In this interview, our IT Manager Julien Frérot explains how we built MyEH in order to provide a modern, unified way for our customers and partners to manage their policies in the most efficient way possible.
Could you please introduce yourself and tell us about your experience?
I am Julien, 38 years old, and I joined Euler Hermes in January this year as MyEH IT Manager. I am passionate about products and technology and have been working in the IT field for more than 15 years with a very diverse experience. I started freelancing 20 years ago to build websites and have also performed some consulting. I spent a very rich eight years in a Corporate Investment Bank, which allowed me to work as an IT Manager in Singapore. I worked as CTO in two start-ups in the last two years before joining Euler Hermes. I’m driven by new technologies and how they allow us to bring more value to customers.
Could you tell us more about your current role? What attracted you to this role?
My role as an IT Manager within the ‘DevOps’ domain of Euler Hermes Group IT is diverse. DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development – ‘Dev’ – with IT operations – ‘Ops’ – and aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
I usually say that I’m an enabler for my team, helping them to deliver the best value in our products through technology, methodology and pedagogy, and to help them advance in their career and reach their goals.
My main focus since I joined is our new digital customer platform MyEH, which is pivotal in our digital transformation, providing a modern, unified way for our customers and partners to manage their policies in the most efficient way possible. We strive to offer our customers cutting-edge solutions to support their businesses, and to provide more and more features with a customer-centric approach within this new platform.
What do you think about the technology and process used to build MyEH?
Two things struck me when I joined Euler Hermes and the MyEH project.
The first one is that MyEH is the tip of the iceberg in Euler Hermes digital transformation. The platform relies on a huge work done by all core systems to modernize them, and a modern architecture made of an API and event-driven approach. Without this prerequisite, we could not offer the complete digital journey to our customers through MyEH.
The second is that I felt lucky to be in a company and work on a project embracing new technologies. MyEH is fully build on Cloud technologies, with Docker containers, NodeJS servers and ReactJS, which are the latest technologies. Beyond leveraging those modern technical stacks, we also have a great freedom in exploring available technologies in order to keep bringing more value to our customers.
What is the most challenging when working on MyEH?
MyEH faces many challenges on its way. As I mentioned, we are working on the tip of the iceberg.
It means that we highly rely on APIs built internally with other teams and it takes a lot of synchronisation and planning to align all the moving pieces in order to deliver the features to the customers at a point in time.
We couldn’t achieve it without the strong level of collaboration our teams are demonstrating on a daily basis, even in our exceptional conditions forced by the Covid-19 crisis. Another challenge is to deliver a global solution, with a unique set of features to fit all our local entities needs and challenges. The change management as well as the harmonization across countries in terms of solutions and operations is a real challenge. Our goal is to make sure we jointly ensure a smooth transition to our customers.
In 2020, MyEH is moving to become a more global solution. We’re progressively onboarding our biggest entities, with an objective to bring close to 65,000 customers on the platform by the end of the year. It will be essential to not only build new features, but also to maintain a very high quality of service on the platform.
And tomorrow? Are there any innovations you are involved in and can talk about that will benefit our customers?
What is great being part of Euler Hermes is that we always look at innovations that could bring new solutions, new services and more value to customers. Our ambition on MyEH as well as on other Euler Hermes platforms is to adopt an enterprise open-source approach. In a few words, we are trying to bring the open-source concepts of co-building, sharing, reusing and integrating to the enterprise level. This allows us to re-use in assembling and integrating features and to deliver services in a unique platform for our customers, bringing further the promise of a customer-centric digital transformation.
Besides this, we’re also looking at what other teams are exploring in terms of innovation to see how we can leverage it in MyEH for the benefit of our customers. Fields such as Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics or Data Science could be a game changer!
