Fasten your seatbelts for an insightful journey with Philippe, the CEO of Amindis, as he showcases how the financial industry is grappling with the advent of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) regulations. Tune in as he details the company’s strategic approach, discusses the impact of these regulations on the end customer, and explores the opportunities it presents.
Buckle up as we delve into the role of software solutions in navigating the complex world of asset management and insurance. Discover how Amindis is spearheading the industry's transition in this dynamic regulatory environment, and learn how the lack of standardization in ESG data can be an advantage. Join us for this enlightening conversation that promises to be a profoundly engaging fusion of finance, technology, and sustainability.
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Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Fasten your seatbelts for an insightful journey with Philippe, the CEO of Amindis, as he showcases how the financial industry is grappling with the advent of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) regulations. Tune in as he details the company’s strategic approach, discusses the impact of these regulations on the end customer, and explores the opportunities it presents.
Buckle up as we delve into the role of software solutions in navigating the complex world of asset management and insurance. Discover how Amindis is spearheading the industry's transition in this dynamic regulatory environment, and learn how the lack of standardization in ESG data can be an advantage. Join us for this enlightening conversation that promises to be a profoundly engaging fusion of finance, technology, and sustainability.
Thank you for tuning into our podcast about global trends in the FinTech industry.
Check out our podcast channel.
Learn more about The Connector.
Follow us on LinkedIn.
Cheers
Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Welcome to the Connector podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting FinTechs, banks and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen van der Hoijdon as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another podcast by the Connector and FinTech Belgium, live streaming from DFS, the digital finance summit right in Brussels, the middle of Europe. And it's my first one of the day, and today I've got with me Philip from Amendis. Can you tell me, philip, what do you do and what is your role?
Speaker 3:I have been with Amendis for more than 20 years now and I serve as CEO, leading the business development team. And what does?
Speaker 2:Amendis do.
Speaker 3:Amendis provides software solutions for asset management company and insurance company, focusing on investment management across various asset classes. Our key points are providing in-depth analysis and reports, including ESG return and risk.
Speaker 2:Ah, super interesting. It's so hot today talking about sustainability and ESG. So how do you see the ESG regulations impacting our financial industry?
Speaker 3:Clearly, esg has profoundly changed the financial industry. Regulations like SFDR, pei and taxonomy have required a lot of change in operational process in these companies and also increase in investment in new software and data source. It also requires a change in the communication with the customers, because the customers are waiting more explanation about the ESG strategy and the impact on the performance and risk and it's quite complicated to organize due to the lake of standardization in the data.
Speaker 2:Thank you, that is very true, and lack of standard is not only a thing that is happening just in Europe, it's a global thing. So I was sort of wondering how would you then align and how do you evolve with all these changing ESG regulatory frameworks?
Speaker 3:Hemendis has decided to develop ESG module already in 2018 and the flexibility of the software architecture we have helped us to develop easily the new function to fit the new regulatory framework. With this solution, we introduce a new concept called new ERR, allowing to combine analysis around along three different axes impact, risk and returns and it helps the investors to understand or to view this portfolio on a more comprehensive way and to understand the impact on performance and risk of the ESG constraints. So you can more present your investment strategy. You can have a better investment strategy.
Speaker 2:Well, very often in the market, regulations are viewed as a challenge, but what I hear is that this could be something that you bring to your customers. So how do you see ESG as potentially being an opportunity for our market?
Speaker 3:ESG can be a real opportunity for the asset manager to differentiate them. It's quite easy to allow them to showcase the quality of their investment, including ESG factor, and also to create a specific product that the competitors cannot offer, and clearly the regulation can also become a competitive advantage.
Speaker 2:Is it because of regulation? Or is it because you guys are a very high tech technology company?
Speaker 3:Probably the two. Yes, the technology is key in our approach and we have a specific concept in our solution called build, not code, and it's allow the investor or the company to easily answer the new regulation requirements and new business requirements and not at a very extensive cost, because it's quite also a challenge to keep costs under control in this company. And we can say that the customers with our solution, keeps ahead in the competition, in business opportunity, but also minimize the risk of non-compliance. That's quite the major advantage we can bring to our customer.
Speaker 2:So now you talk about the customer as being the B2B customer, but what about the customer of the customer? So you and I living in one street dealing with ESG, how do you see the behavior of the end customers changing or not because of these regulations?
Speaker 3:I don't know. It's difficult to know if the ESG regulation impact really the people on a daily basis. In practice today it's more regulation of insurance company and other company that push the ESG market in the asset management, Because a lot of private people are not always ready to eventually lose a part of the performance for better ESG impact. How much are we ready to pay for less carbon emission in the management of our securities? That's the question.
Speaker 2:I think it's a very good question. Once I was talking to a professor and he said to me how can you put a constraint and still expect something more as a return?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it could sometimes, but, as you know, it could be a line, but in certain situations it could be different. In the last year, with the growth of the price in the fossil fuel sectors and so on, people that exclude this type of securities of their portfolio win less money than the other one. And you have to explain it. And it's why we try to do with our software, because we have a lot of functions in our software that can also show what you save as carbon by example and what is the impact on the performance you have. And we have a good combination with these two and it's important also to explain, because this is the only way to solve the problem for a long time.
Speaker 2:So you're talking about transparency. And if you talk about transparency, how do you deal with the fact that the framework that is set in Europe is different than the one in the US? It's different than the one in globally. To be honest, how does Amendis work with that? How do you deal with that?
Speaker 3:As I say, we have a concept called the built-in code and it allows us to adapt easily the HGA framework across the different companies. We've worked a lot of effort and so it's not so complicated for our customer to deal with the different framework for the different countries, and so you can easily navigate across the countries to set up the good regulation Makes sense.
Speaker 2:So technological flexibility, Looking at how do you anticipate ESG regulations to evolve and how could we, or what should we do to prepare.
Speaker 3:Clearly, I think the next challenge would be to make ESG more comparable, because even if we have today regulation like SFDR, PEI and taxonomy, it's not enough for an investor to compare the business or the investment opportunities. Clearly, I'm quite sure that the next step would be to make the information more comparable between the different investments you decide.
Speaker 2:So interoperability, as they call it so nicely, it's always the same words coming back in our industry, isn't it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's clearly. But before it was easy because you can compare the performance of a fund between different asset management companies. But today, if you would like to compare ESG criteria, it's not so easy because you are so much ESG indicators that are different and this moment it's quite complicated to compare some indicator for this company with the indicator of the other company. You don't know if it's the same sense and the next step would be to do this so you compare apples with pears?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it could be, and probably with the highly dynamic regulation we have for the last 10 years, the crucial point for the company is to opt for flexible and evolutive software to prepare for the new regulation change, because today you are never quite you know that it will change in one year, two years, and it's the same for the different aspect ESG, risk and return.
Speaker 2:Makes a lot of sense and I'm glad that you brought these insights to our audience. We're almost at the end of our podcast Time Flies, where you're having fun. Where can people contact you?
Speaker 3:The easiest way is to reach amindisinfoamindiscom, and my colleague Jean-Pierre Hengie will delight to help you to answer any questions you have.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Philippe. Thank you so much for participating in this podcast. I wish you all the lots of joy here at DFS and thank you very much for the audience to tune in. Thank you so much. Thank you, koon. Bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to another episode of the Connector podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to wwwjointheconnectorcom or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.