Céline Lazorthes

Founder and CEO at Leetchi.com and MANGOPAY

Paris, France

@CelineLz | LinkedIn Profile

Congrats on the success of both Mangopay and leetchi.com Why do you believe the companies resonate so well with your customers?

In both cases, I believe our offer answered a need that hadn’t been addressed. I founded leetchi.com in 2009 after having struggled to gather money for a college week-end. I thought it would be so much easier to collect funds online and created the first money pool website. We now have 5 million customers and offer our services in 150 countries.

While building leetchi.com, we couldn’t find a payment service that would enable us to not only collect funds but to escrow them and automate the pay-out, so we decided to build it ourselves. The success of this development was such that we ultimately spun out our internal payment service as a standalone product: MANGOPAY.

When describing your passion for technology at an early age you noted “I fell in love with the internet and its possibilities in high school. It gives you freedom.” What did you mean by this?

I believe the internet breaks down geographical boundaries and social roles. For instance, you can be in the middle of the countryside and have access to a wide international audience. You can be shy and a social media maestro. To that extent, the internet offers you a wonderful freedom to innovate and do business.

You really almost immediately jumped into the startup founder space after school. What gave you the confidence to do this?

I believe that, actually, I was lucky to have my diploma in 2008. That’s paradoxical, I must admit! But in fact, as we were in the middle of the crisis, no one could find a job, it gave me a good reason to concentrate on my money pool project.

Then, some people believed in me and gave me confidence, such as Gilles Babinet, my very first boss. He let me see the opportunity of creating my own business and encouraged me to do it.

When did you come up with the concept for leetchi?

I created leetchi.com thanks to a personal experience. I was responsible for organizing a week-end with all my university fellows. I began to ask each of them to participate and I had a lot of trouble to gather the money needed beforehand. I ended with an overdraft of 400 euros, which is a huge amount for a student! It appeared to me that it shouldn’t be so difficult to gather money at a time when we had internet. And the idea of Leetchi was born.

“Getting the banking license is a real f*#$ing nightmare.” Easily one of my favorite (and most accurate) quotes I’ve read in a long time. Were you surprised at the complexity of this process?

The complexity was a problem, but the main issue was that it took us so long: two years. For a banking institution, a two-year process is usual and adapted to the decision processes, but for a start-up, it is a real drawback.

Timing can act as a barrier to entry. Competition helps to structure a market: to bring useful services and tools, to find an appropriate pricing or to have the right channels. How can you foster innovation with 2-year deadlines?

How did you go about putting together your executive team for your companies?

For me, building a team is hiring people you can trust and rely on. That’s the first criteria in my opinion. I work with close friends, as my CFO is, even if many people advised me not to do so. I always followed my intuition. When I chose our CTO Laure Némée, I was told not to do so because the programming language used to build the product was .NET and unfortunately she wasn’t familiar with it. But I felt there was an instantaneously good chemistry between us, and I was right. As a result, I would say that when you recruit someone, fit and caliber are more important than ticking the right skills.

A lot has been written about your success at a relatively young age. Do you think a founder’s age is a real factor or just FinTech hype?

I think it’s easier to create a start-up when you’re a student because you don’t have financial and family constraints. You also have a lot of time, and no professional pressure. In fact, you are totally free.

On the other side, especially in FinTech, being young is sometimes a disadvantage because you can be perceived as inexperienced. When we applied for the E-Money Issuer license, we had to prove our product was serious and professional.

You have two companies, are a sought after speaker, etc. How do you decompress from work?

I am a yoga fan. I practice 3 times a week and it is my haven of peace. And in fact, I don’t see my day to day as boring job, but as an adventure I am happily going through!

If you weren’t a start-up founder, what other occupation could you see yourself doing?

I think I would be a chef, or at least working in the food industry. I love both cooking and eating, with a weak spot for French cuisine, naturally.

Who(m) do you believe has had the most influence with respect to your own career?

Well, of course, my parents! They gave me the ability to be free, to make my own decision, and more important to choose to be happy.

Who do you consider to be strong women leaders in the FinTech space?

There are many extraordinary female leaders engaging with the FinTech world.

I’m quite impressed by Marta Krupinska, who founded Azimo after having experienced how frustrating and expensive the international money transfer system was. Susanne Chishti is also doing a remarkable work to empower the FinTech community. She founded Europe’s first Angel network focused on FinTech, co-founded the crowdfunded FinTech book, organizes tours to help non-UK entrepreneurs to visit London and benefit from the UK ecosystem.

What do you see as the 3 leading future trends for FinTech?

The game changing trend is the new power of the crowd. Internet gives individuals much wider access to what was reserved to companies or organizations: ability to lend, possibility to sell, access to equity. Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing but also marketplaces where individuals sell to individuals are flourishing.

Furthermore, I think we haven’t explored all the potentialities of data science in respect with customer relationship management in banking. The banks CRM are still rather traditional and whereas internet companies, like social media, have huge data scientists department, banks are more conservative. FinTech can develop a lot in this field.

Finally, I think it is quite remarkable to see that the banking system was born in the 19th century, grew into big consolidated corporations throughout the 20th and is now disrupted by little start-ups growing everywhere. In fact, each of them covers a specific product or service of the financial system. So they can be more agile, more imaginative and more customer-oriented than huge organizations. There will be a consolidation in the middle or long term, but I think the short-term is really exciting!