Every month, we highlight an INNOPAY employee who is celebrating a professional milestone. This month, to congratulate Patrick de Haan on five years at INNOPAY, we asked him to tell us more about himself and his work.
Patrick joined INNOPAY in 2017 in the role of Junior Consultant. After graduating with a BSc in International Economics & Management from Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, he did a six-month internship in end-to-end process & project management at Deutsche Bank. He subsequently spent 1.5 years as a trainee and junior consultant at the international consultancy firm DXC Technology. Today, Patrick is a Senior Consultant and lead of recruitment & HR for INNOPAY in the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland). Pre-Covid, he travelled almost weekly from Germany to Amsterdam for client work, but the amount of travelling has declined significantly since the pandemic. Patrick recently moved out of the centre of Frankfurt and now lives in the city’s northernmost neighbourhood, called Kalbach-Riedberg, which is around 30-40 minutes from the INNOPAY DACH offices by public transport.
There were three main reasons I decided to apply to INNOPAY. Firstly, I was attracted to the opportunity to work in strategic consulting focused on innovative, future-relevant topics. Secondly, the family-like team set-up appealed to me. The company feels very much like a start-up in that you have the freedom to bring in your own ideas, which also gives you a sense of relevance in terms of growing and shaping the company. Thirdly, I was born in the Netherlands but grew up in Germany. At INNOPAY, I could combine the two ‘worlds’ I knew on a personal level in a professional capacity too.
I love INNOPAY’s culture of innovation, out-of-the-box thinking and ‘work hard, play hard’-mentality. On a day-to-day level, I enjoy being involved in such a wide variety of topics and activities. These range from doing in-depth desk research for the next update of our global Open Banking Monitor, to conducting interviews with potential new colleagues. I thrive on ‘getting stuff done’. Right now, I’m working on bringing INNOPAY DACH to the next level of maturity in a number of areas. In HR and recruitment, our biggest focus is on hiring new team members to support our ongoing growth, and just recently we managed to set up a pension scheme for all German colleagues as well as setting up a partnership with a law firm to help us recruit non-EU applicants. Furthermore, we are in the process of moving to bigger office space to accommodate our growth. And last but not least, I’m working to identify possibilities to further improve our integration with INNOPAY’s Dutch operation so that we can effectively leverage relevant processes and capabilities. I appreciate having the opportunity to be such a relevant part of growing the business for INNOPAY DACH, and I am grateful for the level of trust we receive from the MT in pursuing this ambition.
One of my favourite projects was delivering PSD2, one of the most disruptive regulatory changes within the financial sector, at a Dutch fintech bank in 2019. This entailed supporting the client all the way through the process – from the initial regulatory assessment and setting up the developer portal, to successful interaction with the Dutch regulator through to developing & launching the first Open Banking use case. But I must say, I’ve now been here for five years and the longer I stay with INNOPAY, the prouder I become of our approach towards topics like Open Finance and our vision on the future of data.
Generally speaking, both of these topics are still at a pretty early stage in the DACH market. Data sovereignty is being discussed to some extent within the context of SSI. However, this is still at an industry-expert level. The next step will be to create more awareness and encourage government efforts to drive the necessary shifts in society.
In principle, we need the same approach for digital sustainability as for ecological sustainability. As long as the majority of people don’t understand the urgency, necessity or benefits associated with changing their behaviour and mindset, even the best technological solution will not be adopted. This means we will be unable to reap the full potential of data and the digital economy. Therefore, the game changer will be successful education and communication to make the topic tangible also for non-experts.