Investor protection and transparency as a lever for better organising
Client
An international financial institution
Role
Project Manager - Business Implementation
In 2015, the banking sector faced a fundamental shift. MiFID II, the European directive on investor protection and transparency, was coming and would reach deep into the entire value chain: from product development to transaction reporting, from client communication to governance.
MiFID II asked the bank to move on three fronts at once: translate the regulation carefully, strengthen client trust and adjust the operational reality. Wealth managers, asset managers and relationship managers would work differently. Product processes, IT systems and data architecture had to be reviewed. And all of that in a sector already fully in motion.
The question wasn't 'are we compliant?'. The question was: how do we stay human-centred and high-performing while everything changes?
As project manager of the first phase, we deliberately chose one thing first: see clearly what was really going on. No hasty implementation mode. Together with the team we built a qualitative gap analysis based on the priority questionnaires. Domain by domain, process by process.
The questions we kept asking: what do we deliberately keep in place? What do we change fundamentally? And above all, where is the risk of compliance-by-tickbox, without it truly getting better for the client?
The Belgian work was local work, in close coordination with head office in Amsterdam. Every European country ran its own rollout, tailored to the local reality. What our gap analysis brought was depth: by filling in the priority questionnaires carefully, the Belgian team got a much sharper picture of what really needed to shift.
The central team in Amsterdam forwarded the completed checklists to other countries as an illustration of a thorough approach. From that moment, the project felt different: not 'something that has to happen', but 'something we deliberately give shape'. In the second and third phases we took on the role of overall project manager and rolled out the solutions bank-wide in Belgium, across three workstreams: products, services, and transactions & record keeping.
Regulation is often seen as something to tick off. This case showed something different: those who use a major regulatory change as momentum to truly look at how work is done let the organisation come out stronger.
Compliance became a lever here to refocus processes, collaboration and client focus. On 3 January 2017, the Belgian bank was MiFID II-compliant. Equally valuable: it had seized the chance to organise better.
