Parcours
I’m Nicolas; I’m a Financial Manager. I have been working here for Orange for two years and a half. I studied in France as an engineer and then I lived in the US for one year where I studied both Engineering and also Strategy and Management. I did one internship before France Telecom where I was during five months working on Resources Allocation for a Research and Development project. I did several other small internships.
Missions
Within the Finance Division I’m working within a team on Structured Finance, which is included within the Treasury and Finance Department. The mission of that team is actually to work on financing the company at the lower cost. Those solutions are basically based on assets of the company which can be either receivables, equipment or sometimes networking. Basically, when I say financing France Telecom , what I mean is raising debt to finance France Telecom. I’m actually in charge of some of those projects within the Structured Finance Department. We are working in a team of four people, so it’s kind of a, a young kind of team, which is really active. There’s two parts in my job, the first one is actually some kind of follow up once we put a solution in place, we just check everything is working all right and if it doesn’t we try to find the reason why and then find the good solution to that. The other part is basically to analyse and then structure some solution for the group, the aim again being to raise funds at the cheaper cost for France Telecom. So, on a day to day basis, I work first of all with people within France Telecom who are in link basically to the project and who will give us inputs for the, as to improve and create the right solution. Then there are basically people within the company but who help us on mostly every project. Those are the legal people, the tax people and also accountants. The third kind of contact we have are outside of France Telecom and those are mainly banks and investors who will help us within the various steps of putting in place a new solution. The first step will be basically to analyse a solution with them, negotiate and then basically select the right bank so as to put in place the good solution
Au quotidien
I usually work on almost ten projects at a time. There’s basically three steps I can recognize in those projects. First one would be basically to find what there’s on the market out there and what can be put in place within France Telecom . This part is mainly meeting with the banks, having lunch with them, just discovering in an informal way what they can offer us. Second step is much more about analysing and kind of beginning of structuring solution. If I take the example of securitisation for example, we’re working on our receivables. So, what we’re looking at is how a customer will pay us, whether he will pay quick or not, whether there would be some kind of default, he won’t pay, and whether we’ll make some kind of discount for him. So, basically, once those two steps are over we’ll decide the bank we’ll want to work with and which will offer us the best solution because of its expertise and because of the cost basically they offer us. Then we’ll begin the closing parts. During that closing part it’s mainly legal work, so we’ll work a lot with our lawyers, sometimes its means, coming early in the morning, leaving late at night, but it’s also the most intense but also the major part of putting in place that solution because most of the details are actually put in place then. The reason why that part is really intense is basically because most of the time we, we have to work with people sometimes around the world. Right now I’m actually closing a deal with investors who are in the US, and we’ve got like 20 investors, so that also means you have to work, to adapt your schedule to theirs. You then go with them in details in the contract and check all the points they are actually asking for are relevant and should be mentioned. That part of closing represents sometimes one month, but it’s worth mentioning that most of the project are at least for two years.
Avantages
The reason why I decided to take that job initially was because even though I had a great knowledge on the business side I didn’t have knowledge on the finance part. This job was definitely an opportunity for me, to develop an expertise there and also to work with people who can bring me a lot and it turned out my experience also brought me a lot of knowledge on the tax side as well as on the accounting side. The other point about that job was basically the kind of responsibility we have, when we look at our projects sometimes the head of finance is involved, I even had a couple of projects on which the CEO was involved, and basically, as we are working on billion of Euros, you can imagine those projects are closely supervised. The only drawback, as I said, is that we have a heavy workload and especially in the closing part of a project, which is basically the consequence of the responsibility of this project.
Entreprise
There are a couple of reasons why I decided to work for Orange. First of all there’s the Telecom Talents Program. One of the, the interesting point about that program, is that there’s people from all areas of the company you then get to know, whereas sometimes people who have been working within France Telecom only know people from their area, so it’s kind of a way to discover what you can also do within the company. The other point is basically the, the company evolved a lot. If you look back, maybe 15 years ago, we were working on networks, then there was the cell phone which arrived and we also decided to expand on corporate services. Lately we even started our own movie company, so we definitely don’t know what will tomorrow be done out of.
Personnalité
The quality you have basically is to be able both to have some analytical abilities, which is common in finance, but you also have to have some creativity as well, because in structured finance, as I was telling you, things are evolving quite quickly, and actually you may be in the next trend, so you have to, to be able to, to see what could be the next trend just to, to follow up with that.
Perspectives
After this kind of position, what I can tell you is basically what some people did. I can think about a couple of people who are now in charge of subsidiaries where they’re basically involved in the financial side. There’s also people who are still in the finance section of the company, but they’re the head of some other part of this division. As far as I’m concerned I’m actually considering a position in the supply chain and sourcing department.
