Meet Rūdolfs Līcis, one of our Sales Development Representatives! He himself would describe his role as “the first person a client meets, tells them what we do and tries to determine what it is that they need for our paths to align”. Rūdolfs has been with us since October 2021 and is ready to spill the beans on what his work at Nordigen has been all about.

Starting the day off in a fintech startup

Rūdolfs wakes up, does his daily morning routine which includes drinking some coffee whilst catching up on missed YouTube videos. Around 9:00 he makes his way to work (in his case those few meters to his desk). In general, Rūdolfs works from home, though, just like many others before him, when he started, he came into the office regularly.

Pro tip: when starting off, we recommend working from the office - it's the best place to learn more about the company and get to know the work culture.

Priority no.1: emails, emails and emails. When working remotely, you get a million of them. Keeping yourself up to date on communication with colleagues and clients is the key to starting the workday. The main thing is to understand what's happening and what should be happening - hopefully, these align.

Priority no.2: understanding the current and potential client. Rūdolfs goes on to check new registrations and messages in the Nordigen system. Much of Rūdolfs' job is detecting and understanding the needs of current and potential clients. That's why before he integrates any client with our product, Rūdolfs tries to “get to know'' our new registered accounts and understand what value we can create for them. Rūdolfs does extensive research and tries to understand our client's needs right to the very last detail. The main goal is to make sure that all our client needs are met.

Integrating clients and providing support all the way through

After doing the research, catching up on ongoing communication and making sure every client is happy, onboarding meetings with the new accounts are scheduled. The purpose of these meetings is to inform clients about Nordigen products and how to use these for their needs. This is when the client finally gets to meet Rūdolfs face-to-face (well, probably screen-to-screen but good enough, right?) and align Nordigen's offering with client interests. Because communication with clients is such an important aspect in his position, Rūdolfs finds that “it's important to like to integrate conversations with other people in your daily routine.” If you enjoy human interaction, you will also enjoy your workday, without even really keeping track of the hours worked. Either way, none of us really has a “fixed” time to start or end work. We can dictate the working time and adjust it to business needs. If your team lead is in on it, there's always a choice to finish something later and come in earlier the next day and vice versa.

Now and then a day may occur when a client might be experiencing technical difficulties or inquire about the inner workings of a product. This would mean that Rūdolfs is also an advanced IT expert, correct? Well, not exactly. When referring to his tech knowledge prior to working here, he says “fintech was something that I didn't navigate in and that was one of the main reasons why I wanted to try it here”. So, can you learn the technical things on the job?

“You can, the question is how motivated you are to go in-depth. Don't be afraid to ask questions - everyone here can teach you something, and they won't turn their back on you!”

Additionally, of course, we have great tech support who are there for issues like these - if Rūdolfs can't answer a question himself, tech support can!

Downtime

It's all about balance. The best way to describe the Customer Onboarding and Sales Team is “work hard, play hard”: “On one hand, it's important to tune in for work and do everything to the best of my abilities, but it's also important to have a good downtime.”

When Rūdolfs finishes his workday, he takes on a completely different role - the one of being a Business Management student. In terms of education, though, he doesn't stop there. As a hobby he and his team are currently participating in Nordigen knowledge sharing courses “Brain Food”. Rūdolfs is someone who prefers to always be on the move but he also recognizes that one day of the week must be spent in complete leisure mode - he rests and watches TV shows (just ask and Rūdolfs will recommend anything from classic sitcoms to horror shows).