We delighted to have Joris join us at Motulus: he brings substantial experience in product and solution design. In this article Joris tells us a bit about his background.
How long have you worked for Motulus, and what did you do beforehand?
I have been working for Motulus for about half a year now to help the company to
further build out their product suite. This year I am reaching my 20th year of
professional activity 😊 and all this time I have been active in designing, developing
and deploying software.
After my studies as Electrotechnical Engineer (Master in Engineering) from the VUB
University, I started at Accenture in the Financial Services market unit, where I
stayed for over 8 years. At Accenture I mainly worked in the Wealth Management
space on very diverse roles in the software delivery lifecycle, i.e. from developer,
functional and technical designer to solution architect all the way to project
manager and test manager. After this exciting adventure at Accenture, I switched to
CSC for another two and a half years, where I continued to do a number of
consulting missions in the banking space, but this time more in the credit space.
With more than 10 years in consultancy I found it was time to see the other side, so
I joined Deutsche Bank where I worked as application specialist and functional
designer for about 3 years. This learned me that software is so much more than just
doing software delivery (change) projects, but that the whole “Run-phase” is just as
important.
Better late than never, but after Deutsche Bank, I finally got infected by the positive
vibe of the start-up scene. First at The Glue, a Fintech start-up, where I worked for 3
years as product manager (and where I also met Benjamin, the CEO of Motulus) and
then an additional 3 years at Monizze, a Belgian social voucher issuer, positioned as
a digital challenger. In the meantime I also co-founded a Fintech software company
called Capilever.
This year I finally made the step to becoming a freelancer. Since then I combine
working as product manager at Motulus, Monizze and Ubike. This mix of different
clients allows me to share best practices and keep an open mind-set in delivering
innovative new products.
What’s it like to work here?
After having worked so many years in the financial services industry, the aviation
sector where Motulus is active in, is completely new territory for me. The aviation
sector comes with a lot of specific terminology and a lot of need-to-know rules and
practices, but from a software perspective there are enormous commonalities with
the banking space. For example both sectors are highly critical, thus imposing
similar non-functional requirements on security, availability, performance…
But apart from the challenge of exploring a whole new sector, the thing that struck
me the most at Motulus is the pleasant atmosphere within the team. A small team,
united by a common goal: delivering the best possible scheduling optimization
software for airlines. And unlike many other start-ups, no one of the
management team is in there for quickly becoming rich. Everyone loves the
challenge of building out a sustainable company, while at the same time doing
fundamental research on the mathematical complexities of complex optimization
problems. This creates a unique vibe, which is very inspiring for every new joiner.
And outside of Motulus what do you do, or interests you, in your spare
time?
I have 2 young children (a boy age 9 and a girl age 6), so next to my professional
work, they occupy me very well 😊. But in little free time left, I try to go running once
a week (a long-time ago I used to run several times a week, but these times are long
gone) and I also have my own Fintech blog https://bankloch.blogspot.com/ where I
publish regularly articles on Fintech, but also on topics, like IT and digitalization and its impact on the world (for example mobility).
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