Building Digital Capabilities in Ecosystems

On 7 December 2020 more than 100 digital leaders attended CIONET’s last event of the year in Belgium, focused on "Ecosystems, understanding platform strategies and how to best implement them" and for the occasion we used a brand-new platform.

Key note speaker was Geert Van Mol, CDO of Belfius Bank., who was also guest on CIONET TV in 2020.

Geert explained that Belfius started by digitising its own processes. This effort was significant and has resulted in Belfius being next to KBC in a leading position in the banking world globally. Both banks have become global digital champions we can be proud of. The initial goal for the Belfius app was to be like a toothbrush: “to be used twice per day”. That goal is already achieved. Already at this moment Belfius has 1,5 million users per day.

The next step in digitalisation was converting other services in the Belfius platform. Belfius looked not only at what players like Amazon are doing, yet also at the new developments in China with Alibaba and WeChat. And in Russia Sberbank is a good example of building an ecosystem..

The efforts of Belfius to build an ecosystem let to a close, exclusive and 2-way collaboration with Proximus. “bank-in-telco”, offering a digital bank to Proximus customers, and “telc-in-banking”, integrating telco services on the Belfius platform. This 2-way collaboration, selling each other’s products is unique.

Belfius realised that the biggest spending in Belgium and the biggest existing ecosystem is around real estate and intensified its collaborating with Immovlam.

The third collaboration Belfius made is in “mobility as a service” with Skipr.  Skipr combines an app to make intermodal travel easy, a mobility card to get access to any provider in the EU and a budget management platform into the first all-in-one mobility solution in Europe.

Geert’s presentation was followed by a panel discussion with Kurt Cuijpers (De Lijn), Björn Van Reet (Kinepolis),  and Karin Van Hoecke (KBC) on what it takes to build an Ecosystem.

De Lijn started already in 2016 with selling mobile tickets through different partners and collaborating with NMBS and MIVB. Also on Google Maps the offering of De Lijn can be found. 

Kinepolis is working closely with Google on movie planning and is sharing visitor statistics with the federation. Kinepolis is working closely with KBC, selling cinema tickets via the KBC app. Collaboration with a large IT department was an interesting experience for the IT team at Kinepolis. The collaboration led to the fastest customer journey. With the KBC app consumers only have to select the movie and the seats. It is no longer needed to enter data for the payment of the tickets.

Karin explained that in order to change the customer experience ecosystems need to be grouped logically e.g. around mobility: parking, bus, train, steps,… KBC is collaborating with Olympus. At this moment KBC already has 25 collaborations life. It has been a commercial and technical challenge. Collaboration means that your app is integrated in the platform of the partner and vice-versa. While the purpose of collaboration is to become stronger together, sometimes it is blocked by legislation around tying products together (koppelverkoop). Lessons learned is that ecosystems lead to a better customer experience and in the end to more loyal customers.

After the presentation on main stage, we engaged in speed networking so as to identify potential collaboration with other companies.

We finished the event with an opportunity to meet other CIONET members in one of our virtual open bars. Attendees did also visit the booths of our business partners and some even engaged in private video calls with other attendees.