Société Générale EBS: Adjusting to reality, seizing the opportunity

With over 20 years in Societe Generale and various roles in SGSS operations, covering the perimeters of Johannesburg, Nantes, Luxembourg and India, Matthieu Pasquier contemplates already one year since he took the helm of the company in the position of CEO of Société Générale EBS.

SG EBS’ evolution during this 8 years has been paved with many achievements, from reaching 1,000 employees due to an accelerated growth in just 3 years, to being ranked among the 10 largest shared service centers in Romania, a sector which attracts more than 7% of the working population in this country, as the SG EBS’ manager told The Diplomat – Bucharest in a recent interview.

2,000 people’s milestone reached in 2019

Matthieu Pasquier says that the most important acievement, since the company delivers an average year to year growth of 50 per cent, is the milestone of 2,000 employees which SG EBS reached this year. By constantly adding new services, by implementing the digital transformation strategy of SG Group, by having the capacity to increase the ownership on big, complex projects and by offering great workforce, the company has become a large team of highly professional people with very creative minds, willing to help further develop SG EBS into a company that offers the best services possible in areas such as: IT, HR, Finance and Corporate Operations.

Being a service center, the company is constantly working on including new projects and services in their portfolio. Based on their digital transformation strategy, SG EBS is now really focused on the IT part and they have started great projects on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and RPA.  “Our highly skilled colleagues are working on optimizing a lot of our routine tasks in order to offer many of our employees the opportunity to focus more on innovative ideas and solutions for our partners, than on basic activities that take a lot of their time,” Matthieu Pasquier says.

The company is working internally on atomizing activities and RPA for offering better services to the partners. “But of course, we take into consideration the changes this new direction will bring to the market and for that we are now moving to the next level in which we value even more a centric mindset. Furthermore, we are starting to sell our services externally, as hybrid models,” Matthieu Pasquier adds.

Always expecting the unexpected

As stated by the SG EBS’ CEO, the service industry is so dynamic that there’s always room to further grow and bring new type of activities, which means constantly improving the quality of the services offered. “Think of all the changes that took place in last 2-3 year in the IT world, from new coding languages to AI or Machine Learning. All of them are now, in a way or another, included in the services we provide to our partners. What better example to show the willingness this industry has to continuously improve then this?” says Matthieu Pasquier.

On one hand, the Romanian market is a dynamic one, even volatile sometimes due to all the changes at Government level, as the SG EBS’ manager states. “That is why we need to have back-up plans for any unexpected decision in order to make sure that our business is not affected by sudden changes.  On second hand, Romania still has huge potential and I’m sure that the private sector can work together to mitigate any challenges,” Matthieu Pasquier says.

For SG EBS, as for entire industry, one of the main drive is the availability of the talent pool. “The key for success here is not to expect the public sector to find all the solutions to mitigate the balance between the offer and the demand, but for the private sector to invest in the upskilling of the existing talent pool, to contribute on developing academies, to search not only for high level expertise, but also for juniors,” says Matthieu Pasquier.