Client Interview - Jean-Baptiste Escoyez, CTO Regate

Welcome to our chat with Jean-Baptiste Escoyez, better known as JB, the person who has been steering the tech ship with flair at Regate since early 2022. The product is a game-changer in the French market, helping entrepreneurs, accountants, and CFOs to automate and simplify the finance world.
 

What vision drives your business forward? It seems like a very exciting time for Regate? 

J.B: Regate.io has recently raised 20 million euro to accelerate the company's development in France and Europe. What is most exciting for us is that beyond helping accountants and financial managers to save time on manual recurring tasks so that they can focus on their expertise, our key business drive is to cover a serious gap in European cross-company indebtedness. A flawless, rapid, reliable financial management automation platform enables speeding-up the monthly accounting in businesses with traceability, transparency and efficiency.

Indeed sounds like a great vision! How do you craft the SaaS platform?

J.B: Regate is growing fast as a company, and that is fully applicable to the needs for quality IT. I manage the software development teams. They are organized in agile squads, composed by internal and external consultants, from supplier companies. At the beginning of the year, we were working with three IT suppliers, and currently we work only with Plan A. Our teams, the in-house developers and the dedicated external professionals, are mixed in several different agile squads. There is a cross-squad team of five people as well, which ensures that the best practices are shared between all peers. It is a highly efficient software delivery model that enables us to progress fast, with high quality in crafting the platform features.

Could you elaborate more on the role of Plan A in your development process?

J.B: I have been working with Plan A since I joined Regate. Beyond providing us with excellent engineers who are vetted, knowledgeable, experienced, responsible, communicative and reliable, Plan A is a responsive, strong partner that we can grow with.
The mindset of Plan A team is of thinkers and doers, not mere executors. Collaborating with smart and proactive people is enriching and helps us improve our processes as well. One of the agile squad teams is co-led by a senior expert of Plan A. Over time we are feeling more and more comfortable with involving Plan A as a partner in the core platform development.

Do you have any remarks or maybe suggestions on how Plan A could be a better partner for you? Also, do you have some challenges?

J.B: For us, communication is paramount. Challenges in this area with other suppliers have been deal-breakers in the past. I could only encourage Plan A to keep the excellent communication practices between the teams, at all levels. Any setbacks can be solved, when there is transparency, trust, timely and open communication.
In terms of challenges, as it happens in the whole industry, finding the right talent can be costly and time-consuming. What we really like in the collaboration with Plan A is the prompt provision of highly skilled engineers, something that is difficult to cover with our standard recruitment process.

What is the future in front of Regate as a company? 

J.B: The recent funding we received is kind of synchronized with a huge increase in terms of customers (+10 000) and a significant evolution in the typology of our customers.
Until now we have been providing our product mostly to medium enterprises, and today we start selling to certified accountants that are going to resell Regate to smaller companies. On a product level there is a huge challenge to meet the requirements of the chartered accountants, and those of smaller companies who need a simpler, flexible product, compared to more structured enterprises. 
In this context, we must move fast and we are extremely happy to have Plan A as a strong partner working alongside us and making our expansion possible. We are looking for versatility, resilience and technology excellence and this is what we get from Plan A. 

Final question, what are the best reasons for a developer to come and work for you and your product?

J.B: There are lots of things to learn at Regate. The domain is complex, there are many regulations, protocols and rules, and lots of challenges in terms of software design, performance, and security. As we are directly connected with payments, we face new requirements on a daily basis that we must fulfill. Everything that is related to accounting automation is interesting. On top of that we are a growing organization, meaning that every developer who is part of the team can have quite a significant impact. I cannot find something more exciting than this.

Description: Regate's team, both in-house and dedicated members, gather for a meetup in Sofia.