Koen Vanderhoydonk chaired our conference #TBSCONF20LUX, on January 30th in Luxembourg. You probably remember this was about trust, the central theme of The Banking Scene this year.

We took the opportunity to ask him a few questions in front of the camera:

If you prefer the transcript, here you go:

I’m very glad to be standing here with Koen Vanderhoydonk, one of my good friends but also the voice of and the face of Regtech in Belgium and far beyond, thanks to his book “The RegTech Blackbook”.

Now Koen, as the chairman of today, what do you consider your key learnings of The Banking Scene Luxemburg 2020?

Koen: “That’s a very good question. What I liked a lot today, is that The Banking Scene is alive, very much. There’s a lot of energy about innovation, there’s a lot of energy towards technology, but then I learned today that it also boils back to trust.

I think that trust is extremely important when you talk about banks because the banking industry is building on trust. And I’m very glad to see that today, the discussion is back on what is the fundament to me about banking, that’s bringing back the trust.

That’s one element. On the other hand, I thought to myself, you just said that I love Regtech, yes, I am totally passionate about and in love in Regtech, but I also started to realize during the conversations that the discussion that I’m having around Regtech is pretty much about trust too. I found that link with what I’m doing every day to the subject, the topic of today.”

As we already said, you’re the author of “The Regtech Blackbook”, you just mentioned that the love of your life is Regtech, or one of them let’s say. Regtech means also to some extent that you’re outsourcing some of the key element that keeps a bank strong: the back end, compliance, AML, etcetera. You’re actually to some extent also outsourcing responsibility as a bank, you could say. How do you look at that statement?

Koen: “If you look back in history, when we had the crisis, it was the regulator that stood up — I know I’m going to say some black-and-white stuff, so it’s all in consideration and the world is always grey, but if you look it at that way: the regulator stood up, and the regulator took control to a certain extent of the industry. So how did you see that? It was that some micro-prudential (?) view of the regulator suddenly changed into a macro-prudential (?) view.

You were taking things to a different level. The umbrella was higher and higher. But if you look at Regtech and if you look at the three lines of a defence model in a bank, then that stays very much the same, it’s still very siloed to a bank. When you think about topics like KYC or AML, how great would it be if you would alleviate that to the next level?

If you could mutualize some of that thinking? My view today is that there is a very important role for the regulator to support this new way of thinking, or this evolution if you want in the industry. And I what kind of find interesting is that you can already see that in countries such as Asia for example, the monetary authority of Singapore, they already took in their hands the idea that they’re going to be the golden source for KYC.

So that to me means responsibility to the regulator. And I see early signs already also in other countries, in Europe, which I like, and I think that will mean that Regtech in a certain extent will become SupTech because that is where the magic still can happen.”

Shared responsibilities, shared opportunities.

If you like to join us in the discussion on trust, please join us in Amsterdam or Brussels!

The other interviews can be found following this link.