“I wanted to be closer with the product and understand better our clients needs.”

Discover our Qonto Insiders of the month: Ines Casel, Product Marketing Manager at Qonto.

1. What did you do before joining Qonto?

I have a rather classic background : I studied at Grenoble Ecole de Management and spent a bit of time in Hong Kong during my studies. I started to work at l’Oréal 6 years ago as international e-commerce Project Manager for Biotherm.

I quickly realised that I wanted to be more hands-on, in a market. This is why in October 2017, I decided to join the start up ecosystem with Bolt that was launching its activities in France. I worked on many different topics but I was more precisely in charge of marketing and communication topics for the riders and the drivers. 3 years after this crazy adventure, I started a new professional cycle in Qonto as Marketing Manager for the French Market.

2. Why did you join Qonto?

I first heard about Qonto when we tried to initiate a partnership with them in my previous job. I joined Qonto because I was attracted by the ambition demonstrated by the company to position itself as a European leader and because of its hyper-growth, which meant many internal opportunities and quick evolution.

3. How would you summarize the recruitment process?

Super quick and smooth. I had never gone through such a great recruitment process. I had a Talent acquisition Manager referent (hi Aurélien!) who followed me during the whole process in “real time”: right after each interview, I had a feedback call, which was super reassuring and professional. The process lasted 3 weeks and I had the opportunity to meet my future managers (N+1, N+2) but also my future teammates.

4. Tell us about what you did during your first year at Qonto.

As a Marketing Manager, my role was to build Qonto awareness in France using channels like Press Relations, Events, partnerships and collaborating with many teams to reach my objectives.

When I started in July 2020, I faced the challenge to manage our Press Relations strategy in France, which included improving Qonto’s legitimacy on economic and finance topics via credible spokespeople. This led me to work directly with founders and top managers! It was an incredible experience, even if it represents a real day-to-day challenge to build a trusting relationship with them.

It’s important to keep in mind that when I arrived, Qonto was only starting to scale! So I needed to be pragmatic to follow this hyper-growth and keep innovating to do better than competitors. To give you a recent example, I have launched a partnership with Fundtruck to meet French entrepreneurs in more than 20 cities by organizing a public contest of pitches in… a truck with Qonto’s colors! Our main objective is to reach out in regions and humanize our brand. I can’t wait to see the results this summer.

5. What are the qualities required to be a successful Marketing Manager ?

First, be customer obsessed: take your phone and call your clients. You always need to think with the customer at the core of your decisions. Second, be curious: deep dive all the time about the nuances of the product, industry, and competitors. Third, be business-oriented: leverage data and insights to support your decision making and positioning

Stakeholders management is also key to ensure a smooth cooperation between teams. In September 2021, we organized our first hybrid internal event with 2,000 attendees: “La Rentrée 100% Finance”. It offered 7 online conferences and one physical session at Qonto HQ with top speakers. The event required alignement during 3 months between design, content, social, legal, finance, acquisition and of course our founders.

6. After a year and a half as Marketing Manager, you moved internally to take a new job as Product Marketing Manager. Why did you make this choice?

At Qonto, we are client-obsessed and this is something we are working on in the Product Marketing Management team, to ensure that our product provides maximum value to our users. I wanted to be closer to the product and better understand our clients needs. This is a relatively new job in the industry, so it’s exciting to be part of this new community.

7. Which advice would you give to a candidate for internal mobility within their company?

It’s important to discuss it early on with your manager as the change can take a bit of time. You also need to reach out to the manager of the new team and your future teammates to make sure your profile fits the job and understand what kind of tasks you’ll work on.

My advice: talk to people before taking your decision to be sure the job fits your skills, and be patient as it won’t happen in 3 days. Time is also essential to prepare a smooth transition between your 2 jobs.

8. Tell us about your new role as Product Marketing Manager.

I already love it! I discovered a new team, new rituals, new challenges. For example, we’re doing 30-minutes “dailies” every morning at 9:15 with the entire team (9 people) to share our goals of the day with the others. It can appear to be a constraint, but in the end it’s a good way to set concrete objectives and get advice from your teammates.

Now I work more closely with the Product team, trying to understand the needs of our clients and how we can offer them the best solutions. I’m working more specifically on our Cards offer, to ensure that we build and sell cards that customers need, use — and that always work. A significant part of our global revenue comes from cards (interchange, subscription fees, extra fees) so this is an important goal.

9. Which of Qonto’s 4 values (Ambition, Mastery, Teamwork, Integrity) resonates with you the most and why?

Teamwork. I’m amazed by the kindness of each team but also by the availability of our founders. I’ll always remember the 30 minutes Steve Anavi spent with me to build the standard of “What is a good opinion column” (for the press). The end result was a publication in Les Echos only few days after! This is the definition of Teamwork for sure. 😉

10. Do you have another fun anecdote you’d like to share about your time at Qonto?

Recently I participated in my first reverse-mentoring with BecomTech young ambassadors. We’ve partnered with BecomTech for a year now to work on improving gender diversity and equality in the IT and digital sector. I had a 1 hour session where 18-year-old girls taught us the basics of HTML and CSS languages so we could build a simple structure of a website. It was a great lesson in humility!