Thomas Pintelon

Head of Strategy at Capilever

Message Posts: 34 Comments: 1

Bio Thomas is a financial services expert with strong focus on product strategy and innovation. Career History Prior to Capilever, Thomas has held senior roles within a number of leading technology vendors and global banking providers including Sopra Banking Software and CR2 Channel Banking Software. Thomas holds a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Cambridge.

Blogs

Innovation in Financial Services

Tips and tricks for making investment tools more transparent in these high inflation times

25 May 2023

In these times of high inflation - significantly higher than interests on savings - investing your excess money (wisely) is crucial to avoid losing purchasing power. Hundreds of books and courses try to introduce the basic concepts of investing and almost all of them mention a few key guidelines that everyone should follow, i.e. Invest according t...

Fintech innovation and startups

Market observations for tackling financial stress

09 Jan 2023

What do Wise, Curve, Qover, Monese and Capilever have in common? Besides being Fintechs active in the financial services sector you will probably say not that much, but when you look at their recent product announcements you can see a common line, i.e. they are all working on features to remove financial stress. And with financial stress we don’t ...

Banking and Lending Solutions

Examples how to better guide customers in home loan decisions

09 Nov 2022

The decision to buy or renovate a home, is for most people the most important financial decision in their life. Not only are the involved amounts 10 to 100 times higher than most other financial decisions, there are also many decision factors to consider. Nowadays most banking clients only make a conscious decision about the tip of the iceberg. Wh...

Trends in Financial Services

A Roadmap for Hyper-Personalized Lending

22 Jun 2022

In a previous blog "Are credits not too commoditized?" in February 2020, we already raised the concern that loans in general and mortgages in particular have become too much of a commodity product, for which price is nearly the only differentiator. Many customers are however unaware that the loan with the best price or interest rate may ...

See all Thomas's blogs

Thomas is Commenting on

Radically rethinking financial products from their core – 5 examples

I would like to approach it from a more positive side. True 20 years ago, partially true today, but the longer the less. For me, customer-centricity is a logical consequence of: Greater competition from non-bank players; Digitization, which means that banks have less of a personal relationship with their customers (as opposed to the bank director as your confidential advisor 30 years ago) as a result banks really have to offer more value, to avoid being reduced to low-margin commodity services, otherwise they can no longer differentiate (in the past, the physical branch network and the fact that banking was closed, not open, were the most important differentiators). Moreover, these are not evolutions specific to the banking sector, but to each sector. Every sector works towards more customer-centricity, digitizes more, offers more personalized services and also works more ethically (which in the banking world corresponds to financial inclusion and helping the customer, not poorly informing them). This is also pushed more and more by governments through regulations, just think of MiFID2 in investments, PSD2 in payments, Consumer Credit Directive in credits. These evolutions are clearly underway: - Personal finance management tools are being invested in (in the blog above however we propose fundamental changes to the financial products themselves rather than the classical PFM features mostly considered today); - Banks offering additional third party services (cf. KBC and Belfius in Belgium); - Banks making investments to calculate and neutralize ecological footprint; - Banks selling their products through 3rd parties (such as comparators, other banks, tech players...); - AI investments from banks, such as Kate at KBC Belgium All these investments are to better understand and guide the customer. Evidently with the intention of making more profit (banks are no charities), but with a longer-term objective.

02 Jun 2021 Reply Read article