Maxime, could you tell us a bit about your background? [toc:A career spanning startups and hypergrowth]

With pleasure! I’m a pure start-up product with a particular appetite for early-stage projects, the last of which was Qonto, where I arrived as the first engineer.

My appetite for early-stage projects actually started quite early, during my work-study programme when I joined Youboox (since renamed Next Story) as the first engineer working alongside the CTO.

I had a brief stint at Shopmium, but it was a more mature project—too mature for me, in fact.

I then joined Sushio, an entrepreneurial project that had just come out of 50P. The two co-founders had signed a contract with Intuit, a US-based company, and that’s how I ended up moving to SF. I was hugely interested in it culturally; the market was much more mature than in France. I saw loads of companies being born and rubbed shoulders with people working at Intercom, Slack, or Uber—they were often trying to poach you in bars! I stayed for just under a year and then returned to France, once again in search of a new early-stage project.

That’s when I came across Steve and Alex, who were setting up the idea for Qonto with Gabriel, the VP of Engineering. Gab had also lived in SF before returning to Paris, so we shared a common culture. We had a great fit, and that’s how we started Qonto: the two founders, a designer, Alessandro (now CEO of Abyssale), a VP of Growth, Anh-Tho (now CEO of Lago), and the two of us as engineers.

[button href="/contact-conseiller" style="secondary"]Book an appointment[/button]

‍

You spent several years at Qonto; could you tell us about your role there? [toc:7 years at the heart of the Qonto success story]

You’re likely familiar with the Qonto success story: for me, it was 7 years of an absolutely brilliant ride:

• we went from a team of 2 engineers to 110+ on the back-end
• as a Founding Engineer, I built the entire initial back-end: from the first lines of code to the deployment of over 60 microservices.

We launched Qonto publicly in 2017, but we actually worked in stealth mode for 9 to 12 months beforehand! A few key milestones:

[list]

[b]2016:[/b] nine to twelve months of development in stealth mode before the public launch.

[b]2017 to 2020:[/b] a very technical focus on scaling the product, and a lot of work on onboarding and compliance (KYB/KYC, PEP, AML/CFT on the back-office side).

[b]From 2021:[/b] I became a manager and led all internal support and back-office operations, while working with other leads and staff engineers to help our engineers grow faster.

[/list]

[table]

Qonto | At launch | After seven years

Back-end engineers | 2 | More than 110

Microservices | 0 | More than 60

Clients | 0 | 450,000

Valuation | — | €4.4 billion

[/table]

‍

Why and how did you decide to co-found RockFi? [toc:Why RockFi?]

I was already convinced by Pierre’s vision of the market and how he planned to approach it. Those are solid foundations, but for me, that’s not enough—you need the right people! The partnership as co-founders made perfect sense, and I was also very happy to join Marie, our COO, who has a fascinating background.

[quote img="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6a6cc391f29a3bfcb80711a6/6a7ed2377de7b76cbfbd0db0_68ca8097c9ac250c4b20ea40_6784d3d68815f9c67033392e_Photo%252520Maxime%252520-%252520Copie.jpeg" name="Maxime Durand" role="Co-founder RockFi"]It’s exhilarating to realise there is a leadership position to take.[/quote]

‍

Private wealth management is a new sector for you! What struck you most about it? [toc:Discovering private wealth management]

The first thing that surprised me was discovering the scale of the processes, particularly in compliance. It’s a real problem because it’s extremely time-consuming and frustrating for both the client and the advisor, even though these are processes that are actually easy to automate.

‍

Processes that are still manual

I was also very surprised to see so many administrative steps that are still manual and therefore prone to errors. At Qonto, this was an issue we tackled very early on. Our priority was to build a smooth, frictionless onboarding process. Today, with solutions like ComplyAdvantage or Fourthline, you can easily optimise, save time, and reduce errors. It has almost become a formality. Our goal at RockFi will be to focus our energy on rethinking the UX and the overall experience.

‍

An advisor-client relationship no one has reinvented

Finally, when you look at the last 20 years, all the tech players have focused on SaaS approaches aimed at replacing the manager and going "direct-to-consumer." This includes robo-advisors for asset allocation like Yomoni, services for accessing new asset classes like crypto (with Ramify, for example), or account aggregation (with Finary, among others). These solutions are quite niche and ultimately represent less than 1% of the market. The bulk of the market—the remaining 99%—remains intermediated, and no tech player has yet managed to crack the relationship between an independent wealth advisor and their client. It’s galvanising to realise that no one has yet tackled our segment and that there is a gap to be filled.

‍

Are there any lessons from your time at Qonto that you’ll be able to apply to your new role at RockFi? [toc:Lessons from the RockFi hypergrowth phase]

Yes, I experienced hyper-growth at Qonto: from 0 to 450,000 clients and a valuation of €4.4 billion. Starting from scratch in 2024 is obviously different from 2016; the ecosystem has changed enormously and has become much more mature. But fundamentally, the key success factors remain the same, and replicating them allows us to save a lot of time at the start:

• People are at the heart of project creation; the primary asset remains the talent, the team, and the initial hires.
• Combining different perspectives and expertise to serve a strong vision, with an excellent understanding of pain points and precise objectives.
• Technical and operational excellence to move forward with confidence and ensure the quality of the products developed.

‍

‍

What are the biggest challenges the private wealth management industry will have to face? [toc:-]

There is a primary technical challenge related to data—how we collect, transform, and use it.

At RockFi, we don’t hold the assets, so we need to interface technically with each partner to retrieve data and allow our managers to have visibility over their business, their client distribution, and current allocations, among other things.

There is also an experience challenge. Some products depend on performance and carry different risk profiles. The whole point is to enable our managers to be proactive with their clients, raise alerts and anticipate so they can adapt the strategy. No one really does this today: our role is to build the tools that let managers create that “wow” effect.

Today, you also need to be able to provide real-time client reporting and an aggregated view of their wealth. Many players use technical connectors to retrieve client data from financial institutions, but that requires effort from clients. Our ambition is to collect data directly from partners and offer our clients a single platform.

‍

What is your perspective on the role of artificial intelligence in your sector? [toc:The true role of AI in wealth advisory]

Artificial intelligence is a major challenge to address. The real question is: how will we be able to apply LLM language models in a practical way? In our sector, we are convinced that LLMs will never replace a wealth manager or a wealth engineer.
However, it does help to unblock situations by providing a reliable initial response and answering clients quickly on highly technical tax or legal questions. It becomes a sales tool for managers to better support their clients. We are working on it.

[quote img="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6a6cc391f29a3bfcb80711a6/6a7ed2377de7b76cbfbd0db0_68ca8097c9ac250c4b20ea40_6784d3d68815f9c67033392e_Photo%252520Maxime%252520-%252520Copie.jpeg" name="Maxime Durand" role="Co-founder RockFi"]New technologies, including AI, will profoundly change the wealth management industry[/quote]

‍

What role do you want technology to play? [toc:Giving time back to advisors]

The reality is that managers today have less and less time to dedicate to building relationships, which is the core of their job (20%). Our entire challenge is to reverse this trend and enable managers to dedicate 80% of their time to their relationships and only 20% to reporting.

Our role is to co-create the best tools for our managers' profession and to give them purpose. Some players are already doing this very well for specific subjects: Wizio for CRM, Envestboard for asset allocation, and Kwiper for wealth engineering. However, no complete and satisfactory tool exists. Our goal is not to recreate everything, but to foster partnerships with existing tools that work well and build the missing pieces, in order to create the most high-performing "end-to-end" platform possible.

[calc]

title:Today

Client relationship = 20% of the time

Administration and reporting = 80% of the time

title:The RockFi goal

Client relationship = 80% of the time

Administration and reporting = 20% of the time

---

Over a 40-hour week, that means 24 more hours spent with clients.

[/calc]

[quote-large]A framework that serves your freedom, tools that serve your performance.[/quote-large]

‍

What is your tech development strategy? [toc:RockFi's tech roadmap]

Our long-term vision is structured around two pillars:

• for our managers, it is to offer them a unique, automated tool connected to all financial partners, allowing them to stop worrying about administrative tasks and dedicate their time to what matters most: the client relationship
• for our clients, it is to give them access to the best possible customer experience: a simple and transparent app that offers a 360-degree, real-time view of their wealth so they can manage it as easily as one manages their business on Qonto

For 2025, we have several projects underway:

• On the saver side: providing clients with access to a platform. A technical barrier to entry
• Streamlining the compliance experience by rethinking the product
• Improving the CRM experience (how to manage clients, offer a household view, etc.)

‍

You aim to triple your headcount by the end of 2024; what kind of tech profiles are you looking for? What kind of team are you looking to build? [toc:Building the tech team of the future]

We are already a team of 5 engineers today, and we are primarily looking to recruit product managers who can understand the business, deconstruct it, and help us build the best experiences.

Next, we obviously need to expand the engineering team on the back-end side to make these products concrete and reliable. Their role will be to make the experience envisioned by the product managers and designers possible, both on the front-end and the back-end.

We are also looking for data engineers to collect and process data, data analysts, and finally AI engineers to support us with everything related to LLMs!