| Disclaimer: This is a marketing communication prepared by Gambit, a provider of IT solutions to financial institutions. Gambit is not a regulated firm and does not offer regulated services.
This material is intended exclusively for financial institutions, wealth management firms, private banks, and financial advisory organisations. It is not directed at retail investors or consumers and does not constitute legal, tax, compliance, or investment advice. |
Only 9% of banks globally are considered fully digitally mature, while more than half are still developing digital capabilities (1).
Pressures are intensifying simultaneously: rising client expectations, fintech competition, mounting regulatory obligations, and ageing infrastructure.
Belgian banks, historically strong in channel digitalisation, now lag behind global competitors in four out of six key customer journey steps (2).
Today, we will identify six pressing digital challenges and the technology-led approaches to address them, with particular relevance for institutions considering a wealth management platform for advisors as part of their modernisation agenda.
Challenge 1: The Weight of Legacy Infrastructure
Core banking systems designed since the 1960s remain transactional backbones, and legacy investments continue to delay modern integrations (3).
Banks underestimate the true total cost of ownership by 70 to 80%, with actual IT costs proving 3.4 times higher than budgeted (4). In Belgium, legacy-driven operational expenses remain under significant upward pressure (5).
The Solution
- 47% of institutions favour incremental modernisation over full system replacement.
- Cloud-native, modular, API-first architectures layered onto existing infrastructure.
- Phased migration to maintain continuity. Three-quarters of banks acknowledge they need to modernise their cores to deliver industry-standard services (6).
Challenge 2: An Escalating Cybersecurity Threat Landscape
Banks incur US$2.5 billion in annual losses from cybersecurity threats, with more than 20,000 attacks costing the sector over US$12 billion in the past two decades (7).
Ransomware attacks on financial organisations have risen 91% since 2021 (8). The CrowdStrike incident in July 2024 demonstrated how a single third-party provider’s error can cascade across the entire sector (9).
The Solution
- Treat cybersecurity as a core digital transformation component (10).
- Deploy AI-powered, real-time threat detection and a zero-trust security model.
- Conduct rigorous, ongoing due diligence on third-party vendors. 89% of financial institutions increased cybersecurity budgets in 2024.
Challenge 3: Navigating a Complex Regulatory Landscape
Belgian banks face a concurrent wave of new regulatory frameworks: FIDA, PSD3/PSR, Basel IV/CRR3, DORA, RDARR, and updated AML regulations (11).
Third-party risk management is considered the biggest compliance challenge, with nearly half of institutions struggling to review existing supplier contracts.
Subcontracting rules and information register obligations under DORA prove particularly difficult (12).
The Solution
- Invest in RegTech solutions that automate compliance and regulatory reporting (13).
- Build cross-functional governance structures embedding resilience across IT, legal, risk, and operations.
- Reference official legislative sources directly, such as the EUR-Lex database, rather than secondary interpretations.
Challenge 4: Competing in an Open Banking Ecosystem
Open banking frameworks are reshaping competitive dynamics, but PSD2 has been criticised for inconsistent technical standards and variable data quality (14).
In Belgium, the National Bank of Belgium continues to remind institutions of the need for robust governance when outsourcing critical operations to third-party technology providers (15).
The Solution
- Treat APIs as strategic assets requiring proactive governance and security by design (16).
- Adopt standardised interoperability frameworks and develop open banking infrastructure as a commercial opportunity, not merely a compliance obligation.
- Build client trust around data sharing as a prerequisite for open banking adoption.
Challenge 5: Delivering Seamless Digital Customer Experiences
The Challenge
Belgian banks are improving digital channel quality, but personalisation through advanced AI remains a significant gap compared to leading international peers (17).
This is where a modern Wealth Management Platform for Advisors becomes strategically valuable.
By consolidating client data and interaction history into a single interface, such platforms enable advisors to deliver the personalised, frictionless service clients increasingly expect.
The Solution
- Invest in omnichannel platforms unifying data across digital, telephone, and branch touchpoints.
- Leverage AI and automation to shift advisor time toward client-facing activities.
- Reduce onboarding friction: average processes take up to three days; digital identity tools are a key 2025 trend (18).
Challenge 6: Harnessing Data and AI Without the Foundations
Most retail banks remain unprepared for intelligent banking driven by generative AI, lacking the necessary business, technology, and data readiness (19).
Key obstacles include legacy system integration, the absence of unified customer data platforms, and poor data quality undermining decision-making (20).
In Belgium, AI adoption remains largely limited to chatbots (21).
For advisory institutions, a purpose-built Wealth Management Platform for Advisors can accelerate this transition.
Platforms that aggregate client data and surface next-best-action recommendations give advisors AI-assisted tools without requiring complex bespoke infrastructure, making this particularly relevant for wealth management firms, private banks, and financial advisory organisations in Belgium and Luxembourg.
The Solution
- Build a unified data estate first, consolidating transaction, onboarding, risk, and interaction data into governed, accessible platforms.
- Define clear KPIs for AI initiatives to ensure measurable return on investment.
- Start with lower-risk use cases: process automation, fraud detection, and customer service augmentation.
- Invest in staff capability: Belgian banks collectively spend almost 2.2 million hours and 4% of total annual staff costs on training (22).
Closing Thoughts
These six challenges are deeply interconnected: legacy infrastructure constrains AI readiness; fragmented data undermines personalisation; regulatory pressure accelerates the need for operational resilience; and cybersecurity threats exploit every weak point in the chain.
Sustainable progress requires a coordinated modernisation strategy that treats digital resilience, data integrity, and client experience as mutually reinforcing priorities.
Institutions that invest in the right technological foundations today will be better positioned to meet evolving client expectations, satisfy regulators across multiple jurisdictions, and compete effectively against both incumbents and new entrants.
For wealth management firms and private banks specifically, investing in a purpose-built Wealth management platform for advisors is fast becoming a baseline requirement for sustainable, long-term client relationships.
