Meet Cake: this is Tom

Name: Tom Claus
Role: Head of Business Development, co-founder
Making Cake since: November 2018
Location: Bilzen, Belgium
Mail: tom@cake.app

Tell us about your workspace

A few months ago I moved from a small apartment to a new home. When designing and decorating it, we immediately made sure that it would be optimal for working from home. The fact that we don’t have an office at Cake obviously influenced this decision. We have designed an entire floor solely as office space, where both my partner and I can work at home undisturbed.

This way, I can continue working in the evening without being distracted by the children. And I can keep my work and private life a little more separate than if I were to work in the living room, as I used to.

As you can see, except for some details, it is almost completely finished. In the coming months, I’m going to install a larger desk and some light fixtures still need to be hung.

What do you do at Cake?

As Head of Business Development, or simply Sales, I am responsible for all the commercial partnerships we conclude at Cake.

And there are many! Cake for Business has a lot to offer to brands and companies.

First of all, we have the Cake cashbacks which allows companies to easily offer cashback discounts to specific target groups based on their previous purchase behavior. We now have over 90 different partners including Torfs, Mealhero, JBC, Foodmaker, AVA, E5, Veritas, MaxiZoo, Eneco, Luminus and many others.

Cake also sells reports and insights based on anonymized transactional data to companies. You can see an example of such a report here.

And besides that, with Cake for Banks, we also partner with banks. For example, Cake cashbacks were also integrated into Argenta’s app.

So, together with the sales team, I make sure we have the right partners on board to make our users happy and we generate the Cake revenue.

In the early days of Cake, I was still on the road almost daily to (potential) partners, but today the team has already expanded significantly and I now have a more coordinating and supporting role towards the team. That way, they can do what they do best without the operational worries.

By the way, we are still looking for sales colleagues! Check out the vacancy and do not hesitate to send me a message if you are interested or have any questions.

Why Cake and not another company?

I’ve worked at quite a few companies in the past, but I always tend to gravitate to smaller companies and startups.

When I started at the last company I worked at, it was also quite small. But when I left, the team size was close to 100 people. When a company gets too big, it doesn’t feel like home for me anymore. There’s something about the risk, charm and excitement of a new small company that I really like. I truly enjoy helping to start something new, building new things, make it great and then see how it takes off.

Cake is incredibly interesting to me because we are building and create something that is innovative. And we all know that the world of banking definitely needs a kick in the shins.😁

What’s your most memorable Cake moment?

That’s a difficult one because we’ve had so many memorable moments.

One of the fondest memories I have was the moment we signed the first partners. It felt like quite an accomplishment because, at that time, we did not have any product yet, we did not have an app, we had absolutely nothing but a great idea, and yet we did find the first partners who signed a yearly contract with us. So that was definitely one of the most memorable moments so far. 

Most other memorable moments happened at the quarterly on-sites with the whole team. Those are really fun and I get to know the team much better at a personal level. 

What’s your favourite cake?

It is “abrikozen met lattekes vlaai”, that’s just so good!

Any topping on the Cake?

Whoohooo! What a great adventure so far! Thanks to all Cake partners, users and colleagues, together we can write the recipe for a better banking world. 🍰