Mission: Ops Possible, Ep. 7 - Fintecture Ops Leader on AI Empowerment Revolution

For Alexandre, "the goal is not to replace people. It is to empower them."

Alexandre had a problem: he needed a specific integration. Three years ago, this could have meant months of development time. Today? He built it himself in a week, despite having zero web development experience.

Welcome to the new reality of operations leadership where teams are empowered to create solutions to their own issues on their own.

Three good reasons to watch this episode?

When Support Operations Hit a Wall

Fintecture processes over €5 billion in payment volume for 7,000 clients across Europe. But in 2024, their merchant satisfaction scores started declining. Support operations couldn't scale with growth.

Alexandre shares openly how he started heading a team where agents lacked consistent methods and quality standards, and where institutional knowledge lived mostly in people's heads and email threads. Sounds familiar?

The traditional solution would be hiring more people or waiting months for development resources. Instead, Alexandre chose a different path: one that shows how ops leaders think about problem-solving in this day and age.

The AI Empowerment Revolution

"We often talk about how AI can automate tasks," Alexandre explains, "but it's also a huge opportunity for self-empowerment, especially for non-technical people."

This isn't just about productivity gains. It's about fundamental role transformation. Operations leaders are no longer dependent on development roadmaps for internal tooling. They're building solutions themselves, iterating fast, and solving problems directly.

But Alexandre's approach goes deeper than individual empowerment. He's using or planning to use AI to tackle systemic operations challenges: automatically generating documentation from support cases, creating searchable knowledge bases, and building integrations between disconnected tools.

The Human-AI Balance in Regulated Industries

Working in fintech adds complexity layers most ops leaders don't face. Compliance requirements, data regulations, and the need for human oversight in financial decisions create unique constraints around AI implementation.

Alexandre shares how they navigate these limitations while still leveraging AI for empowerment, a balance that's increasingly relevant as more industries face similar regulatory pressures.

“The goal is not to replace people. It is to empower them. Because at the end of the day, it should still be a human deciding on the fraud case”
- Alexandre Criseo

What This Means for Operations Leaders

Alexandre's story represents something bigger than one company's transformation. It's a great picture of how operations roles are evolving in real-time.

The ops leaders who thrive in the next few years won't just be process optimizers. They'll be builder-managers who can directly solve problems, implement solutions, and empower their teams with new capabilities.

Ready to hear how Alexandre built this transformation at Fintecture? Listen to the full episode (YouTube or Spotify).