Onderstaand vind je een overzicht van artikelen van het tijdschrift Bank- en Financiewezen.
During the Belgian Financial Forum event on September 30, 2025, Etienne Bouas-Laurent, Chairman of Assuralia, sat down with Indra Dewitte, Editor-in-Chief of Het Belang van Limburg, to share his vision for the insurance sector in Belgium and beyond. His reflections offer a compelling look at the sector’s societal role, regulatory challenges, and future opportunities.
Le succès des fonds d’investissement repose, entre autres, sur la confiance que les investisseurs placent dans les gestionnaires et en particulier sur leur capacité à délivrer de la Value for Money. Dans l’évaluation de la Value for Money d’un produit financier, les coûts, en tant qu’éléments objectifs, occupent une place centrale. La FSMA contrôle l’information relative aux coûts diffusée par les fonds et publie, à destination des consommateurs, des informations concernant ces coûts.
Verzekeraars verlaagden de kosten of stopten de commercialisering van meer dan 200 verzekeringsproducten nadat de FSMA had vastgesteld dat ze onvoldoende waar voor hun geld boden.
Regulators increasingly rely on supervisory technologies to enhance bank supervision, yet their potential to discipline risky bank behaviour remains unclear. Using unique data from the Central Bank of Brazil, this article shows that after a ‘SupTech’ event, banks disclose inconsistencies in their risk reporting and tighten credit to less creditworthy firms, effectively reducing risk-taking.
The results of this study suggest that European publicly listed banks were not much affected by new tax introductions in the 2022-2024 period. Although there was an average negative reaction on the stock market, no clear reaction appears in either dividend expectations or CDS spreads. This indicates that there was no increased expected risk of failure to uphold sufficient capital positions. The stock market reaction can thus be attributed to general market uncertainty.
This thesis studies how U.S. firms structure mergers and acquisitions to avoid antitrust review. Many deals cluster just below the Hart-Scott-Rodino threshold, showing evidence of “stealth acquisitions.” Private equity often appears in these deals, but cash financing is the main driver. Once cash is considered, the independent effect of private equity weakens. These results suggest that cash broadly enables stealth acquisitions and that policymakers may need to rethink relying solely on deal size for antitrust review.
This study investigates whether firms backed by family offices differ in performance outcomes from those backed by PE or VC. It also evaluates differences in growth and profitability, using two matched samples. The findings show that family office-backed companies have highly significant lower growth compared to their venture capital-backed counterparts, but no different growth from private equity backed companies. Furthermore, for return on assets, there is no significant difference between a FO-backed company compared to their VC-backed or PE-backed counterpart.
In the Autumn of 2024, Impact Finance Belgium invited the Financial Forum to co-host a conference on Impact Investing. By the time it took place, the world had already changed. On June 13th, nearly 250 participants gathered at the National Bank of Belgium to consider a pressing question: Does investing with positive impact still matter in today’s volatile climate? The event brought together leading voices from Belgium and Europe’s financial ecosystem—from institutional investors to pioneering impact fund managers.
In an era of geopolitical turbulence and the erosion of long-standing institutions, one question looms large: Is investing for positive impact — for people and planet — still relevant today? The answer is not only “yes,” but “more than ever.” Despite shifting political winds, policy backlashes, and market volatility, the case for embedding impact alongside risk and return has never been stronger.
Every euro we invest shapes the future. It can reinforce systems that drive inequality and environmental breakdown — or it can fuel solutions that make societies more just, resilient, and sustainable. Traditionally, investment decisions have balanced risk and return. But in a world marked by climate urgency, rising inequality, and shifting global dynamics, there is a third dimension we can no longer ignore: impact.
Insights from the BFF Panel 2025 based on multiple real-world cases in the social and environmental sector, illustrating the different strategies for positive impact.
At the BFF Conference on June 13th, 2025, the session “The journey Towards Investing with positive impact’ brought together three experts representing different parts of the financial ecosystem. Moderated by Hugues Pirotte, professor at the Solvay Impact Institute (ULB), the panel explored how institutional investors, private banks, and universal banks are shaping the future of sustainable finance, in the context of a changing narrative, and what barriers remain.
