EPISODE 204: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Antoine Le Nel
Table of Contents
Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!
We recently interviewed Antoine Le Nel for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Antoine and here’s what we discussed about –
1. Discussion on balancing growth, marketing, and analytics in a cohesive strategy.
2. Importance of a solid analytical foundation for effective growth and marketing.
3. Brand marketing as a catalyst to support growth driven by analytics.
4. Applying insights from gaming to FinTech, emphasizing product quality.
5. Approaches to resonate with different industry audiences, focusing on consumer services.
6. Navigating outdated banking regulations while maintaining customer trust.
About our host:
Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co. He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.
About our guest:
Antoine Le Nel is Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Revolut, a leading fintech company. With a background in growth, marketing, and analytics, Antoine is dedicated to empowering financial freedom and access. He spearheads global growth strategies for both B2C and B2B offerings, overseeing Marketing, Communications, Analytics, and Growth Partnerships.
From Candy Crush to Cash: Revolut’s Chief Growth & Marketing Officer Antoine Le Nel on How to Win the Marketing Game
The Intro!
Saksham Sharda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda, and I’m the creative director at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to interview Antoine Le Nel who is the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Revolut.
Antoine Le Nel: Great to be here. Thank you.
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Challenge yourself with this trivia about the exciting topics Antoine Le Nel covered in the podcast.
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The Rapid Fire Round!
Saksham Sharda: So the first question is, at what age do you want to retire?
Antoine Le Nel: As soon as possible.
Saksham Sharda: How long does it take you to get ready in the morning?
Antoine Le Nel: Me, 15 my kids an hour.
Saksham Sharda: Most embarrassing moment of your life?
Antoine Le Nel: When, for my first job, I was asked to tell a joke and the joke was quite inappropriate, unfortunately.
Saksham Sharda: Favorite color?
Antoine Le Nel: Green.
Saksham Sharda: What time of day are you most inspired?
Antoine Le Nel: That’s a good question. I’d say around 10.
Saksham Sharda: How many hours of sleep can you survive on?
Antoine Le Nel: Probably six.
Saksham Sharda: Fill in the blank. An upcoming marketing trend is ______&.
Antoine Le Nel: AI.
Saksham Sharda: The city in which the best kiss of your life happened?
Antoine Le Nel: Paris.
Saksham Sharda: Pick one. Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk.
Antoine Le Nel: Mark Zuckerberg.
Saksham Sharda: The biggest mistake of your career?
Antoine Le Nel: The biggest mistake of my career is launching my own company.
Saksham Sharda: How do you relax?
Antoine Le Nel: I sleep.
Saksham Sharda: How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?
Antoine Le Nel: Between three and four.
Saksham Sharda: A habit of yours that you hate?
Antoine Le Nel: Drinking three or four coffees,
Saksham Sharda: The most valuable skill you’ve learned in life?
Antoine Le Nel: Resilience.
Saksham Sharda: Your favorite Netflix show?
Antoine Le Nel: I’m more of an HBO guy.
Saksham Sharda: One-word description of your leadership style?
Antoine Le Nel: Decisive.
Saksham Sharda: The top priority in your daily schedule.
Antoine Le Nel: Take decisions.
Saksham Sharda: Ideal vacation spot for relaxation.
Antoine Le Nel: Barcelona.
Saksham Sharda: A key factor for maintaining a work-life balance.
Antoine Le Nel: Prioritizing your time.
The Big Questions!
Saksham Sharda: Let’s end the rapid round, and now we can go into the longer questions, which you can answer with as much ease and time as you like. The first one is, that in your role at Revolut, you always see various aspects of growth, marketing, and analytics. How do you balance these different responsibilities to ensure cohesive and effective strategies for driving global growth?
Antoine Le Nel: Excellent. So it all starts with analytics, right? The foundations of everything you do in growth and marketing are about analytics. So step one, build the foundation that helps you understand what you do alright? Otherwise, there is no chance for you to know what you need, to prioritize, what you need to push, and what you need to stop unless you have a good analytical foundation. So this is step number one. And you never compromise on your analytics. Then you have growth, which you could say is more the lower funnel of activities that you have, which is very much based on the analytics that you’ve built in the sense that if you’re very granular in your analytics, then you’re able to be extremely efficient in your growth engine, alright. Because you’ll be able to know what works to accelerate what works while pulling back on the things that quite work. So, the foundation is analytics, then you put growth on top of analytics. And finally, marketing. And brand marketing is more the amplifier in the sense that is gonna feed growth by putting more activities in your brand. And in marketing, you feed your growth engine that is all based on your analytical foundation. So that’s how I balance those three things out.
Saksham Sharda: So can you share an example of a successful strategy or a story that comes to mind regarding these principles that you just shared?
Antoine Le Nel: Yeah, sure well, so on analytics, so my background, so before Revolut, I was in gaming in mobile gaming. And this is where in that industry we’ve taken the analytical accuracy and obsession almost, you know to quite a high level, which has helped us to know what, where to push, you know, because in a way as well, you need to know that when you start, when you start a campaign, when you start an activity, whatever, you need to get the, the insights of the quality of the users that you’re bringing as quick as possible, right. Because at the end of the day, the best decision that I’ve made at Revolut and before is to not focus on CPA cac. It’s irrelevant. The price you pay for a user is irrelevant. What is relevant is the ROI you get from a user. And in that sense, the stronger your analytical platform, the better you’ll know that it’s worth investing more in some cohorts and less in others. Because if you just focused on CPA and CAC and so on, you’re just going after the worst cohorts because you’re just gonna try to bring your CAC down. It’s very easy to bring a CAC down, but ultimately the cohorts of users that you’re gonna bring are gonna be very poor. And that’s where having a very strong analytical platform helps you to know the things that work and the things that don’t work. You know, some platforms have a higher catch versus others, but they bring much better users than other platforms. So you can’t say, Hey, you know what, we’re going to buy at the CAC at 10. No, you don’t buy CAC at 10. Maybe some you buy at 20, some you buy at 5, and so on. And even within a platform, maybe you have as well a high diversity of users that might bring for that. And this is where to win big. You need to win small first.
Saksham Sharda: So you hinted here at your past in other companies that you’ve worked for, you’ve had extensive experience in both the gaming industry with King and now in FinTech with revenues. How do you leverage your past experiences like these in gaming to inform your strategies for growth and marketing in the FinTech sector?
Antoine Le Nel: So the first thing is to not necessarily make the shortcut that brand is marketing, alright, I have a strong conviction that brand is the product in both cases of Candy Crush and Revolut, the brand existed way before we started to do any marketing alright. The brand was there because the product was there because the product was differentiating enough and so on. And what marketing and growth does, it’s a catalyst but it’s a catalyst of something that works. You know, there’s no point trying to push desperately with growth and marketing a product that’s just not good. You’re not gonna suddenly make a product look good just because you do some good marketing alright? So it all starts with the product, which is the key that I got from gaming that I brought into FinTech. Linked to that there’s a lot of startups and so on you know that say you know what? I have a great product, but my problem is my brand awareness. That is a bad excuse. That is a very bad excuse. It’s not such a thing that my product is great. I don’t have brand awareness for a very simple reason in the early days your product penetration will never be linked to your brand awareness in the sense that it’s not brand awareness driving your penetration, it’s the opposite. It’s your penetration that drives the brand awareness. It’s because you have a great product that you get more and more adoption that you get more and more known. And then you get that’s how you start. That’s how you get the ignition, you know, through that. And then you can build some virality that both Candy Crush and Revolut have been very good at in building viral loops and so on to engage and accelerate this growth. And then you can put some marketing and then you can build stronger foundations to build, to build on the engagement, on the loyalty, etc in the longer run.
Saksham Sharda: But given that gaming and FinTech are two completely different industries and audiences, how do you tailor your approach to resonate with the unique needs and preferences of each of these demographics?
Antoine Le Nel: So I mean, I don’t think too many banks would hire a CMO coming from mobile gaming. It’s probably not the shortcut people would take. Now, when you look at the core of it, what is it? Alright, in both cases we’re talking about mass consumer services, alright. It’s about an app application business, you know on mobile that then follows the same tech stack, the same tech stack that you have in both cases. And then it’s about driving the adoption of a product that is based on the freemium model. You know, it’s both a freemium model. You know, gaming is free, revolt is free until you want to get more stuff and get a premium subscription, etc, or into gaming, you get some boosters or you can buy stuff, and so on. So it’s very much more, it’s not necessarily about the product itself, it’s about how it’s structured and what it’s based on because, at the end of the day, you speak to the same people. I mean, everyone has a bank, right? Everyone plays games, you know, you’re talking to the same people.
Saksham Sharda: So speaking of everyone having a bank, Revolut has experienced significant growth in various markets, including Italy, where it recently achieved the number-one spot in downloads for financial apps. Can you elaborate on the specific marketing strategies for tactics that led to this?
Antoine Le Nel: Yeah, so to compliment what you say, we’re now number one in 15 countries. So whether it’s in the UK, in Ireland, in Spain, in Italy, as you said since a few weeks ago in many countries as well in Eastern Europe, Romania, Poland, Slovakia, etc. And we’re growing across all our European markets. And as well beyond, I mean, in Australia and New Zealand, Singapore, it’s on, we’re growing very fast and they have other expansion markets. Now what is the recipe? How did we do that? So first of all our growth is not made of coup in the sense that it’s not like you suddenly see a spike. You know, we believe that growth is, it’s like running the hundred meter, you know Revolut was not running much faster than everyone else right? It just managed to optimize everything little by little so that he could win in the end. At the end of the day, he was the winner. Marketing is the same thing. Because marketing today is a bidding strategy. It’s a bidding war, you know? And at the end of the day, what matters is that you bid always slightly above everyone so that you always get to the top of the waterfall, you know? And that’s what we are doing. So we are, it’s about those small wins that ultimately put you at the forefront of everyone else. And then the winner takes it all. You know, we are in a place where especially with the new technologies, with the mobile platform and so on, where its winner takes it all. That’s what we are doing in every single market. We are making sure that we are number one which makes us win.
Saksham Sharda: So you mentioned 15 countries where Revolut is now number one. How important was localization in your marketing efforts? And what specific steps did you take to tailor revenue offerings to this particular market?
Antoine Le Nel: That’s very interesting. So I think localization is one of the most overly-rated things in marketing. I’m not saying it’s not important. I’m saying quite often the cost of localization is higher than the scalability opportunity. Okay, I’ll give you an example. If you start scaling your teams locally, you are gonna dilute your talent. Alright So at Revolut we have a small team of growth that sometimes we don’t even speak the language of the country where we’re in and we’re playing against competitors who have a whole department of marketing into it. And we are winning, not because we are better locally, but because we’re better in the vertical that we’re operating, whether it is analytics, whether it’s performance marketing, whether it’s the way we do influencer marketing, etc. Because we are very deep experts in everything we do. No one is a generalist at Revolut. I think generalists don’t bring the value that you would want. Now, they can come to localization and so on, which I agree localization has value, but I believe scalability and in-depth expertise in every domain are a lot more important than localization.
Saksham Sharda: So these 15 countries that you’ve mentioned have also had their big banking giants. So what do you have to say to detractors who don’t look at Revolut as a banking real bank?
Antoine Le Nel: So we have a very different approach to the way banking is promoting itself. You know, I think there is still this idea that I’m going to change banks. You know, I think Revolut, we see ourselves more as how can you say it’s like a snack, you know, it’s a snack moment. So because Revolut is a super app where you can make payments, where you can do Fx, where you can do trading, when you can do savings, credit, etc, remittance. So you have a very wide spectrum of products. Now, we’re not asking you to come to Revolut and adopt them all at once, which is what banks are doing, you know, in the way, like you change banks. Well, you know what, you’re gonna bring everything you know with you. No. How about you get a snack? Let’s imagine you go on holiday in Mexico next year next month, and then you need a card with a cheap FX and so on. Something very efficient. Take a Revolut card, go on holiday there, and then you’ll see it’s super convenient, and so on. And then when you come home, you realize, wow, actually I can win points the more I spend and I can win cash back. So maybe actually I’m gonna spend with my card, you know when I’m, when I’m there and then, oh, there’s a bit of trading, maybe I do some ETF just on the side and see how that is and so on. And then you go little by little and then at some point maybe you take the full tasting menu, you know, and then you move and then you say, okay, now I bring my salary to Revolut and now that’s it. I don’t need the other banks. But we’re not asking our users, Hey, you know what, we are here together for life. You know, that’s it. No, that’s not the approach. And that’s why that’s the power as well from a cost of acquisition perspective, you know because I’m not here to acquire the full household. If you want. I’m just here to acquire a user and get the opportunity to demonstrate the power of our product instead of just saying, Hey, you know what, you need to bring everything with you.
Saksham Sharda: So what role does user experience play in all this? You mentioned all these features that Revolut has don’t overwhelm the users as traditional banking apps do. So what is the key here?
Antoine Le Nel: You’re asking a really good question because this is the core of where I believe Revolut is head and shoulders above everyone. Because having a super app can be quite intimidating and well, let’s call it frankly a mess, you know? And I think what Revolut has done is making it super clear for the users to understand where is what, where they want to go, where they don’t want to go, and where to find my product. Nailing this user experience to maximize your cross-sell across-selling roses, upselling, etc is critical to our business model today.
Saksham Sharda: And to what extent does your data-driven approach play a role here? Are you able to tell them to make things simpler in case they get more complicated at some point? What is gonna keep this super app in check in case it gets complicated like a bank?
Antoine Le Nel: Yeah, sure. So, well, I mean, as all FinTech and tech companies you know, we AB test a lot. I think we have as well, the huge advantage of being present in 40 countries, which means that we can soft launch products you know in a very gaming way. You know, you soft launch in a country and so on, to test a product and see whether this is the right product, take the opportunity to work on it, improve the experience, and so on. So that when you want to launch in a bigger market it’s already a proven product, you know, and leveraging this thing. And I do the same, you know, from a marketing perspective, you know, like we test a lot of incrementality, we test a lot of go-to-market strategies, let’s say in a market. I go with TV in a market, I go out of home and so on, and then I can do some multivariate testing. And that you can do only if you’re global. Because if you’re only in, in one market, how are you gonna test? You know? And that is the power really that Revolut has, has cracked, is that we don’t go with a leap of faith, we just go, we test, we improve, we optimize, and then we launch, we roll out, and then we move on to the next one.
Saksham Sharda: What are the next markets you’re planning to expand into?
Antoine Le Nel: Sure, so as I said, we are in Europe, we are in the UK in Switzerland. We already live in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Japan. We live in Brazil and the US now, we just got last month a banking license in Mexico. So that’s gonna be a big launch for us coming in the coming months. And then the next big one will be, and that is coming very soon as well.
Saksham Sharda: So I suppose in charge of growth, sometimes, do you find it mind-boggling the regulations that might be outdated in countries regarding banking regulations, what is allowed and what is not?
Antoine Le Nel: So Well, it would be too easy to say yes. I mean, the banking needs to be regulated, right? Let’s be clear. You know, it is very important because that’s how well you drive trust, you know? I mean, if you are perceived as the player that always goes against the regulators, well that’s not gonna play in your favor. You know, I think we’ve seen some some sectors that have gone a little bit of peace. You know, like you don’t want that, you know you need to build your business. Considering all those, those are constraints, but they are protections, you know? And protecting the customer is protecting the business. You know, at the end of the day, you want the customer to be happy with the experience and to feel protected from the loss. So of course, we would want regulators to be quicker, faster, more agile, and so on. I think you need to adapt.
Saksham Sharda: What does your typical day at your work look like?
Antoine Le Nel: So I wake up in the morning prepare my kids, and drop them to school. Then and then the day starts. Now I’m quite lucky because I live, so I live in Barcelona, but a lot of the team is in London and so on, which means usually my meeting starts at 10, which gives me a lot of valuable time until 10 when I can prepare my day. So start with Looker. I drill looker as much as I can so that I know my numbers. So that’s my routine. And then and then the day starts. And then because we’re a very flat organization at Revolut, I manage roughly 20 different teams at Revolut where, and then we have a weekly business review. So then I have all the different weekly business reviews for those 20 teams during the week. And then and then I do one-on-ones and then repeat and repeat.
Saksham Sharda: So how much percent of your time is taken up by meetings?
Antoine Le Nel: A hundred percent. But that’s fine. But that’s fine. I’m only paid for that. You know, that’s that’s fine. I’m here to help. I’m here to unblock things. I’m here to make decisions. I’m here to see how it can be helpful to the team and so on. You know? So I need to speak to the team, you know, I need to be with the team, I need to talk to them. So, I’m a hundred percent of the time in meetings. And that’s conscious, you know, I’m conscious about it.
Saksham Sharda: For job seekers listening to this show, what kind of talent are you looking for in the company or the FinTech sector in general? What kind of talent is needed? What kind of talent is missing? What kind of talent are you looking for?
Antoine Le Nel: Yeah, sure. So the way I look at talent and the way Revolut overall looks at talent, we divide it into three parts. The first one is probably the less relevant part somehow is how competent are you at the job that is, especially if you’re a junior, that’s not very relevant. Whether you would be competent for the job we’re asking you doesn’t matter. In many ways, and if you’re senior, it’s a bit more, but at the same time because you see in Revolut, we’re disrupting an industry and so on, you can’t refer to your experience. You know, I like to say the fact that at Revolut, we don’t have any benchmark because we are the benchmark, you know, so we are market-defining percent. So that’s why, in a way, competence, we still check it, especially for some specific jobs and so on, is one of them. The second one, which is a lot more important, is your problem-solving skills. So we want people that can take a very complex problem, slice it down, whatever the problem is, slice it down, be very structured in its approach to find a solution, not jump strength into gut feeling I’m gonna go this way and so on. It’s this analytical approach about how you simplify things that look very complex. Can you imagine launching a bank that is in 40 different countries in just 10 years? That’s a pretty big thing. But if you just slice it down and take things one by one and focus on execution rather than the strategy, you just focus on execution, then you win. So that’s the second one. And then the last one is your value alignments. Try to understand whether the company values and the candidate values match. And then this is not just, it’s not a question of whether you’re good or bad, no, it’s just, do you fit or you don’t fit? And there’s no, it’s not even, it’s not judgmental, you know, in a way, like at Revolut we have certain ways of working that maybe don’t fit with you, that doesn’t make you a bad person, just means that it doesn’t work. And in the same way, you may not fit. You may think that, well, actually, you know what? We’ve checked the values. It’s not the way I work. And I think you need to be very transparent about that at the very beginning, you know? And Revolut is quite a demanding place. It’s very entrepreneurial. You need to have to be okay with autonomy and so on and and quite quite hard working. That’s fine. That’s the deal. If you are very ambitious and you want to do it and be part of this incredible story, come and join it. If you feel like it’s too much for you, it’s okay. I think there are opportunities for everyone in this space.
Saksham Sharda: So the last question for you is of a personal kind. What would you be doing in your life, if not this?
Antoine Le Nel: I would be scuba diving somewhere.
Let’s Conclude!
Saksham Sharda: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Antoine Le Nel who is the Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Revolut.
Antoine Le Nel: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.
Muskan is a Marketing Analyst at Outgrow. She is working on multiple areas of marketing. On her days off though, she loves exploring new cafes, drinking coffee, and catching up with friends.