INNOVATORS VS COVID 19
How the Crises Made Us Win 2 to 3 Years in Vision
Constantin Wolfrom tells us how the Pumpkin card saves you time and money.
First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?
Constantin Wolfrom: We’re great, thanks. We just can’t wait to have a drink with friends.
Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Pumpkin.
Constantin Wolfrom: I was a student when I met Hugo and Victor. We were all students. We decided just to have a ‘good grade’ to launch a fake startup, and we finally decided to launch it for real at the end of our studies.
How does Pumpkin innovate?
Constantin Wolfrom: We are a new French bank, free, with everything in real-time, and that enables people to earn money through cashback when they pay with their MasterCard.
How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business finances?
Constantin Wolfrom: It affects it a lot, first because we have a big offline acquisition strategy, working with student campus, and because we are also selling a ticketing solution for events.
Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources, and what are the lessons learned?
Constantin Wolfrom: We are a hundred at Pumpkin, and we managed to make 10 persons change their job temporally, to work on mostly manual tasks we did not have time to do.
How did your customer relationship management evolve? Do you use any specific tools to be efficient?
Constantin Wolfrom: Yes, we changed it a lot; went from 2 day maximum of remote to full remote in 1 day
We did not use new tools but just organized them in a better way.
Did you benefit from any government grants, and did that help keep your business afloat?
Constantin Wolfrom: No.
Your final thoughts?
Constantin Wolfrom: This crises clearly helped us accelerate some projects we had in mind but that we would have done years later, such as building a bank with a real social impact, a bank that helps small business, and help our client to increase their revenue
It was not a real strategy at the beginning, and we felt we had a part in support of business in difficulties that were not as much a real cause for us before these crises.
