Jan Bellens, EY Banking & Capital Markets Head — Advising & Digitizing Banks Worldwide
By: Miguel Armaza
Tags: Banking, Consulting, Technology, Fintech, Finance

Miguel Armaza sits down with Jan Bellens, Global Head of EY’s Banking & Capital Markets Group. In his role, Jan counsels banks in defining their strategies and supports their implementation with investments, acquisitions, and ambitious organic growth initiatives around the world. He has been supporting banks for the last two decades and has worked with clients in over 20 countries.

We talk about:

Jan’s professional journey and what led him to his current role

A few of the trends he’s seeing from banks across different regions

What the impact of COVID really means for banks

The challenges of managing an organization with 45k+ professionals

And much, much more!

Listen to the full interview → Spotify | Soundcloud | Apple Podcasts

For the past three decades, Jan has had a truly global career, working with some of the largest banks and financial institutions across Europe, Asia, and North America. In this interview, we explore how Jan and his team are helping the largest banks navigate the most critical challenges of today. In particular, the EY Banking team is focused on helping banks modernize their legacy systems and graduate to new technologies. In fact, Jan tells us most banks have actually been pleasantly surprised to achieve aggressive modernization efforts in 2020, but digital adoption progress has not been uniformly distributed across the world. In many cases, emerging markets have moved faster in digitizing, driven by three main factors:

Younger banks with a lighter and less complex network of legacy systems to deal with

A savvier and younger customer base that demands and quickly adopts digital solutions

A friendlier regulatory context that has encouraged digitization efforts from incumbents

It is no surprise that 2020 has been a truly critical year for banking institutions and COVID has reinforced the desire of most banks to become technology companies. But while all of them recognize the urgency to accelerate this transformation, none of them are there yet. According to Jan, one of the reasons holding them back is the legacy divide between the Business department from the Operations and Technology department. Jan argues these divisions should not exist and both teams should be closely collaborating and listening to the client.

As we enter 2021, Jan will be watching closely two key banking trends:

- Invisible banking (for consumers and corporates alike) — is the concept of supporting a client’s life while intermediating and bringing financial products that will help customers achieve their life goals. Jan envisions a whole new range of products will be created in this category, oftentimes driven by partnerships between fintechs and banks.

“I think it is more and more important to see how financial services can support different propositions rather than being propositions in itself.”

- Sustainability (ESG) — 2020 has been a year of tremendous positive momentum for initiatives related to social and climate responsibility and Jan’s team has seen an increase of client requests to help them and their stakeholders in this area.

Jan Bellens

As the EY Global Banking & Capital Markets Sector Leader, Jan counsels banks in defining their strategies and supports their implementation with investments, acquisitions and ambitious organic growth initiatives.

He has been supporting leading banks’ executive teams with their growth opportunities and multi-year business transformations for the last two decades. He has worked with clients in over 20 countries.

Before joining EY, Jan was in management consulting for 17 years. He has an MBA from INSEAD.

About EY Banking and Capital Markets

EY’s worldwide team of industry-focused assurance, tax, transaction and advisory professionals integrates sector knowledge and technical experience. They work with clients to navigate digital innovation, new business models and ecosystem partnerships, helping banks become the nimble, responsive organizations that customers demand.

About EY

EY exists to build a better working world, helping create long-term value for clients, people and society and build trust in the capital markets.

Enabled by data and technology, diverse EY teams in over 150 countries provide trust through assurance and help clients grow, transform and operate.

Working across assurance, consulting, law, strategy, tax and transactions, EY teams ask better questions to find new answers for the complex issues facing our world today.

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.

Information about how EY collects and uses personal data and a description of the rights individuals have under data protection legislation are available via ey.com/privacy. EY member firms do not practice law where prohibited by local laws. For more information about our organization, please visit ey.com.

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