Building Alan's operations from zero, then doing it again: meet Brecht, International Ops Deputy

Alan is now live in 6 countries (France, Belgium, Canada, Spain, Senegal, Ivory Coast) and will add more in the coming years. 

Someone has to build our product and operational stack there from scratch. I'm Brecht Verhamme, International Ops Deputy at Alan, and today I share what that was actually like for Belgium, and why the next launches will look very different.

In May 2020, I joined as Ops Lead for Belgium, Alan's first market outside France. I was the first employee there. My job was building Belgian operations from scratch. That meant mapping the needs before the go live, designing the processes and  solutions, running our first operations (think; billing, claims, customer support, digital clinic)and making sure members were supported. Every problem was new, and most of the time we solved it ourselves, in real time. 

Over time, my role became broader. I moved from day-to-day operations to designing how we build and organise teams, allocate resources and onboard people. More and more, I worked on turning what we learned locally into better ways of working for Alan as a whole. I went from Ops Lead, to Operations Run Deputy, to the international expansion role I hold today.

The common thread has always been building: teams, product, processes, and an operating model that can scale without losing the quality of the member experience.

When we launched Belgium, we chose speed over robustness and agility over scalability. At the time, that was the right call. We needed to get members covered and learn fast. But it also meant we built a lot of things just for Belgium. 

One painful example was our Claims engine: the software brick that processes our members’ claim requests. We had been building it rather ad hoc, without an end state in mind and insufficiently leveraged what we had already built in France. As a result, we suddenly hit an automation threshold. It led us to invest almost one full year to fully refactor the engine, integrated in the global stack, to break the automation ceiling.  

What excites me most today is making sure our new markets don't have to go through that again. 

When we launched Canada in February 2025, we didn't repeat the same mistake as in Belgium. Canada reads and processes claims with the same global building blocks as our other countries, and the local team only had to add what's truly Canadian: its coverage rules and local interfaces. Global where it creates leverage, local where it creates relevance, and simple enough that teams can move quickly.

There's no typical day, and that's what makes it interesting. Part of my time goes into figuring out what should stay local and what we can share globally: product, tools, processes, partners and expertise. That takes a lot of coordination with ops, product, people and commercial teams, so that new markets don't rebuild what already works. It's strategy one moment, and unblocking a very concrete issue the next.

The holy grail I'm chasing is an operating model that lets us open many new markets with small, agile local teams. We don't want every country to become a separate company. We also don't believe one model can simply be copied and pasted everywhere. 

Several new international teams are about to be built by people who haven't joined Alan yet. Is it you? If you want to build from the ground up, with a global team ready to hand you the tools, come build with us. Find all the latest job postings here, go through our hiring guide here, and apply!