Olivier Debeugny: “When I was a student, I would only picture myself as an entrepreneur, starting to work in a small- to mid-size company.” (Photo: Lingua Custodia)

Olivier Debeugny: “When I was a student, I would only picture myself as an entrepreneur, starting to work in a small- to mid-size company.” (Photo: Lingua Custodia)

Prior to the “Start-up Stories: Round 3” organised by the Paperjam Club and the Lhoft and sponsored by Bil on Tuesday 17 September at the House of Startups, one of the start-uppers, Olivier Debeugny (Lingua Custodia), shares his entrepreneur vision.

Please introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about your start-up.

Olivier Debeugny. – “Hello! My name is Olivier. I am the founding CEO of Lingua Custodia, a French fintech company which applies machine learning to financial translations.

We are developing smart translation engines specialised by document types or customised for a client. Our ambition is to help financial institutions to use their linguistic data more efficiently so that they can spend less time and money in translation and communicate rapidly and effectively with their clients whatever their native language may be.

And I am delighted to announce that we will be opening our first office outside France here in Luxembourg at the Lhoft. It will be officially launched in September, and we are all very excited about it!

From idea to implementation, there is only one step… and yet. What triggered your entrepreneurial journey?

“When I was a student, I would only picture myself as an entrepreneur, starting to work in a small- to mid-size company in the French country with the objective to lead it one day or to grow from scratch a new business.

Truth is that my first job was at JP Morgan in Paris! – and I was happy about it and the next 17 years I have been working in the financial industry – but still, I was always thinking about my entrepreneurial dream.

At the time of the financial crisis 2007/2008, I was in charge of the global client service team of an international asset management company. My team had to switch into a crisis communication mode as the transmission of information had to be faster and available in the native language of our clients.

Many financial professionals – who speak English in addition to their native language – are forced to translate very urgent and technical texts that cannot be outsourced to translation agencies either because there is no time or because of the shortage in specialised financial translator. The ‘Do It Yourself mode’ can represent up to 15% of their time.

Eureka! I created Lingua Custodia to solve this conundrum faced by the entire financial industry.

We often hear that it is essential to make mistakes. What do you think of that?

“I would fully agree. Especially in entrepreneurship. It requires tenacity, resilience, making mistakes – not too often but still –, learning from them, improving and moving to the next step!”

You can register for the Start-up Stories: Round 3 on the website of the .

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Discover the innovators of the Lhoft .

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