Portraits of Télécom SudParis - Portrait of Thibaut Loilier (TSP 2010), Product Strategy at Meta Fintech

Hello ! Could you please introduce yourself?

I'm Thibaut, 35 years old, I've been living in San Francisco for almost 10 years, and I'm a graduate of TSP, class of 2010. I did my Telecom final year specialization at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. I've been lucky enough to work in 5 different countries: France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain and the United States, where I am today.

In addition to being a TSP graduate, I saw that you also graduated from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and also took courses at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. What have you learned from your many international experiences?

My international experiences have enabled me to learn about and acquire different working methods.from one country to another, the way education and the professional world are approached are different. It also enabled me to meet new people from different nationalities and backgrounds. These experiences taught me a lot about autonomy and organization, and further aroused my curiosity and desire to discover new countries and learn new things. Above all, it opened me up to other ways of living and thinking.

Can you look back over your career and tell us a bit about Meta Fintech?

Following TSP, I did my end-of-studies internship in the satellite division of Airbus in Paris for 6 months, where I worked on the first generations of drones, in particular on issues relating to the management of drone traffic in airspace. in the first generations of UAVs, notably on subjects linked to the management of UAV traffic in airspace. It was a very enriching experience, but very soon I wanted to go back abroad. I had an opportunity at BNP Paribas Group in San Francisco, where I joined the innovation team called "l'Atelier", a team of experts in the field.l'Atelier", a watchdog unit that helps major French groups as well as the bank with digital and new technology issues. I was in charge of payments and fintech at BNP Paribas. I was in charge of analyzing new payment models, particularly at a time when mobile banking and bitcoin were booming...

I then moved back to Barcelona to work for a Spanish start-up on digital strategy, influence and customer acquisition for major groups. I took responsibility for the French market and developed the company's presence in France. Following this experience, I returned to the financial world at GFT in Barcelona, where I was in charge of prospecting for innovation and new financial services to support the GFT Group and its customers in their digital transformation.

In 2014, I joined the AXA Group to open the AXA Lab in San Francisco, an innovation office to get closer to GAFAMs and startups, but also to be at the heart of digital transformations in order to better understand them and create new products and services for AXA Group customers. I was in charge of identifying new trends, perfecting the Group's acculturation to the new digital landscape and forging partnerships with technology players such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Uber and Microsoft, as well as insurance and financial services startups. After 8 years at AXA in San Francisco, I joined Meta in January 2022 in the Fintech division, which is dedicated to the creation and management of financial services and payments across the Meta group. This includes products such as Whatsapp Pay, WhatsApp's payment functionality, Meta Pay, Meta's digital wallet and NFTs.

Is your current situation anything like you imagined it would be as a student? What advice would you give to students?

When I was a student, I didn't anticipate what the world of work would be like, so I took advantage of everything that school had to offer at the time: studies, extracurricular life... I met most of my good friends at school, and I was also fairly active in associations, especially the sports association. Aside from my studies, I also worked part-time at Orange as a branch salesman. What hasn't changed is that I'm still keen to learn; I was already quite curious at school, and I'm still learning every day. My 2 pieces of advice would be to try to get out of your comfort zone and develop a network within school but especially outside school.

One last question: what's your most vivid memory of school?

In 2008, I took part in the First program, an open innovation program that enabled a few TSP students to lead team projects around new services linked to digital life, coached by experts from partner companies of the Mines-Télécom Foundation. This program enabled me to spend 10 days in Silicon Valley, where we visited the Facebook and Google campuses and met alumni from the school. It was a wonderful experience, as it involved working and above all innovating in collaboration with students from other Telecom schools, while at the same time discovering one of the major centers of innovation.