In this live episode of the Connector Podcast recorded at the Digital Finance Summit 2022 in Brussels, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Sigrid de Wever, head of Strategy & Innovation at KBC Group. The conversation starts with a brief overview of KBC’s geographic footprint (Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria) and its two strategic pillars – customer experience and operational efficiency – which the bank seeks to multiply for success. KBC positions itself as a data‑driven organization aiming for proactive, contextual, hyper‑personalised services. The interview explores the tension between handling sensitive financial data and delivering hyper‑personalisation, highlighting the need for strong compliance, risk, and legal safeguards. The discussion moves to the concepts of open data and open banking. Open data is defined as freely accessible, multi‑purpose data, whereas open banking is a regulatory outcome of PSD2 that forces banks to expose account data via APIs to third‑party payment providers. KBC’s response is to build a plug‑and‑play API platform, offering third‑party services that add value without eroding the bank‑client relationship. The guests note that open banking is still early in its hype cycle, citing trust issues, data‑breach concerns, and market fragmentation as barriers; they suggest consolidation and mutualisation as a path forward. A concrete example of KBC’s hyper‑personalisation effort is the digital assistant “Kate”. An initial generic storm‑alert push notification achieved low engagement; after refining the data model to include postal‑code targeting, conversion rates rose dramatically, illustrating the importance of relevance and precise data. The conversation then shifts to emerging data‑sharing models. Sigrid describes a trend where companies place data on shared platforms, retaining ownership while only exchanging derived insights. This leads to a discussion of self‑sovereign identity (SSI) and data vaults. KBC envisions acting as a custodian of identity, linking its own “bank vault” with external vaults (e.g., Belgium’s ISMI) to streamline customer journeys such as mortgage applications. The challenges of authentication, fraud prevention, and the need for trusted authorities (potentially blockchain‑based verifiable credentials) are acknowledged. Finally, the guests reference broader European initiatives – the EU digital wallet and Flemish “Dataclaus” – positioning banks as trusted intermediaries in a future where users control their data. The episode closes with mutual thanks, sponsor acknowledgment (Fintech Belgium), and a call to subscribe for more podcast content.
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Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets. This episode is proudly sponsored by Fintech Belgium, the digital finance association by and for fintechs. Live from the Digital Finance Summit 2022.
A warm welcome to everyone and welcome into our podcast. And again, it's a podcast live from the Digital Finance Summit here in Brussels, and I've got the pleasure to have Sigrid in front of me. Sigrid, can you introduce yourself?
So I'm Sigrid, Sigrid de Wever. I'm responsible for strategy and innovation for KBC Group. That's a bit vague, probably. What I exactly do is we trend watch and we look at the trends and then we co-define the strategic direction of the group on which topics we need to invest a lot and in which we need to invest a bit less in order to make sure that we have profitability and customer experience on top of our mind.
These are already super ingredients to start a podcast. And I think for our national, the Belgium audience or the Benelux audience, KBC is very known by everyone. Could you just explain a little bit KBC as for our international audience?
Sure. So, KBC Group is active not only in Belgium, but we are also active in Czech Republic, in Slovakia, in Hungary, and in Bulgaria. So, there we have a retail SME and corporate banking business. And the 2 pillars of our strategy are customer experience and operational efficiency. So, our strategy is actually you need to multiply both in order to be successful. So because if one of them is zero, you're nowhere from, from client perspective. So that, that's our starting point.
Makes sense.
And the main tagline is that we want to become a data-driven organization. So if we see what's happening out there, we need to actually change the interaction with our customers. We need to turn it into proactive, relevant, contextual, hyper-personal if we want to remain the leader we are in the current countries.
Aren't you not mentioning 2 difficult things at once? Because on one hand you say we are a bank, so there's a lot of trusted data that belongs to a customer. It's financial data and you name it. On the other hand, you want to be personalized and super personalized. How do you look at it?
That's indeed If we look from a business perspective, the more data, the better. But on the other hand, indeed, we're a bank insurer, actually. Customer protection is a top priority. So, we are an incumbent bank insurer with businesses that have some business requirements, but on the other hand, a very well, good compliance and legal and risk department.
Yeah.
So, whatever we develop in the area of hyper-personalization and data-driven, all partners are around the table to discuss this. And if we look currently at what's out there, there are a lot of protective measures we need to take for our clients. And the frustration that we sometimes have is that it's not only incumbent banks and insurers who are active in the data industry, but also like the big techs and a lot of fintechs, for which they do have regulation, but on entity level, the regulation does differ from what we as an incumbent bank have to do. And so that's one of worries we actually have is that do customers always realize what happens to their data? So, if you talk to people, and also I have a teenager, oh, I get this for free from Google and I get this for free from— I said, you don't get anything for free.
It's nothing like a free lunch.
Indeed, it's in return for your data. And we think that actually could be our competitive advantage compared to those new entrants in the financial industry.
Now, it's funny that we immediately start talking about the data of customers, whereas the topic today is more open data. So does that mean you're going to open the door of the data of these customers? I don't think so. That was just a joke. But open data, what does that for you mean?
Open data is actually the data which is freely available, which can be shared in an open way. in a very accessible manner. Because I think that that's important. So it's data which is free, which is accessible to all, and which has multi-purpose. So it's not only for the purpose of the profit of companies, for instance. That's for me open data.
Okay. So maybe people would make a bridge with open banking, but then that's something completely different, right?
Yeah, open banking, it's something which was started by PSD2. Again, something on data. So at the moment, we were obliged to open up our accounts to payment providers. And we were thinking, okay, we need to do this in a cost-efficient manner, but without jeopardizing the safety, the security, and also without jeopardizing our customer relationship. Because if all of a sudden payment providers come in between us and our clients, then we could become a kind of invisible product factory, which is not at the time our strategy. So, this PSD2 actually opened the door for open banking because all of a sudden PSD2, it was not an obligation to use APIs, but from safety perspective and because we want to safeguard the relationship, we started to act upon APIs. And with this plug-and-play system, we actually started to offer different services to our clients. So, within KBC Open Banking, we have specific departments devoted to open banking in all the countries. in which we're active. So, our main strategy is we open up our mobile as a platform on which we offer products of third-party services, but only those that make sense from a banking client perspective.
And that's where open banking became beyond banking.
Indeed, yeah. So, we call it in our strategy bank insurance plus.
Okay, I didn't know that. And talking about open banking and PSD2, not so long ago I was also in a panel and I got the following question and I thought it was a tricky one. It was more in the direction, where are we today in open banking? Are we in front of the hype cycle? Are we exactly on the top or are we already at the bottom of it? What would you think?
I think we're not there at all yet. I think if I look at open banking, It sounds promising and it is promising, but there are various factors that actually, yeah, are the reason why it's not at the hype yet or at the top. So, and one of the things is the trust, the trust of clients. So why on earth all of a sudden is a bank doing different things than initially just the banking activities? Or the other way around, if neobanks come into play in the open banking. Yeah, sometimes you read articles, maybe the compliance was not that good or data breaches. So again, it impacts the trust of clients. And another aspect is there are many, many players in the open banking scene. And I think because of these many players, the success of each of them is still rather low. So I think that there should be kind of consolidation or less players so that it becomes scalable. It's not scalable for everybody involved yet.
Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it. Well, consolidation seems to be hype at the moment, not only in PSD2, but I think if you look at KYC providers, for example, there are so many in the markets. I would plead for exactly the same story as you just mentioned, that there's some collaboration, some Mutualization, some M&A maybe. This could be very useful. Well, open data is a key ingredient, I guess, to build superior customer experience. And you mentioned customer experience a few times. What do you see as a bank are the biggest challenges that you need to overcome to deliver that promise, to deliver that user experience to your clients?
I think if we make the promise we will give you relevant hyper-personal services, we need to live up to that promise. And I think it's difficult to implement those use cases that really have clear value for our clients. So, I will give you an example. So, we are developing our own digital assistant called Kate.
Kate, yeah.
Indeed, towards our clients.
It's—
we don't want to bombard our clients with push notifications by Kate to show that she's relevant and so on. So we need to, we need to be sure that we are selective in that one. So we also monitor the conversion of the push notifications we send via Kate. And one example we have is like we have the storm case. So this was a use case of Kate. And a year ago when there were these big storms, Mm-hmm. Kate sent out a rather generic message to the clients. I hope you're fine. If you have any damage, here is the link that you can file a claim. And we saw that the reaction to this push notification was rather limited. So we said, we need to improve the hyper-personalization. So what we did the next time, we included in the dataset the postal codes where the storm took place. So the push notification was only sent to the people living in this region. Hey, I hope you're fine. Do you have a claim? And then we saw that the pickup rate was extremely high. And this is actually what we learned. If you want to live up to the promise of customer experience, you need to make sure that you are indeed relevant. So make sure if you think about the use case of hyper-personalization that you have the correct data, the correct parameters, and so on.
Sigrid, to me it almost sounds that you're trying to bring human elements, emotional elements to a digital experience.
Yeah, so our strategy is indeed digital first with a human touch. And at first instance, this is our network. We We deliberately opt for a network and not because digitalization is not able enough to replace them. No, not at all. We have a deliberate choice of the human touch. But on the other hand, we also want to humanize the technology so that the know— I know you, I know my customer— is also included in the technology we have in order to increase also the usage and to make it more personal.
Yeah. Well, I think it's a nice journey that you guys are on. Coming back a little bit more to the topic of data. Well, lately, I seem to have a lot of conversations that take a kind of new turn. And the turn that I hear often is that various datasets with competitors even are shared amongst each other. And somehow the new algorithms can get like common data or common understanding from that data. Is that something that you guys are exploring on as well, or have you heard about it even?
I indeed have heard about it. So I think it's a nice trend going forward because it has 2 aspects to it. So first of all, from the current perspective towards data, it's like who owns the data? It's like, oh, we don't want to share our data with telcos because then we give up some of our advantage. So from that perspective, it's a nice evolution as companies you put your data on a platform, but the data, you don't have access to the data of the other. You only have access to the insights generated based on the shared data.
Exactly, yeah.
So that's indeed a relevant aspect going forward. But on the other hand, you also need the trends about who's actually the owner of the data. Because from that perspective, you still assume it are the 2 companies who put the data of all their clients together in one database and insights are generated. But on the other hand, On the other hand, you have also the trend of this self-sovereign identity.
Yeah.
Where the user is put back in control and this type of— so it will be an interesting evolution to see how this would evolve from the perspective of self-sovereign identity, where you put the user back in control. It's my data and I decide with whom I will share it for how long and under which conditions. And then the aspect of like, okay, we companies, It's a paradigm shift.
Yeah, exactly the way you put it. For me also. Yeah, it's a new insight if you want.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so from KBC, we also openly communicated about it. We would like also to be custodian of identity for our clients. So to develop a kind of vault, a storage point where you put your data in. But it's not only A vault where you put all your data, but we would also create connections to other other data vaults. For instance, in Belgium, you have ISMI as a vault where you put all housing related related issues, and then you have your your bank vault where you put yeah like your salary and your wage and and your creditworthiness. But if you buy a house, you need documents from both vaults. So this is what we are looking at to make sure that we make it even more convenient for clients that from these various vaults access points are created to put it in the in the in the customer journey. So that's one aspect we are also looking at because we think user control is important. And we would like to work— because what we see today, you have these various vaults and you give the customer the impression that he has it under control, but these vaults don't communicate with each other.
No, no, they don't.
So technically, the highways need to be created. That's one aspect. And then the other aspect is also, yeah, If you put the user in control, he can claim whatever he wants. Who says it's true? You can, yeah, unfortunately you can do fraud on your degree of your university or on your EPC. There needs to be an authority. So what about the authentication? Okay, the authority could be blockchain with verifiable credentials and the authentication, but still an intermediary could also have this role. So it's an interesting world going forward.
Yeah, it's a super interesting debate around the European sovereign identity.
Yeah. And also the governments are working on it. The EU wallet, also the Flemish government with the Dataclaus and so on. So it's a hot topic that we're also looking at to see from the financial industry with the trust we currently regained a bit and still have, and we could play a role in that world. Yeah.
Well, I think it's trust and also the direct access to the client. Yeah. Because you do have interactions with the client on a day-to-day basis.
Correct.
And that maybe is different than a governance, for example. Sigrid, I really enjoyed this conversation.
Me too.
I have that funny feeling that we probably could speak for the next 24 hours, but unfortunately we don't have that. So I really like to thank you again. for your participation in this podcast.
You're welcome.
And also thank you for our sponsor, uh, Fintech Belgium, for inviting you and having this possibility to record the podcast. And last but not least, also our audience, the, the people that are listening. And as you know, there's much more podcast material to be found on our channel, so please come back, subscribe, and get all the latest news. So thank you so much for joining.
You're welcome.
Thanks for listening to another episode of The Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to www.jointheconnector.com or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.
