Voice-over: This is Leaders in Finance, a podcast where we find out more about the people behind a successful career. We speak with the leaders of today and tomorrow to discuss their motivations, their organizations, and their personal lives. Why? Because the financial sector could use a little more honest conversation. We’d like to thank our partners for their ongoing support: EY, Mogelijk Vastgoedfinancieringen, and Lepaya. Your host is Kees de Wit.
Kees: Welcome, everyone, to a new episode of the Leaders in Finance podcast—a special episode today. I am Kees de Wit, Managing Director at Leaders in Finance Events. Together with my colleague Tom, we are coming to you live from Italy.
We are attending OWIN26, a multi-day event hosted by Objectway. We are here with around 200 professionals from across the financial sector. A brief introduction to Leaders in Finance: we are more than just a podcast. We organize large-scale events in partnership with industry leaders like Objectway, offer in-depth training through our academy, and host exclusive networking lunches throughout the year.
Today, between sessions at OWIN26, we are taking a moment to sit down for a short but powerful conversation with two key attendees. I will briefly introduce them, after which they will introduce themselves further.
In this recording, I am joined by Kurt Vanhee, who, as CEO Continental Europe, leads Objectway’s Continental Europe business and is a board member of Objectway N.V. I am also joined by Maarten Lindner, who, as Lead Investment Products, has been working with Rabobank for more than 13 years.
Welcome, both. Starting with you, Maarten, could you tell me a bit more about your role within Rabobank and your experience here at OWIN26?
Maarten: Yes, sure. First of all, it has been a blast here—it’s been very interesting. Yesterday’s opening was already mind-blowing, and today’s presentations provided a lot of valuable insights.
You mentioned 13 years, but it’s actually already 18 years. The first 10 years at Rabobank were in wholesale banking, followed by the last eight years in private banking and the investment domain. Currently, as Lead Investment Products, I am mainly responsible for the front end—the client journeys and everything that directly impacts client experience.
Kees: Amazing, thank you very much. It must be great for you to hear so much about innovation today.
Maarten: Yes, absolutely. I think we’ll come back to this later, but there is always a tension between being innovative and dealing with the challenges of day-to-day operations.
Kees: Absolutely—more on that later. Kurt, could you tell us more about your role at Objectway and your key takeaways from today?
Kurt: Hi Kees, hi Maarten. I won’t say how many years I’ve been with Objectway—I’ll skip that. I’ve been in the financial industry for a long time, starting at banks, and now with Objectway. I lead the business in Continental Europe, focusing on key markets where we work with wealth managers, asset managers, and private banks to improve their processes and better serve their clients.
So far, the event has been great. As Maarten said, yesterday’s opening was exceptional.
Kees: For listeners who weren’t there, could you briefly describe yesterday?
Maarten: I think listeners should come to the next edition. We’re in Italy, and the Italians really know how to organize a great evening—with all kinds of surprises and festivities. It was mind-blowing: live music, excellent food—really excellent food—and a lot of great people. Good coffee and good wine.
Kurt: Don’t forget that.
Kees: I expect more of that in the coming days—who knows.
Zooming in on OWIN26, it’s all about innovation, collaboration, and finance. We’ve also been discussing leaders and followers this morning. From Objectway’s perspective, Kurt, what distinguishes firms that successfully transform client experience from those that don’t?
Kurt: When talking to people in the industry, many focus on AI—we discussed that this morning as well. But AI is the top of the mountain.
When working on innovation, you need to start with the client in mind. You must take a holistic perspective: how does the client fit into the ecosystem, and what truly matters to them? For banks and asset managers, everything starts with the client.
From there, you need to look at your underlying systems. Do you need to modernize your core platform or make adjustments? These systems capture and store your data. If the data isn’t available or accessible, nothing works—your innovation, your AI implementations, your agents. So the groundwork must be solid.
At the same time, while firms operate in the same industry, each is different. That’s why it’s important to tailor systems to specific processes and priorities.
Maarten: That’s why I sometimes look a bit jealous at new brokers and neobanks. They start with a clean sheet. Coming from a well-established, traditional bank, we obviously deal with legacy systems, which brings many challenges.
Kurt: That’s true. Neobanks are, by definition, new and innovative because they don’t have legacy systems. On the other hand, they may lack data, infrastructure, and experience. And those are also essential for innovation. As I mentioned, innovation builds on a strong foundation—and legacy can actually be part of that foundation.
Maarten: Exactly. Experience is something people should not underestimate.
Kees: Absolutely. And it all comes down to data. Neobanks can start fresh with well-structured data, while established banks must work with existing data, which can be more complex.
So how does Objectway support a traditional bank like Rabobank in modernizing client propositions and journeys while still operating within complex legacy environments?
Kurt: At Objectway, we have a very modular platform. We can cover the entire wealth and private banking space—from front-end applications to underlying back-office systems—and everything is modular. When we engage with clients, prospects, or new partners, we start with a solution design.
Referring again to the ecosystem: what is currently in place, what needs to be replaced, and what can be improved? Based on that modular approach, we design and implement solutions in an agile, phased way—not everything at once. It’s not a take-it-or-leave-it approach; it’s about tailoring along the way to deliver value step by step.
And don’t forget: these innovation projects are never finished. Innovation is ongoing. I think Maarten will agree that with Rabobank we work closely together, because innovation is a point on the horizon—you never fully reach it.
Kees: Yes, that’s also why during a previous OWIN session you introduced the Innovation Diamond, right? From Objectway’s perspective, it’s interesting to hear more about that today.
Maarten, we’ve heard a lot about client innovation today. Some of Objectway’s clients also shared how they innovate and scale innovation—which is the real challenge. Zooming in on Rabobank: from your perspective, what are the toughest trade-offs between scale and agility when driving innovation?
Maarten: I don’t think there’s one single trade-off—there are several. Within a large organization, you have governance structures and many stakeholders with different needs and expectations. Managing all of that through steering and approval committees can slow down innovation.
Secondly, there are increasing rules and regulations from a European perspective—such as the Sustainability Directive and MiFID—as well as local Dutch regulations. These need to be implemented, often within legacy IT systems, which creates additional complexity.
And thirdly, our legacy platform itself. We have a fragmented landscape with multiple applications, some built over 20 years ago. These systems need maintenance, updates, and integration of new regulations and security requirements.
So it’s not one trade-off, but multiple ones where we constantly need to find the right balance.
Kurt: Yes, combining innovation with business-as-usual operations is a challenge in itself. Balancing those two aspects is not easy.
Kees: I can imagine that. How do you balance your current systems and processes with the need to continuously improve the digital client experience?
Maarten: Over the past months, we’ve worked on a solution. There were many parallel initiatives—client segmentation, product development, regulatory implementation, and IT decommissioning.
What we did was define a North Star vision together with all stakeholders—client segments, compliance, legal, and others. Based on that vision, we created a roadmap that brings all these elements together.
This roadmap provides clarity on priorities, sequencing, and interdependencies—for example, launching a new product while decommissioning an old system. All stakeholders aligned on this roadmap, which gives us direction.
It’s not a short-term plan—it’s a five- to six-year horizon.
Kurt: Like a North Star—you aim for it, but you never fully reach it.
Maarten: Exactly. It’s a never-ending process, but it gives clear guidance.
Kees: That connects nicely to a testimonial earlier today from Redmore Group, where they spoke about not only raising the floor but also the ceiling—really aiming for that point on the horizon.
Thank you for these insights. Looking ahead, do you have any takeaways or expectations for the remainder of OWIN26?
Maarten: As mentioned, we face many challenges—but in a way, that’s also motivating. It gives energy to tackle them every day. I hope to gain insights from other banks and organizations on how they approach similar challenges.
Kurt: For me, it’s about integrating AI into the broader innovation journey. There’s a lot of focus on AI, but as I said earlier, it’s just the top of the mountain. It’s only one part of the overall innovation chain. I’m looking forward to learning more about that this afternoon.
Kees: Thank you both. I’d like to close with a quote from Luigi Marciano, founder and Group CEO of Objectway, who said earlier: scaling without differentiation is just standardization.
We hope to explore that further during this event. My thanks to Maarten Lindner from Rabobank and Kurt Vanhee from Objectway. Thank you very much.
Maarten & Kurt: Pleasure. Thank you.
Voice-over: You’ve been listening to Leaders in Finance. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would love to hear from you. What’s on your mind? Who would you like to hear next? Let us know via a review, email, or our social channels—we’d greatly appreciate it.
Finally, we’d like to thank our partners for their ongoing support: EY, Mogelijk Real Estate Finance, and Lepaya. Don’t forget to check out everything else we do at leadersinfinance.nl. Thank you for listening.