In this episode of the Connector Podcast, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Klaas, a senior leader at Regnology, about the company’s rapid growth, strategic acquisitions, product evolution, and future vision. Klaas explains how Regnology’s acquisition of Befine in 2022 (and earlier purchases like Pfizer and Kehlix) modernized its front‑end and enabled a Europe‑wide rollout of the Regnology Reporting Hub. He describes the firm’s dual regtech‑subtech approach, close collaboration with regulators, and a granular data model that minimizes the impact of new regulations on customers. The conversation covers Regnology’s award‑winning cloud‑native platform, recent funding milestones (Nordea Capital in 2020 and CPP in 2024), and the ambition to become a global leader through further acquisitions such as Vermeg and expansion into the US and APAC. Klaas details the exclusive partnership with Google for a SaaS, cloud‑native offering, and outlines AI initiatives ranging from a regulatory chatbot to AI‑assisted data‑mapping in professional services. He also discusses taxonomy standardisation efforts (XBRL, ECB’s BERT/IREF initiatives) and the shift from template‑based to granular reporting. Looking ahead, Regnology aims to improve two‑way communication between regulators and regulated entities and ultimately enable real‑time supervision, positioning itself as a global leader in regulatory reporting.
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Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Cohen van der Huydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Welcome to another podcast together with Belgium Fintech, and today I've got with me Regnology. And I've got Klaas with me, and I know it's a little bit of a different story, but somehow part of the founders. But you need to explain us a little bit what that means.
Well, yeah, we joined actually Regnology in '22 through the acquisition of Befine. So Regnology bought Befine in '22, and that was a major milestone for us and also quite pivotal for Regnology, especially in the development further on in their their product.
And can you explain a little bit what that meant? What do you mean? Why were you so pivotal?
Well, we were one of the first M&As. So Regnology already did an important M&A in Subtech. They bought Pfizer in '21, and in '22 they continued on the M&A vibe. And so they bought Befine and Kehlix. And Through the, through the acquisition of BeFine, they were able to, to modernize the whole front end of their offering, and that resulted in a rollout of our platform across, across Europe. So for us, it was quite important to be part of that family because thanks to Regnology, our platform became installed and rolled out across the whole European region.
So I could say a leading platform, right?
Yeah, you can say that indeed.
Well, I say that not only because there was good acquisitions in terms of new business, but there was also acquisitions in terms of other companies that came on board, right?
Yeah. So that was the first— we were part of the first wave of the acquisition. And nowadays we, we have around— we finalized around maybe 10, 11 acquisitions already. So it was also a learning process for technology. So we were one of, one of the first ones. And so there was still a lot of, a lot to learn. Nowadays we have playbooks, how to deal with acquisitions, to rapidly integrate, to rapidly decide what we will do with the product, how we can onboard the people and so on. So yeah, definitely a big improvement compared to the previous—
And the Befind platform is still there?
Yeah, it's still there. It's still part of the Regnology stack and plays a quite important role in the overall, what we call now, the Regnology Reporting Hub. So it's quite an important component in the overall product offering.
And Regnology supports a lot of financial institutions at a lot of regulatory spaces. So how does that work? How can you keep like the difference of all these different countries, if I may say, or regulatory spaces? How does that work?
Well, we start with, of course, the analysis. We have closely, thanks to the fact that we are not only offering regtech solutions but also subtech solutions, we are actually closely connected to regulators as well. So we are well aware of what regulatory changes are upcoming. We are even part of a lot of— from the start, we are even implementing these ones and designing these together with regulators. So that helps as well in designing the right regtech solutions. So that makes us really unique in the market due to the fact that we are— that we have a presence at both sides. We can easily adapt our regtech solutions to and really and really implement what is really requested by regulators. Next to that, the fact that we have quite a unique approach in the market. So we are really pivoting from a reporting platform to a data platform, which means that new regulations have minimal impact for customers. So we, thanks to our granular data approach, we have already a lot of the data elements that need to be reported, presented in our platform, and so we can easily adapt the platform to new regulations by minimizing the impact for banks, insurance companies.
Is this the reason why you actually been recognized and received the prize of being the Regulatory Reporting Product of the Year Award and the Risk Market Technology Award twice? Or have I missed something?
No, no, that's indeed our granular data approach is one of the key drivers over there next to the fact that we are really— that we already did the whole transformation to a cloud-native platform compared to most of our competitors. They are still in a transition phase or starting to do the transition. We have already done that transition. So that's also there. We are quite ahead of the curve, I would say. So compared to our competitors, that's also one of the main reasons I think why we receive those awards.
Congratulations again. I think there's another reason I should say congratulations, because it has been a tough time for a lot of startup technology companies to get fresh money. And you guys managed to secure funding with the CPP back in, if I believe, December 2024.
Yeah, indeed. Yeah, that was indeed a huge milestone for the company. Next to the previous important milestone for the company was around 2020 when Nordea Capital came on board. And that was quite a pivotal moment for the company. But now again, with the entrance of CPP, it will also be pivotal for the company because with the initial— the previous 5 years were focused from growing out of the, of the, of the Dutch region, I would say. So we became a European leader in, in, in REC reporting. And now with the entrance of CPP, we want to become the global leader. One of the first steps we did was also due to the acquisition of Vermac, was one of the first steps in that direction. So now we have not only a major customer base in Europe, but also in the US, APAC. So we have presence in— we have an office in the US, we have customers over there, we have quite some customers in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia now. So we are now ready to serve the the G-SIB financial institutions in the world. So I would say that, yeah, if you compare with football, that we are now playing in Champions League and we are well placed to play the final in the end.
So yeah, nice one, nice one. And since we talk about football, not so long ago we had South Africa as the place where the World Cup was taken. Yeah, we're getting old. So I also saw that South Africa, for example, is on the list. So what would you see are the differences between all this, all these different continents? I mean, especially you being a part of that initial sort of blueprint of the systems, is it really the same in different countries and continents?
Well, in the end, regulators are more or less looking at the same type of information. They all want to have statistics around— they're all looking at your key risk indicators. They all want to monitor your liquidity risk, credit risk, market risk. They all need statistics for their own economic decisions. So globally, we see quite the same level of information that is required. Of course, there are local flavors, but let's say that 80, 90% is probably the same set of information that regulators are looking for. Of course, we see difference in the underlying technology. So the adoption of cloud goes not at the same speed across, across the whole globe. So the offering is adapts it a bit as well to, to the regions where we are operating.
I know you have openly a partnership with Google, but does that mean that you force the banks to use the Google platform or you, or can you, are you open to other cloud or on-prem?
Well, we have a clear non-prem strategy, so we strongly believe in a SaaS offering. So there we We only collaborate with Google because we believe that that's the best cloud in which we can offer our regtech solutions. Also, due to the fact that we closely collaborate with Google, we can also offer the best deployment and monitoring environment for our customers. We also have a lot of benefits of the collaboration with Google, so a lot of AI initiatives are jointly initiated in close collaboration with Google. So that's also a great benefit, I think, from collaborating with close— close— very— by collaborating closely with one cloud provider instead of going for a multi-cloud strategy.
Well, talking about Google, you talk about Gemini. So are there a lot of AI projects running because you have obviously an awful lot of data across the globe?
Well, what we, what we are, we have a lot of AI initiatives ongoing. So one of the first ones, of course, everybody has a chatbot. So that's really—
Never heard about it.
So that's of course the quite obvious one. So it allows our customers to, to, to interact with the chatbot on regulatory topics, on questions about the platform, how that regulation is really implemented into our platform. So we give a lot of transparency on how that, how regulations is finally implemented in the solution. So they get a full end-to-end transparency, I would say, from thanks to that chatbot. Other initiatives that are, that are we doing is more in the development, in the R&D department. So there we use AI to speed up developments.
Obviously.
And also in our professional services. So when we do implementation projects, we use as well AI to speed up the data integration part because that's still the part that takes the most time. So the data mapping, understanding the data elements, the data catalogs from the customer, mapping the data catalog to mapping that to our data catalog, that takes quite some time. So with AI, we can really speed up that data mapping exercise.
Yeah, and I'm glad you talk about data mapping because data mapping also has to do with quality of data. And I'd like to bring that back to what you said earlier when you mentioned supervisory technology and you're at the foreground to sort of decide or to together come to new paradigms and new sort of formatting. How do you see the current state of things in terms of formatting and alignment compatibility across the globe?
Well, across the globe, We are not there yet, although there are some, I think in the ESG space, there are global standards that are getting implemented. But in the rest—
Talk about taxonomy in that case?
Taxonomy, yeah. So, well, I'm talking about XBRL taxonomies. There is quite some alignment at the global level over there. And if you look in Europe, there is quite some initiatives taken by ECB. So you have the BERT and IREF initiative, which will bring more standardization. I'm not saying that it will be no Valhalla yet. Yeah, but there will still be some local flavors over there. But we expect that it should bring a bit more standardization than we have currently today in the areas that statistical reporting. So I think that's a good progress over there, and I think we will see it more and more coming. So the shift away from template-based reporting to granular data reporting will bring more standardization, at least at region level or even at the global level.
Well, it's nice that you give a bit of a glimpse what we can expect. So sort of bridging on this and coming also to the end of this podcast, You obviously had a very exciting last 5 years. So what can we expect for the next 5 years for Rijknology?
So yeah, like I already mentioned, we started initially as a regional DAC player, then became the European leader. And now within the upcoming 5 years, we want to become the global leader and we are on a good track over there with the acquisition of Vermeg. We definitely increased our footprint globally. The other thing we are seeing is that we want to— what we are investing on and focusing on is on improving the workflow between regulators and regulated entities. So still too often we see the process is broken. So banks are delivering their data, but they don't capture the feedback immediately from regulators. So there we want to have a really a 2-way communication process in place between regulators and regulated entities so that it's—
Again, subtech.
Yeah. So that we have, thanks to the fact that we have regtech and subtech, we know how to, how to close the gap between, between both worlds. So we see quite some evolution in, in that area. Another area where we think that things will change is in the fact that we will probably, maybe not in the upcoming 5 years, but we will in the end move to real-time supervision.
Well, thank you very much, Klaas, for sharing these insights here in this podcast. I wish you obviously all the best of luck and keep us posted of this journey. And thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you.
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