Lionel, a leader in the field of information systems, has forged an impressive career path, moving between strategic roles within various organizations. From his roles as Director of Information Systems for the Parcel Division and Director of Finance IT for the Mail Division at La Poste Group to his current position as Director of Information Systems at Bpifrance, Lionel has demonstrated an ability to blend technology with strategic vision. This remarkable career is marked by a series of notable achievements, including recognition as a finalist in the 2020 European Digital Leader of the Year Awards and receiving the 2019 CIO of the Year Grand Prize, among others.

 

1. Could you tell us how your career path has evolved within La Poste Group before taking on the role of Director of Information Systems at Bpifrance?

During my twenty-five years with La Poste Group and its subsidiaries, I had the opportunity to witness and help drive the e-commerce revolution and, consequently, the digital transformation of the parcel and mail supply chain. Digital technology made it possible to expand the “mail carriers” workforce and transition La Poste into the world of services.  When the opportunity at Bpifrance arose, I was looking for three things. First, I wanted to acquire new skills to complement my career—specifically, I had no prior experience in banking. Second, I wanted to maintain a sense of purpose. So I shifted from “connecting people” to “serving the future.” And finally, I wanted to find a sense of purpose, a team, and an Executive Committee. Clearly, I found a supportive environment and a project to transform Bpifrance’s IT system today to serve entrepreneurs throughout France.

 

2. With more than ten years of experience at La Poste Group, can you discuss the challenges you faced in using data as Director of Information Systems for the Parcel Division and Director of Information Systems for the Mail Division’s Finance Department? How have these experiences shaped your current perspective as CIO at Bpifrance?

La Poste Group’s transformation into a service-oriented organization has placed customers at the center of its data strategy. The fact that customers use and track their services, packages, and mail in real time—regardless of the communication channel—has been the catalyst for leveraging customer data all the way down to the mail carrier.

As for Bpifrance, the advent of online banking and customer interactivity within their client portals means that we must also transition to real-time information systems that interact with all processes, Bpifrance team members, and Bpifrance partners.  Our information system is therefore a platform that brings together different ecosystems. We are deploying a new “Core Banking System” that manages end-to-end business ontologies, with a relentless focus on improving data quality. Indeed, decision-making and regulatory compliance require that data management be placed at the center.

 

3. As Chief Information Officer at Bpifrance, what are your current priorities regarding digital transformation and innovation? How do you view the role of technology in creating value and improving operations at Bpifrance?

We must provide French entrepreneurs with what they need to grow—at the right time and without delay. That means real-time support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across all channels, and it means a comprehensive range of products that covers the full spectrum of growth needs: loans, capital, insurance, guarantees, and advisory services. In other words, a very comprehensive and highly scalable product catalog.

Our business model is therefore that of a fintech company serving our network of 1,200 account managers, who are based in 50 locations across the country and support entrepreneurs.

We support our business units and users through Agility at Scale (SAFe), using a full DevSecOps approach, within a microservices architecture featuring a mature object-data model. For us, this is also inextricably linked to a hybrid multi-cloud strategy. We are driving these transformations simultaneously because doing so enhances the consistency of our operational model.

But today’s technology allows us to go much further in understanding our clients’ challenges and in the service we provide them. We need to connect entrepreneurs through networks. We need to move toward zero-delay financing. We need to incorporate significant new risks—such as cyber risk and climate risk—into our financial risk assessments. All of this depends on data: in terms of quantity, quality, and the capacity for analysis and decision-making. At Bpifrance, we have been implementing artificial intelligence algorithms for several years to assist our users with prospecting, fraud management, and fraud prevention. The world of generative AI, which is rapidly expanding, naturally captures our attention and will enable us to achieve unprecedented levels of performance and precision in the use of our data.

And then there’s the issue of cybersecurity, which is now clear to everyone—and in the banking sector, we’re no longer just talking about perimeter security. We’re deploying continuous detection and automated, proactive responses. The challenge lies as much in the preparedness of the information system—we’re talking about observability, microsegmentation, and strengthening monitoring and access controls—as it does in the preparedness of the men and women who make up the company. We’re stepping up training and conducting simulations as much as we can to raise our level of preparedness to the highest possible standard.

 

4. What are your key strategic plans for fostering innovation and maximizing the value of data at BPI France in the future?

At Bpifrance’s IT Department, we’ve just completed a major transformation that has enabled us to transition to agile development on a distributed scale. We now have a robust framework for generating value for our business units, and this allows us to move on to the next challenge: innovating in parallel. We’re working on an ideation process that lets us move very quickly on ideas that disrupt our business lines, as long as they’re fully engaged. We’re considering setting up “merged teams,” which essentially means scaling Agile across the entire company, beyond strictly IT-related topics. Our goal is to test new ideas—and sometimes fail—because if we don’t, we’re not tackling the right kinds of challenges.

When it comes to data, we have a tremendous advantage: Bpifrance engages with every entrepreneur in France. We’ve built this advantage over decades of providing humble, helpful service that’s close to the men and women on the ground. Today, we therefore have this extraordinary wealth of information that allows us to gain a detailed understanding of the state of the French SME economy and their support needs—both financial and non-financial. We must make the best use of this asset. We make it available to business teams via the cloud and responsive data hubs. We cross-reference it repeatedly using artificial intelligence. We’re going to analyze it from multiple angles using generative AI and the power of techniques such as graph analysis, and so on. Ultimately, our goal is to enable Bpifrance’s business teams to gain a deeper understanding of their clients, their risks, and their needs. By doing so, we are clearly investing in the future.

To wrap up this topic, at Bpifrance there’s one thing we’ve come to understand—and that’s reflected in our actions: data is a business asset. And data expertise is something that must not, under any circumstances, be confined solely to the IT department. We are currently rolling out “go data” initiatives to provide business teams with the data that pertains to them, prepared to a level of usability that makes it actionable. We are also equipping our business units with data visualization tools to empower them to work with this data and derive its full value. Our clear goal is to turn our business units into “data citizens”—that is, professionals capable of understanding, handling, and making the most of data, completely on their own.

 

5. At Tech Show Paris, you will participate in a panel discussion on DevOps practices. In your opinion, what is the benefit of adopting a DevOps strategy to improve a company’s performance?

We are strong believers in DevOps and are implementing it across all our agile teams. In fact, we’ve introduced a DevOps passport for our agile teams: once they have it, they’re self-sufficient when it comes to production deployments and service launches. It’s essentially our way of measuring agile maturity and ensuring that the team has fully mastered all aspects of its work: building, securing, testing, delivering, operating, maintaining, and scaling.

We then use data—and specifically the DORA framework (four key metrics)—to monitor the performance of our DevOps practices at the team level.

DevOps is the key to shortening time-to-production. It allows us to deliver a more secure product to business units more frequently. It also leads to a huge performance gain during the testing phases. Last year, we doubled our deployment frequency (DF) while cutting our change failure rate in half. We aim to do the same again this year.

At Bpifrance, we’ve added the word “sec” in the middle of “devops”: we only use the term “devsecops.” Security is non-negotiable and is part of the maturity framework required of our agile teams. Our security champions are constantly active within our devsecops teams.

When IT moves faster, the company can move faster. At Bpifrance, strategic agility is a top priority: if we weren’t using agile and DevSecOps, our technology infrastructure would be unable to keep up with this strategic demand.

 

If you’d like to learn more, we invite you to attend Lionel’s sessions at the conference. He’ll be participating in a panel discussion on DevOps practices on Thursday, November 16, at 10:10 a.m. in Theater T4. Then he’ll give a fascinating presentation on data culture on Thursday, November 16, at 3:20 p.m. in Theater T8 (Data and AI)!

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