In this episode of the Connector Podcast, recorded at the OWIN23 event in Venice and sponsored by ON23/Objectway, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Maarten Greik (Head of Product Development) and Karl de Borger (Sales & Relationship Management) from KBC Security Services. The conversation introduces KBC Security Services as the securities‑handling competence centre within KBC Bank, serving internal KBC divisions and increasingly external financial institutions across Western and Central Europe. The guests explain why KBC chose to insource back‑office securities processing rather than outsource, highlighting the robustness, integrated brokerage‑and‑custody capabilities, multi‑entity design, and API extensibility of their proprietary eBoss platform. They discuss the strategic benefits of this insourcing approach—cost efficiency, scalability, buying power, and preservation of in‑house expertise. The dialogue then shifts to KBC’s BPO offering to banks, wealth managers, and brokerage houses, emphasizing operational excellence, innovation, and the importance of partnership ecosystems. Karl describes a joint digital onboarding solution developed with Objectway to streamline client onboarding for wealth managers, illustrating KBC’s collaborative mindset. Throughout, the guests stress the core‑versus‑non‑core business model, where clients focus on front‑office activities while KBC handles back‑office processes. The episode concludes with reflections on vulnerability in partnerships, the drivers that compel clients to outsource (cost, expertise, focus on core activities), and a reaffirmation of KBC’s commitment to operational excellence, innovation, and ecosystem collaboration.
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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 ON23, organized by Objectway.
Welcome to another episode of the Connector Podcast, and still streaming from the nice and sunny Venice. And I have to go all the way to Italy to speak to good friends of mine from KBC in Belgium. So I have in front of me Maarten and Karl. Who are you guys?
I'm Maarten Greik. I am head of product development at KBC Security Services, and I'm joined by my colleague Karl.
Hello, Karl.
Hello, Koen. So I'm Karl, Karl de Borger. I'm in charge of sales and relationship management at KBC Security Services. And let me take that opportunity now to, to explain also to you what is KBC Security Services. In fact, we are a department within KBC Bank and it is the competence center for all the securities handling. And of course, we do that primarily for the entire KBC Group, for our own private banking, retail banking, corporate banking, CBC in Wallonia. But more and more, we are acting also as a service provider towards third parties, external financial institutions, banks, wealth managers, brokerage houses in Western Europe, but also in Central Europe. And based on the knowledge that we have in security services, well, we can also present that now towards the external world. And that's exactly what we are doing today.
Excellent.
Is that also one of the reasons why you're here at this event?
Absolutely. Tomorrow is one of the themes that is going to be touched upon is business reconfiguration. So how do financial institutions look at their operational structure, their business model, to boost their results there. And that's where we come into the picture very often because one of our propositions is, yeah, we insource what other financial institutions outsource. So, my story tomorrow is going to be about that. Don't want to go too deep into it to give anything away, but that's the idea.
Ah, but this is only afterwards. So, if you don't mind, maybe you could share a little bit about what you're going to tell tomorrow. I promise nobody will know before the moment you go on stage.
Okay, if you guarantee it, I'll—
100%.
Happily, I'm happy to go into it because it's a nice story to tell actually. Um, so it was a number of years ago, 6, 7, history is a bit vague on it, um, where as many banks were looking at our, uh, basically our back office for, for investment processing, and we were looking at how can we make this stuff more efficient, how can we maximize the impact that we have for the money that we spend. We started looking around and one of the obvious options always is, yeah, let's outsource. And then we started listing the requirements. Okay, what do we need to be comfortable when we are going to outsource this business?
Mm-hmm.
We wanted to make sure that we had a robust platform. We want to make sure that the transactions of our clients that they entrust us with Our process somewhere safe that can cope with volume changes and such. So that was a must-have. Secondly, we have a lot of expertise in-house.
Mm-hmm.
And we didn't want to lose that expertise because we knew, okay, when that phone call comes with the angry client, what do you do? Who do you call? We want that expertise close by. We want it on hand so we can solve the problems that are unavoidably going to pop up. You want them to be solved efficiently, quickly, with the right expertise. Then you also want to be a bit more flexible, or flexible enough, I should say, to adapt because you don't want to lock in your way of working in such a way that you have no flexibility towards the future because that's going to drive the customer experience as well. So you want to make sure that you can still tweak your business a bit. And make sure. So we started looking around and we came to the conclusion, I already hinted at it, the expertise, we have it in-house. Why would we outsource it? Would be a shame to throw all of that away. We looked at our platform, the eBoss platform, Karl. It's our baby, well known. It's actually quite a robust platform. It was conceived, and this is unique about it, it's Yeah, it's doing the brokerage and the custody on the same platform, so there's no problems of reconciling between the two.
Mm-hmm.
It was also conceived to be able to function with multiple entities within our group, and as such, also easy to connect outside with some extra tweaking and some web services APIs. It would make— it would be very easy to connect it to the outside world. And then lastly, the customer experience. We were not comfortable enough that we would be able to set up something that was flexible enough for us to keep managing that.
Mm-hmm.
So rather than going the outsourced route, we started looking at the insourcing route. So one of the other things that you could do to boost your cost and your effectiveness is that you scale. And with the requirements described before ticked off, We were fairly confident we could scalably grow on that platform by taking in additional volume. This gives us more buying power with our suppliers. It is going to make investments that we do on IT side more easily to bring some return. And we started going that route and then we started noticing, Karl, as well, that there was demand for this.
No, exactly, Martin, you are fully right. And in different segments, in fact, because we are not offering only the, yeah, the business process outsourcing towards banks. But I'm always proud to say that almost all wealth managers in Belgium, they are a client of KBC Security Services. And of course, now that we decided to do to offer our services to, to that segment, we also needed to continue on improving our services. And one of the things, and that's also the reason why we are here today, is, is on the digital onboarding. For instance, the end clients of wealth managers need to be onboarded, and that's always a tough thing. And we can't continue handling that in a manual way. So we developed with Objectway a very nice digital onboarding platform. It's not yet state-of-the-art, but it's helping a lot, and we already took steps to further improve it. So that is one example where we collaborate with Objectway and why we wanted to be present here at this event in Venice.
Well, the industry is all about collaboration. It's not about doing on your own. But one thing that struck my mind is What you said, both of you, is there's a lot of terms that come that sound a lot like innovation, but there's also a lot of words that sound like operational excellence. So which one of the two are you guys the specialist in, innovation or operational excellence?
If we do our job right, I think we bring both.
That's a good answer.
That's the commercial answer.
No, I fully agree on that one.
Absolutely.
But I think it would be fair for us to say as well, at the same time, we looked at that analysis that I described from before, that our main strength that came out of that was the operational side, the expertise that we have, those hundreds of people that know the investment business inside and out with a network that goes, yeah, it spans many countries and continents. That was our starting point. And by acknowledging that strength and working with it, you can become innovative. I don't think those two concepts that you mentioned are contradictory at all.
Okay, I'm meant to ask provocative questions. Sorry, Karl, go ahead.
No, no, but I fully agree on the operational excellence and innovation thing. We want to bring operational excellence to our customers, but it means also that we need to look internally within our organization also to be excellent in our performances. And those things go hand in hand. And we heard this morning a lot talking about ecosystem. And I think that is key. You can't stand on your own and you need to work, you need to collaborate, you need to partner with your customers. You can't call them customers anymore. It's in fact a partnership. And that is very obvious here at this conference.
Yeah. And also sometimes behind the presentation and the buzzwords, it is easy to get lost at how uncomfortable it can get sometimes, or you get out of your familiar terrain and you have to be a little bit vulnerable towards your client because you're actually opening up the way you work to external parties who will undoubtedly have an opinion about that. But that's a challenge that you have to be willing to take when doing such partnerships. And you have to take it in stride, know that you will face things that you'll have to work on.
So, well, nice. And then we're almost to the end of this podcast. Talking about that vulnerability, now your clients know that that's the story. So what are the elements for a client to go the other way around? Because you're convincing them to start outsourcing with you. So what are the main drivers for the companies that you work with for in terms of BPO, business process outsourcing?
The classic one would be the same that drove us. So, cost is always going to be a big one because you don't want to get into an adventure that is going to cost you more in the long run. But that's just not going to make any business sense. But then secondly, it's also about that recognizing of your strengths. If your strengths are, okay, being close to your client, knowing what they need to invest in, what kind of lives they live, what their aspirations are, how do they see their future in 20 years, how do they see the future of their children? It's those kinds of questions that we as KBC Security Services, we have no added value in that. We can support that business, but the only person or the only organization that is best placed to tackle that is going to be our clients that work with us.
I would like to add that the key message that we give to our customers and potential customers is that, guys, do take care of your front office, take care of your commercial activity in private banking and wealth management. We'll take care of your back-office activities. Don't be worried about that. We want to unburden, in fact, the customer, and so he can focus on, on what should be his main activity, not the back-office activity. We take care of that.
Yeah, it's often mentioned as the core versus the non-core business.
Indeed.
Guys, any last comments that you want to bring to the audience? Anything they definitely need Is there anything else we need to know about KBC Securities before we close this podcast?
Well, we are very happy to be here, and, and we were able to connect already today, and we'll probably do also tomorrow, with quite a lot of customers from Belgium being present here. And it's good to see that there is a very good understanding between Objectway, our customers, ourselves. It's nice to see that we make a lot of progress in in good partnerships.
Well, excellent. On that happy note, I'd like to thank you both for participating to this podcast.
Very welcome.
And thank you also to the audience for again tuning in and stay tuned. Thank you so much.
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