Did you know that Flanders has six times as many fintechs as Wallonia ?

Fintech, a contraction of the terms "finance" and "technology", is a booming sector worldwide. Behind artificial intelligence, it is probably one of the sectors that continues to attract investors. And Belgium is no exception to this trend. There are countless start-ups and even scale-ups (once they have grown a little) operating in the financial market. The Belgian association for the sector, Fintech Belgium, is proud of the pioneering role played by our young start-ups.

However, the analyses carried out by Inoopa on this niche are not lacking in interest. Our intelligent algorithms for correctly identifying players in the sector have revealed that, in addition to Brussels, Flanders is much more active in fintech than Wallonia. Out of nearly 300 fintechs identified by Inoopa, there are more companies active in this sector based in Ghent, Antwerp, Hasselt or Mechelen than in Liège or Charleroi. In Liège and the Liège region, there are barely ten or so financial start-ups… compared with more than 25 in Ghent alone ! Unsurprisingly, Brussels takes the lion's share, with some 70 fintech projects listed…

The dominance of Flanders over Wallonia can also be explained. And we can identify several factors that favour the dynamism of the fintech ecosystem in Flanders. At the top of the list is the stronger financial tradition of our northern neighbours. This is a fertile breeding ground for fintech start-ups. And that includes ecosystems born of the success of some fine companies in the field. Take the example of Jurgen Ingels, a well-known Flemish investor. Now an expert in investing in fintech start-ups, he launched Clear2Pay in 2001, a payment provider for financial institutions and their customers. In 2014, he sold the company (which employed up to 1,200 people) for €375 million to the American group FIS. Armed with his expertise (and the funds he pocketed), he co-founded the SilverFin fund specialising in… fintech. Which, logically enough, invests a lot in Flanders. This is in addition to a tech ecosystem that is also more mature in Flanders, with numerous incubation and acceleration structures, and so on.

Of course, Wallonia is home to a number of successful and promising projects

Of course, Wallonia has a number of promising projects that have already been completed.. And with this article, Inoopa is simply highlighting data that only its expertise is capable of bringing to the fore. The algorithms developed by Inoopa are based on artificial intelligence and NLP (Natural Language Processing), giving our company cutting-edge expertise in semantic analysis. This has enabled us to produce the above figures reliably.