Headquartered in Brussels, KBC Asset Management was formed in 1998 and is part of the broader KBC Group. KBC Group focuses on integrated bank-insurance-asset management, and to date has over 12 million clients. In 2020 it created the wealth-tech spin-off everyoneINVESTED.
According to Johan Lema, CEO of KBC Asset Management, 2024 has been another strong year for the company. KBC Asset Management is deeply focused on the retail asset management area, with the aim of attracting new investors from KBC Group’s client base. Despite some potential concerns in the market related to the geopolitical front, Lema says they have not translated into stock market performance.
Six years ago, KBC Asset Management embarked on a new mission for the company: the dream of getting everyone invested all the time. Lema says the dream was based on the observation that while many of KBC’s private banking and higher-end clients were well served for their investment needs, many of KBC’s retail investors were not investing at all. KBC Asset Management questioned this, believing that investing was a good thing for all clients. They then went to work and tried to get rid of the hurdles that were getting in the way of investing.
“We found that clients had a lot of misconceptions about investing,” Lema said. “These ranged from thinking that investing is only for people who have a lot of money, to thinking that investing is like going to a casino, you never know if it will go up or down. A lot of clients felt they should stay away from investing. So we went on a mission to change that and get everyone invested.”
Invest Your Spare Change
For the CEO of KBC Asset Management, one of the company’s key missions is to help its clients break through the wall of investment misconceptions and become investors, not just savers. This focus led to the creation of the company’s Invest Your Spare Change solution, which has attracted many first-time investors.
The inspiration for creating this solution, according to Lema, was driven by a focus on lowering as much as possible the thresholds that clients feel they need to overcome to start investing.
He noted, “One of the things we observed was that our clients were engaging a lot with KBC’s mobile app, especially through payments, so we looked at how we could take a behavior our clients already had – paying for things digitally – and link it to investments. That’s how Invest Your Spare Change was born.
The solution works by clients activating a payment function in their banking app, so that every time a client makes a payment, KBC rounds up the payment to the nearest euro. KBC collects all the roundups until the total reaches ten euros, and this money is then automatically invested in a mutual fund.
“Every time a client makes a payment, the client is investing a small amount at the same time. We have found that this works very well for many clients,” says Lema. “It takes away the misconception that you have to invest with large amounts or that you are at risk of losing a lot of money.”
Once clients start investing, KBC wants to make investing a healthy financial habit. Lema noted that in most of the markets in which KBC operates, many of its clients are in the habit of saving.
“When these clients have some money left over at the end of the month, they tend to put it in a savings account. It’s a natural habit that many of our clients have, and we try to create the same habit in investing. By rounding up payments, clients are investing regularly, and that really helps build the habit,” said Lema.
The solution was first launched in Belgium and then in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria. In the first two countries, Lema said the company has about 350,000 clients who have activated the feature in just a couple of years. “If we look at Bulgaria, where we launched a few weeks ago, we already have more than 5,000 clients who have activated the feature,” he explained. Furthermore, he added that the data found that 60% of these are first-time investors, getting their first investment experience through the aforementioned solution.
Long-term mission
As KBC considers the future direction of its Invest Your Spare Change offering, what does the company want to achieve?
For Lema, the focus is clear: to get as many people as possible to invest. “That’s the big dream. Because we believe that investing is valuable for everyone. But in many countries, financial education is limited, which makes people reluctant to start investing. School systems could do a better job here, but we try to help by making people comfortable with investing by offering simple, easy solutions like Invest Your Spare Change. As they use the solution, clients become more knowledgeable and understand the benefits and risks of investing.
According to Lema, the Invest Your Spare Change solution’s mechanism is key for KBC because it allows the company to reach a very wide audience and a large number of clients through its market-leading mobile app.
“Many of these clients will continue to invest for the rest of their lives because they’ve developed this habit, which is good for them, but it’s also good for us because it gives us a constant inflow of new money,” he said. “However, we also know that some of that larger group of people, through their careers or maybe through inheritance, will become larger investors over time with broader investment needs. So there is a long-term strategy here that should support asset growth and profit growth for both the investor and us.”
The evolution of everyoneINVESTED
The strategy to get everyone invested was originally developed in early 2018, when KBC adopted it as a go-to-market strategy. According to Lema, once the company saw that the strategy was working, we were able to attract a lot of first-time investors.
From here, Lema noted that while KBC has over 12 million clients, there are many more people beyond KBC’s client base who could benefit from becoming investors. “While we can’t reach these people directly because they’re not KBC clients, we can indirectly help them become investors, and that’s where the idea for our wealth tech spin-off everyoneINVESTED came from. We said, let’s take our mission beyond KBC and help other banks and asset managers outside KBC’s home markets to get their clients more invested by offering them our proven solutions like Invest With Spare Change. This is the core mission of everyoneINVESTED – the company.
everyoneINVESTED advises banks outside of KBC’s home markets, raising awareness of the societal impact of financial well-being and introducing them to our tooling to digitally engage their clients on the topic of investing. “We have developed tools that we use in many of KBC’s home countries, and then we try to sell this knowledge and these tools to the banks and asset managers that everyoneINVESTED serves, so that these banks can turn their clients into investors and thus get more of their clients to buy into their investment offering,” said Lema.
Future plans
As KBC looks to the future, what is next for the company and its spin-off everyoneINVESTED? In this area, Lema can boil it down to one key and succinct answer: get as many investors on board as possible.
“We have this dream that we should be able to get a million new investors on board for everyoneINVESTED by helping other players in the market,” said Lema.
Lema emphasized that the company has two main tracks. The first track – an internal one – is that everyoneINVESTED is also KBC’s innovation engine within asset management, helping the firm to come up with new ideas. A recent example is a solution that measures client intent in the face of uncertainty. Presented as a playful series of screens in the mobile banking app, this solution provides valuable information to make digital services more personal, with use cases in banking, insurance and investment.
The second key track is external, which is focused on helping other banks and asset managers get more investment clients. “We work with large financial institutions that implement our solutions in their own mobile app, which is a strategic decision for financial institutions. So we hope to add some of these financial institutions year after year. Since we offer both consulting and tools, we want to expand our relationship with these institutions. Always with the same goal, which is to get as many people as possible to become investors,” says Lema.
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