one thing to have a procurement platform that can automate some admin, but it’s a game changer to have one like Synertrade that can proactively identify new opportunities to improve performance, save time or money: all things that free up the procurement team to work on their own self-actualisation and consolidate their position at the board level.
Our revenue model is based around the SaaS subscription model – when people become customers, they stay with us, for a long time, with a high level of satisfaction.
If you had a magic wand, what one thing would you change in the banking and/or FinTech sector?
There’s a big disconnect between software providers, implementers, consultants and end-users. It’s great when you’ve made the decision to invest in a shiny new software solution – and these decisions aren’t cheap – but some vendors then don’t keep you close.
They push you over to their chosen implementer of choice.
All of a sudden you’ve got another relationship to build, a ton more consulting and implementation days to pay for and your time-to-value suffers.
Imagine if you could work with a platform provider and know that you had a guaranteed implementation deadline? And that you wouldn’t have to keep buying more days and seeing your project pushed back?
That’s the magic wand that I’m looking to work on here at Synertrade.
What is your message for the larger players in the Financial Services marketplace?
You’ve got to look at your supply chain and procurement processes more deeply. There are opportunities not just in cost savings, but in transforming productivity, capturing new customers and protecting business from risk, if you do so.
Long gone are the days where companies just bought and sold items.
How you source, pay and sell is a hot topic. It’s got to be more transparent, ethical and green, but it’s got to be efficient and profitable too. There are ways to do this, but you need a solid platform to work with to make that happen.
Looking at the disruption in the past few years in supply chains, de-risking and having a ‘plan B’ is critical, not just to grow, but in some instances, it is critical to the survival of some businesses.
These are the topics that should be discussed and acted on at board level and not just seen as an issue only for procurement. It’s the maturing of the procurement function that’s driving this.
Where do you get your Financial Services/FinTech industry news from?
I’m well networked, so a lot of information comes from those sources, but I find a lot of value in the analysts in this industry, such as Gartner, Hackett or Art of Procurement, as well as publications such as Procurement Magazine or The Procurement.
In terms of the wider industry and issues, I rely on the FT and the Economist for information and insight and of course, FinTech Insights keeps me posted on the best of the financial technology industry!
Can you list some people you rate from the FinTech and/or Financial Services sector that we should be following on LinkedIn, and why?
I’m privileged to have worked with some inspirational leaders at both Synertrade and Econocom.
- In Particular, Mathilde Saint-Pol Cousteix, Managing Director of Econocom, has been instrumental to the success of Econocom in recent years due to her strong leadership skills and strategic vision
- Equally, former Chief Financial Officer at Taylor Hobson and private equity fund owner, Dean Westmoreland, has played a big part in my career. He mentored me at my first job as a CEO 25 years ago and has a wealth of experience in financial management
What FinTech services (and/or apps) do you personally use?
There’s a couple and they’re obvious ones I’d like to highlight.
The first one is so overlooked as it’s just become a day-to-day tool but I’m not sure people take full advantage of it. Google Wallet is ‘just there’ on your phone. But think about it. It lets you buy things, keeps track of your purchases, integrates seamlessly with your bank (even using virtual card numbers). You travel on any metro in the world with it. Your loyalty cards are all there and linked. And your tickets, passes and travel documents are all kept securely in a single place. It’s so simple and so obvious, yet overlooked.
And of course, how about Revolut with its great user experience and multi-currency features? I think everyone is still talking about how that’s essential for anyone that travels a lot, or with friends and relatives in other countries.
What’s the best new FinTech product or service you’ve seen recently?
I’ll answer this as more of a challenge to the rest of the market.
There is such diversification in how people access finance and fintech in general, that trying to bring all those platforms together into a single point of access would be something special.
Think how people use transactions today – in apps, in games, BNPL, credit cards, debit, finance schemes, money transfers, multi-currency… but it’s all fragmented into many logons, identities, and information stored in discrete pools.
How can this all be brought together and make the end-user experience seamless?
Finally, let’s talk predictions. What trends do you think are going to define the next few years in the FinTech sector?
The addition of AI to fintech is going to fundamentally change the sector. Right now a lot of this is just hype from vendors and the AI amounts to not much more than automated admin – but we had that with Mr Clippy in Office ’97!
Things really change when that AI becomes embedded throughout the software platform you’re using.
When it connects to multiple sources of information and correlates that back to your task in hand, proactively pushing you up new avenues of opportunity that you could never discover without the linkage and speed that the AI provides.
I think of it as a big haystack containing needles of opportunity. AI is a huge electromagnet that just pulls those opportunities out of the hay. Smarter working, not harder working, as they say.
Olivier, thank you so much for participating!
Find out more about Olivier on LinkedIn at Olivier Berrouiguet and get more information about Synertrade at http://www.synertrade.com
