Bankloch

Belgium is unfortunately   not (yet) a hot spot of Fintech in the world . Contrary to our surrounding countries from which several Fintech Unicorns have emerged (e.g. Qonto, Alan or SpenDesk in France, Revolut, Monzo and Starling Bank in the UK, Mollie, Adyen and Bunq in the Netherlands or Trade Republic, N26 and Solarisbank in Germany), Belgium unfortunately doesn’t have a pure Fintech unicorn yet. This is unfortunate, as such unicorns often form a source of inspiration and a pool of money and people, which result in interesting new Fintech start-ups. Belgium does however have some   unicorns , which have a strong link with the financial services industry, i.e. Collibra (data governance, for which the financial sector is one of their primary targets), Odoo (a platform for business apps with strong financial integrations), Deliverect (integration of online food orders into restaurant’s POS systems) and team.blue (provider of internet services), but no pure Fintech player. It’s...

The word " Fintech " has become such a hype and such a widely used term, that it can actually mean anything today. Therefore when people ask for trends in the Fintech industry, this becomes harder and harder to answer, as anything even remotely associated with financial services can be linked to Fintech. Additionally traditional financial players (like banks, insurers, brokers, stock exchanges, but also traditional financial software vendors like Temenos, Sopra, Fiserv…​) have also caught up in their digitalization and modernization roadmaps and have launched Fintech innovation labs, meaning they can just as well be categorized under Fintech. We could therefore say that: As   technology has become so crucial in the financial services industry , the entire financial services sector can be categorized as Fintech. Due to the   rise of ecosystems and embedded finance , financial services companies start to offer more and more services in adjacent sectors (like HR Tech, MarketingT...