#Open Banking
An engineer by training, Thierry Jolliot began his career as a developer before moving into Product Management in 2010, driven by a desire to better understand the business and his clients’ needs. Today, as an Operational Product Manager on SBS Digital Core, he works at the intersection of product, technology and banking. In this interview, he talks about his role, the challenges of building a next-generation core banking platform, how AI is changing his job, and what keeps him busy outside of work.
How did you become a Product Manager?
I originally trained as an engineer and started my career as a developer. Over time, I realised that I wanted to focus less on the technical side and spend more time understanding our clients’ business and the challenges they face. Technology is still important, of course, but what really matters is understanding your clients’ business well enough to speak the same language and understand their needs.
What does your role as an Operational Product Manager on SBS Digital Core involve?
As an Operational Product Manager, I’m responsible for designing and overseeing SBS Digital Core features in the areas of pricing, billing, and customer and contract data management. My role starts with understanding market expectations and translating them into concrete features. That requires a good understanding of the banking industry, which I’ve built up over time through working closely with our clients. I then follow those features through to implementation, working with R&D and the different areas of expertise involved in the product, including architects, UI/UX designers and Cloud Ops. Another big part of my role is also connecting teams, facilitating discussions and making sure everyone is moving in the same direction.
What are you working on at the moment?
We’re building SBS Digital Core, a platform designed to manage the core activities of a traditional bank, namely account management and payments. The challenge is to rethink these fundamental banking functions using a new cloud-native architecture and state-of-the-art technologies. We’re still in a major development phase, so our priority today is to bring these essential banking activities into SBS Digital Core while building a modern platform that can evolve with the market and changing customer needs. Our ambition is to offer the platform internationally, starting with France, Benelux and the UK. That means having an in-depth understanding of local banking practices in each market.
How do you turn a client’s need into a concrete feature?
A Product Manager’s role is first and foremost to listen to the client and understand their need or the problem they’re trying to solve. Often, clients who already know our products will come to us with a specific feature they’d like us to add. But our role is to take a step back and ask: “What do you actually need? What problem are you trying to solve?”. From there, it’s up to us to determine how that need should translate into the product. And the right solution isn’t necessarily the one the client had in mind at first.
You also have to be prepared to challenge the request and sometimes say no, particularly if it’s too specific or doesn’t align with our product strategy. When a request is relevant, we then formalise it with R&D and move into development. For me, that’s also what operational excellence is about: listening to the client, understanding the need, knowing when to challenge it and coming up with the right answer, while staying consistent with our product vision.
What are the main challenges when implementing solutions that sit at the heart of a bank’s operations?
Today, the main challenges are primarily technical. Technology is evolving quickly, faster than our clients’ business, so we constantly have to adapt. We work on systems that sit at the heart of a bank’s operations. They need to be available 24/7, with extremely high availability and very fast response times. They also need to be highly secure in the face of a growing number of attacks.
That’s one of the reasons we chose the cloud with AWS for SBS Digital Core: to benefit from its infrastructure in terms of security, resilience and computing power, and help us address these different technical challenges.
AI is already changing the way you work. How do you think it will transform the banking customer experience in the future?
AI has become an essential part of the way we work. As Product Managers, we now use it every day to work more efficiently and move faster. It makes our lives much easier in many areas, whether it’s deepening our banking knowledge, monitoring regulatory developments, writing requirements, creating mock-ups, producing product documentation or preparing presentation slides.
But there’s a second challenge too: integrating AI directly into our products so our clients can benefit from it as well. That’s the whole purpose of our SBS AI Platform and the roadmap we’ve put in place. We’re still at the beginning, but we can imagine banks gradually giving their customers AI tools to interact with them more simply and quickly. For example, you could ask your banking app: “Find a transaction related to my trip to India a few years ago,” or ask it which banking products are best suited to the way you use your account. Of course, ensuring the security of the data used by AI will be essential. But ultimately, the goal is to make it easier for customers to access their information and interact more effectively with their bank.
What do you enjoy most about your role as an Operational Product Manager?
What I enjoy most is starting with a client problem, designing the solution and following it all the way through to final delivery. I like the variety. You get involved in the business side, implementation with R&D, technical aspects with architects, and UX and UI with designers. And above all, there’s the satisfaction of delivering a solution that genuinely meets the client’s needs.
How do you like to spend your time outside of work?
I’m really into sports, especially cycling in the mountains of Haute-Savoie. That’s what really helps me switch off. I also play a bit of tennis and go to the gym. I’ve also always enjoyed working with my hands. I do a lot of DIY, and at the moment I’m helping my daughter renovate her house. I like doing a bit of everything: plumbing, electrical work, masonry… In the end, there’s something quite similar to my work in that process: you discover things, you try, sometimes you fail, and then you learn and improve. That curiosity and desire to keep learning are important to me, both personally and professionally.
What is one of the biggest lessons you’ve learned from your career so far?
There are two things that really stand out for me. The first is the importance of the client relationship. In a service company, the client has to remain at the heart of what we do. When you succeed in building a genuine relationship based on trust, you create something lasting and beneficial for everyone.
The second is teamwork. On your own, you can only achieve so much, but together you can go much further. And that goes beyond your immediate team. At SBS, for example, R&D and integrators need to work as one to provide the best possible experience for the client. We all think differently, and that’s precisely what makes us stronger, as long as we share the same desire to move forward together.