BDO, Van Havermaet and Vandelanotte launch fintech for accountants
BDO has teamed up with two Belgian colleagues – Van Havermaet and Vandelanotte – to launch a new fintech joint venture.
The new company operates as AI-GUST and aims to help accountants increase the value they can provide to their clients – using big data insights leveraged by smart technology.
“AI-GUST will help accountants detect trends automatically from large collections of financial data, formulate recommendations or prepare comparative studies for a sector or between sectors. This will free up more time for accountants to provide better and personalized advice,” explained Tim Bottelbergs, CEO of AI-GUST.
AI-GUST works as follows. The program gathers data from all possible accounting software packages to build a complete database of data, from commercial data such as sales figures to payroll data and operational data. Intelligent algorithms then run models and automatically formulate financial advice, trends and benchmarks.
The company seeks to exploit a gap in the market, according to Bottelbergs. “While accountants are sitting on a mine of data, this data is still hardly used as a basis for interesting insights into business operations or trends to make companies stronger for the future. One of the bottlenecks is that data is often spread across different software packages and systems. AI-GUST provides an answer to these problems.”
AI-GUST aims to grow into an “open network” of accounting firms, software providers and financial professionals. Peter Van Laer, CEO of BDO in Belgium said: “With AI-GUST, we have the ambition to build a large ecosystem around financial data in Belgium. We have the financial knowledge and we combine it with the necessary digital competence to provide even better and more targeted advice to companies.”
Hein Vandelanotte, managing partner of Vandelanotte, added: “The partners who join or connect to AI-GUST strengthen their innovation capacity by sharing knowledge. Together we can offer solutions to very complex, financial challenges that no single company or organization has resources to, let alone power, on their own.”
AI-GUST operates out of Leuven (a city with a well-established tech talent base) and plans to hire a dozen computer scientists, computer engineers and technologists over the coming year.
Van Havermaet (a member firm of the Morison network) and Vandelanotte (part of the Leading Edge Alliance) are both local accounting and consulting firms based in Belgium. BDO is the world’s fifth largest professional accountancy firm.
