Our strategy

Supported by our strong client relationships, we aim to be a leading player in our relevant markets and geographies. This means being:

• The leading wealth management platform for the mass affluent market in the Netherlands, combining online with
  a personal approach;
• A prominent, European-oriented, active investment manager that delivers both financial and sustainable alpha in less efficient and alternative markets;
• The leading fiduciary manager in the Netherlands, and a key challenger in the UK fiduciary market;
• The preferred trusted adviser in selected sectors in investment banking across Europe;
• A wealth manager with a solid risk profile and a moderate risk appetite, aiming to optimise our capital base while leaving room for potential acquisitions.

We will maintain our solid risk profile with a moderate risk appetite. Over the years, we have developed a strong capital base. We aim to optimise our capital base, while leaving room for potential acquisitions. In addition, we will consider paying out excess capital to our shareholders.

Accelerate growth organically and inorganically

To remain relevant for our clients and accelerate our organic growth, we believe that we have to truly understand our clients, anticipate their needs and help them to fulfil these needs in a sustainable manner. Instead of searching for a single product or a specific brand, which entails a product-led approach, clients are looking for solutions that fulfil multiple needs.

In recent years, we've successfully expanded our activities through selective bolt-on acquisitions, partnerships and hiring teams. Our high post-acquisition client retention rates show that clients value our proposition. We aim to engage in further bolt-on acquisitions and larger acquisitions in order to accelerate our growth, increase our scale and benefit from revenue, cost and/or funding synergies. We will focus on acquisition opportunities that support our positioning as a specialist player while keeping a balanced asset mix and consider acquisitions in existing and contiguous markets.

Advance through digitalisation and analytics

Changes in clients’ needs and economic developments require us to react quickly. Technology and digitalisation will allow us to improve our productivity and service, by speeding up processes, reducing operational errors and improving the availability and quality of data. We expect to significantly invest in our capabilities in this area in the coming years.

Digital interaction is crucial as it offers both clients and employees increased flexibility in terms of means of communication and the time needed to communicate. To grasp the full potential of patterns in internal and external data, tooling is being developed that helps end-users to interpret data and use it for data-driven decision-making in commercial, investment s and operational processes.

Act as one to leverage our full potential

In order to unlock the full potential of our solutions-led organisation for our clients, we must be able to offer solutions that build on the knowledge and expertise of the entire group as well as our open architecture platform. We believe that by providing clients access to the full range of services and products across our business lines, we can meet client needs in a sustainable manner. We have adjusted our organisational structure to fully benefit from knowledge sharing, to make optimum use of resources across the organisation, and to reduce overlap.

Attract, develop and retain the workforce

Our people’s knowledge, experience and professionalism are key to the way we operate. Investing in our people will enable them to embrace new technology and adopt a more data-driven way of working and decision-making. We facilitate and encourage development and training of our existing workforce. Together, we need to optimise the use of advanced analytics, to embrace new technology and to work in a more agile manner. We will also hire new people with the requisite skills and capabilities to help drive our development and the changes needed to adapt.

Achieve our sustainability ambitions

Being a sustainable wealth manager with a long-term focus means that we proactively strive to prevent negative consequences for all stakeholders in line with the UN Global Compact, while aiming to create positive long-term financial and non-financial value. We can achieve the most significant social and environmental impact via our client investments. Our ambition is therefore to move towards more sustainable investing, together with our clients. In the future, we intend to raise the bar even higher and make sustainable investing the new normal. To achieve this, we will increase employee awareness and expand our expertise in the area of sustainable investing.

In order to monitor whether we're on track to deliver on our ambitions and create long-term value, we define financial and non-financial KPIs and targets. These are based on industry trends and developments, stakeholder expectations, client needs and strategic relevance.

Our performance on these themes and purpose is measured via the KPIs, of which 16 are reported externally. Please refer to our Annual Report for these KPIs. The complete list of KPIs is an integral part of our internal management information.