Thomas Soulez

Strategy for all of our business operations capabilities :
- Customer Service
- Billing & Payments
- Anti-fraud
- Revenue Assurance
- Carrier Relations

Created Skype’s function responsible for product management and operations of a global billing, payments and self-care platform at one of the Internet greatest success stories. The unprecedented speed and scale of Skype’s development enabled me to develop rapidly both as a leader but also as a payments, e-commerce and billing professional with a unique insight.

• Created team of 15 people (6 Operations, 9 Product and Partner Managers)
• Orchestrating B&P strategy, delivery and operations (10 locations)

Payments :
• Enabled ten-fold fold volume increase whilst reducing costs and friction
• Expanded payments reach to 200 countries, 14 currencies and > 80 payment methods
• Integrated and managing actively a portfolio of 9 Payments Service Providers
• Halved payment fees through vendor mgt and routing tools to optimise costs, quality
• Expanded provisioning platform used by 9 partners around the world
• Rolled out skype top-ups at Walmart and retailers in UK, JP, PL etc..
• Led PayPal integration and joint product launches like “Send Money”
• Reached and maintained PCI compliance since Nov 2007
• Built one of skype’s most valuable assets ie its repository of payment details

Billing :
• Reduced customer contact rate by 30% through user experience improvements
• Extended platform to also serve Business Customers (8% of our sales)
• Built one of the largest recurring billing service on the internet (> 40% of sales)
• Expanded original prepay billing platform to bill for localised packages
• Concluded 3-year deal for a postpaid billing managed service for B2B clients

As Skype went from a $60M to a $800M company I have successfully demonstrated I can thrive during rapid changes of culture, direction, focus and management by challenging myself, my team and others whilst developing my leadership skills.

Carphone Warehouse is one of Europe’s leading mobile phone retailers and telecom service providers. TalkTalk was their main fixed line and broadband offering in the UK.

• Delivered solution to integrate TalkTalk resellers.
• Led feasibility study to deploy Wholesale Line Rental and Broadband on a new architecture.

Kenan is a tier-1 billing and customer care software vendor. It was a privately-held company subsequently acquired by Lucent and later sold on to CSG (and now owned by Comverse). I delivered solutions across 13 projects in 7 countries.

Project Manager, 2000 - 2004: Managed 6 projects including :
- First-ever large scale implementation of a new real-time billing product
- 3 Euro conversions projects: unique, had never been done before - obviously !

EMEA Consulting Product Manager, 2002 – 2004 :
- Enabled two first sales of the “CSG/Data Mediation” product in Europe
- Trained 50+ consultants and engineers across EMEA on this product.
- Provided the sales and implementation platform for this US-only product to grow in Europe.

Implementation consultant, 1999 : technical consultant onsite at the 2nd largest fixed telephony operator in Italy. Providing functional and technical expertise for fastest growing telco in Italy back then. Also learnt Italian on the job.

3-month internship : Contributed to a proposal for a French conglomerate to integrate their TV and Telecom activities by setting up an Internet business.

Designed, developed and maintained a system to store customer details, billing information and to automate marketing campaigns.