Ladies and gentlemen — your excellencies,

Thank you for attending Febelfin Connect. Providing closing remarks after such speakers and panelists, on April 1st, is not a joke.

What does it take for financial institutions to survive a crisis?

History gives us a clear answer: the most adaptable survive.

And today, adaptability has a name. It is called innovation.

We are here — as Febelfin members or key stakeholders of the Belgian financial sector — to make the case that innovation is not a luxury reserved for times of calm. It is the very foundation on which resilience is built.

Let us be honest about the environment we are operating in.

1. Geopolitical instability 

2. Inflationary pressure 

3. Interest rate volatility 

4. The accelerating pace of digital disruption 

The pressure on financial institutions today is impressive — and it is not letting up. This is our environment. Not a crisis — but not comfortable either.

The Belgian financial sector has built more than adequate solvency and liquidity ratios. It is strong enough to absorb shocks, but it needs to actively build its capacity to face upcoming challenges, with technological impacts being at the center of this edition of Febelfin Connect.

The challenges ahead are too complex, too interconnected, and too urgent for any of us to face alone.

Resilience is not a passive quality. It has to be actively built — and the primary tools for building it, in our era, are innovation and collaboration.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating this effect. KPMG highlighted that major Belgian institutions are now deploying AI across lending, advisory, and fraud detection – while simultaneously building governance framework to ensure responsible use.

This is innovation done correctly: capability with accountability.

A recent study from Deloitte found that slightly more than half of organizations are already actively measuring their exposure to technology-driven risks and building strategies in response - with a further 30% already in active implementation.

The institutions taking those steps today are building a resilience advantage that will compound over time. Those waiting are not just standing still - they risk falling behind.

Innovation protects clients directly. For example, Febelfin's research shows that Belgian banks stopped 75% of phishing attempts before money was stolen last year — a direct result of sustained investment in detection technology.

That is not just a statistic. That is many Belgian households whose savings were protected by tools that did not exist a decade ago.

Let us look further ahead — to a threat that does not yet exist at scale, but for which the window to prepare is closing faster than most people realize.

Quantum computing. Having studied quantum physics, I cannot not talk about it.

Within the next five to fifteen years, according to the Global Risk Institute's Quantum Threat Timeline Report, a cryptographically relevant quantum computer could break today's standard encryption in under 24 hours.

RSA. ECC. The foundational protocols on which every payment, every transaction, every fund transfer is currently secured - potentially rendered obsolete.

For our sector, the implications are profound - and they cut in two directions.

The first is opportunity.

Quantum-powered optimization will transform activities like portfolio management, risk modeling, and payment routing in ways we cannot fully anticipate yet. The institutions investing in quantum literacy today will hold a genuine first-mover advantage.

The second direction is opposite: quantum is an existential security threat that requires action now.

The reason is a strategy already being deployed by sophisticated adversaries today such as the Harvest Now, Decrypt Later' threat.

Encrypted data — your transactions, your client records, your fund movements - is being collected right now, with the intention of decrypting it the moment quantum capability arrives. The threat is not future. The vulnerability is in the present.

Recently, an American physicist and a Canadian computer scientist earned the Turing Award for their groundbreaking work on quantum key cryptography.

Brassard and Bennett demonstrated that two parties wanting to share sensitive data could establish a secure encryption key ensured by the laws of physics, not the computational difficulty of a mathematical problem.

The approach involves using photons of light to establish a secret key between two parties. Rather than directly encrypting data, it creates a secure channel for communication.

The quantum nature of the light photons means that if anyone tries to intercept the signal, it will immediately change the signal's state, a property that makes any hacking or eavesdropping attempt immediately detectable.

This is truly fascinating. And this means once more we must change our understanding of information itself.

Being quantum-ready means seizing the business opportunities.

Being quantum-safe means protecting our customers and ourselves - from criminal actors, from state-level adversaries, and from parties who may gain access to our data before we have secured it. And this demands a coordinated response.

Today's call of action is a national, or even supra-national challenge, as much as a sectoral one.

Let me bring this back to the present - to fraud. Because here, the Belgian sector has a story to tell: Belgian banks have invested heavily, and continue to invest, and it shows.

Febelfin's anti-phishing awareness campaigns and the Belgian Anti-Phishing Shield have meaningfully raised public vigilance. The FSMA joined BAPS directly in May 2025, enabling real-time submission of fraudulent websites.

Belgian banks have introduced the BAN-name check - verifying that the account name matches the IBAN before a transfer is executed - and an incident warning system that flags suspicious patterns across channels in real time.

These are not marginal improvements; they represent a new generation of anti-fraud infrastructure built by the sector itself.

Several banks have been deploying Al-based transaction monitoring, identifying anomalies that human analysts would miss.

Innovations like 'one-targeting' - which is a precision fraud detection focused on the highest-risk transactions - are demonstrating that smarter technology, not simply more technology, is the answer.

But the challenge remains.

Fraudsters adapt to our success and look forward to new modus operandi such as social engineering, deepfakes and scam-based manipulation of payers, actively using social media.

And it is not just about banks. In 2025, 60% of all Belgian phishing occurred via telephone.

In 2024, across the EU, payment fraud losses reached 4.2 billion euros - up 20% from the prior year.

In the same period, Reuters revealed that Meta has itself earned more than 16bn euros in fraudulent advertising.

The path forward beyond innovation is collaboration - genuine, structured, led by intelligence.

Not just between banks, but with all stakeholders, such as telco's, social media companies and the government.

What we are calling for - in order to be able to even better protect customers - is a shared legal framework for intelligence exchange between all stakeholders.

A joint framework that makes all stakeholders collectively smarter than any individual participant can be alone.

The Dutch TMNL (TMNL stands for Transaction Monitoring Netherlands, i.e. the banking transaction monitoring programme) experiment shows us the pitfalls — privacy, legal fragmentation, regulatory ambiguity. This programme is now phasing out

The UK might actually show us the right way: CIFAS (which stands for Credit Industry Fraud Avoidance System) was created more than 35 years ago and is now bringing multiple sectors together for the common goal of eliminating fraud and financial crime. Serving individuals as well as companies, it has been actively collaborating with government, law enforcement and regulatory bodies.

We must design around those lessons.

The Belgian financial sector is resilient. The numbers confirm it. But resilience is not a state — it is a practice.

It is the practice of building before the crisis arrives. Of migrating cryptographic systems before quantum makes them obsolete. Of sharing fraud intelligence to strengthen our individual defenses.

Innovation is not what we do when times are good and budgets allow. Innovation is precisely what keeps us standing when they are not.

The challenges ahead - quantum threats, fraud networks — are too consequential to face in silos. That is why collaboration matters. And that is why we invite everyone in this room to join us in tackling these challenges.

Not because we have all the answers. But because together, we have a far better chance of finding them.

Thank you, and enjoy the rest of the evening!