Consultancy firms BDO Belgium, Van Havermaet and Vandelanotte set up their own fintech company

AI-GUST is the name of the fintech company that sector colleagues BDO Belgium, Van Havermaet and Vandelanotte are setting up. The new Belgian AI player combines data from all possible existing accounting software packages and other sources and uses artificial intelligence to automatically formulate financial advice, trends and benchmarks for the business world. AI-GUST, which will operate from the university city of Leuven, will hire a dozen computer scientists, data engineers, front-end developers and software engineers in the coming year. 

In 2022, financial data processing and accounting are often already performed digitally. But the data is often spread across different software packages and other systems. In addition, financial and accounting data is still hardly used as a basis for interesting insights into business operations or trends to make companies stronger for the future. AI-GUST will provide an answer to these problems. For example, the AI platform will be able to quickly calculate the impact of a new law or European rule on a company's compliance or see if a company's costs, such as energy consumption, are in line with players in the same sector. In this way, AI-GUST makes the job of accountant more attractive.

“We are developing a new platform that bundles all possible accounting software packages and other sources such as payroll data, detailed sales figures, energy consumption or customer data, on the one hand, and intelligent algorithms on the other, which will be able to detect trends automatically from the large pool of financial data, formulate recommendations or devise comparative studies for a sector or between sectors. This will free up more time for accountants to give better and personal advice."
Tim Bottelbergs, CEO AI-GUST

Standardising and mining financial data management with AI 

Companies that will use AI-GUST's SaaS software are buying more than a software licence. They will be part of a larger community. The more accountants, software suppliers, and financial experts join, the better the AI platform performs. That is why the heavyweights in financial services, BDO Belgium, Van Havermaet and Vandelanotte, decided to start AI-GUST together. The three partners are also open to allowing additional players to join. There is no danger of competition: shared data is anonymised and stored securely in the data warehouse. 

“Accountants will be able to connect and share their data through their existing accounting package. AI-GUST collects this data anonymously and securely in the data warehouse (comparable to the cloud). We then apply our algorithms to the data. If the accountant has a specific question, he or she will get targeted advice based not only on their data, but on the available data of the entire community. It is up to the accountant to decide how to personalise that 'algorithmic advice' for his client or company. In other words, the accountant retains control over his data and the advice from AI-GUST at all times."
Kristof Meesters, CEO Van Havermaet

AI-GUST has no intention of rebuilding existing fintech applications itself, even though the company has the in-house expertise to do so. The fintech player of BDO, Van Havermaet and Vandelanotte integrates these applications and offers them digitally in a neutral, independent way in an ever-growing ecosystem.

“The partners who join or connect to AI-GUST strengthen their innovation capacity by sharing knowledge, so that together they invest in innovative solutions that they can offer under the umbrella of the platform. They do not compete with each other. Together they can provide solutions to very complex, financial challenges for which no single company or organisation has the resources, let alone the power, on its own."
Hein Vandelanotte, managing partner Vandelanotte

Leuven as a base to attract talent

The main office of AI-Gust will be in Leuven. Not coincidentally, this way the company can take advantage of the presence of the university to attract computer scientists, data engineers, front-end developers and software engineers. Within the year AI-GUST wants to count on a dozen employees.

“With AI-GUST we have the ambition to build a large ecosystem around financial data in Belgium. We have the financial know-how and we are now combining it with the necessary digital knowledge and AI competencies to provide even better and more targeted advice to companies. The key is collaboration: bringing together company data in a secure and anonymised way is going to increase the performance of the algorithms."
Peter Van Laer, CEO BDO Belgium