Belgium’s RiskConcile Emerges as Europe’s Go-To RegTech for Fund Managers

Leuven-based RiskConcile has quietly built a reputation as one of Europe’s most capable regulatory technology providers, serving more than 100 institutional clients across the Benelux, UK, Ireland, and France. Founded in 2015 by Jan De Spiegeleer and Karl Ottevaere, two former academics from KU Leuven University, the Belgian software offers cloud-based compliance solutions that help asset managers escape the time-consuming world of spreadsheet reporting.

Why Fund Managers Are Turning to RegTech

The European RegTech market tells a growth story that’s hard to ignore. Valued at $4.59 billion in 2024, it’s expected to nearly double to $9.38 billion by 2029, growing at 15.3% annually. That expansion reflects a reality facing every fund manager: regulatory requirements are getting more complex, more frequent, and more expensive to handle manually.

RiskConcile’s client roster includes leading asset managers, banks, insurance companies and fund service providers. The company’s pitch is straightforward: “it’s time to ditch the spreadsheets.” For compliance teams juggling multiple regulatory frameworks across different jurisdictions, that message resonates. Manual processes create bottlenecks, increase error rates, and tie up resources that could focus on investment decisions.

The Product Range

RiskConcile built its business on solving specific regulatory headaches. The company offers software covering PRIIPs calculations, AIFMD Annex IV reporting, transaction cost analysis, liquidity stress testing, and SFDR disclosures. These aren’t general-purpose compliance tools but specialized solutions for the particular regulations that keep fund managers up at night.

The flagship FundStudio platform ingests daily transaction and position data, then automatically generates outputs across multiple formats: Excel files, email reports, PDFs, and cloud dashboards. The system handles Value-at-Risk calculations, stress testing, scenario analysis, and investment restrictions monitoring. For UCITS funds and alternative investment vehicles navigating Europe’s regulatory maze, those capabilities matter.

What sets RiskConcile apart is its team composition. The company employs software developers and data scientists alongside former financial services professionals who understand the business context behind the regulations.

“They speak our language,” one London-based hedge fund manager noted when explaining why they chose RiskConcile’s solutions. That blend of technical skill and industry knowledge helps the company address nuances that purely tech-focused competitors often miss.

The company’s roots in complex structured products give it particular depth. RiskConcile started in 2018 with a narrow focus on producing PRIIP KIDs for complex structured products, an area requiring sophisticated mathematical modeling. Today, UCITS PRIIP KIDs form the bulk of the business, but that structured products expertise provides a technical foundation that generic enterprise software vendors struggle to match.

Private Equity Backing Accelerates Growth

In June 2024, Main Capital Partners took a majority stake in RiskConcile, marking the private equity firm’s first Belgian platform investment. The deal preserved continuity, with founders De Spiegeleer and Ottevaere retaining significant minority stakes and staying involved in operations.

Main Capital brought more than just capital. The firm’s expertise in B2B software, particularly within RegTech, suggested a clear growth playbook ahead. That playbook materialized quickly. Three months after the Main investment, RiskConcile acquired London-based Fitz Partners, a specialist in fund fee and expense data serving more than 65 of the world’s largest asset management firms.

The Fitz Partners deal adds a new dimension to RiskConcile’s offering. Fund managers now get proprietary fee benchmarking data alongside their regulatory reporting, creating an integrated platform that addresses both compliance obligations and competitive intelligence. “The synergies between our two firms are immense,” said Hugues Gillibert, founder and CEO of Fitz Partners.

Jorn de Ruijter, investment director at Main Capital Partners and chairman of RiskConcile’s board, called it “a major step towards building a pan-European leader in regulatory technology for the fund industry.”

Standing Out in a Crowded Field

The European RegTech landscape is getting competitive. UK companies dominated activity in 2024, completing six of the top 10 deals, with Napier AI securing $56.9 million from Crestline Investors. RiskConcile competes with established players including FundApps, which monitors over $30 trillion in assets under management for global compliance teams, and Ireland-based AQMetrics, which provides data management and compliance monitoring services.

The differentiation comes down to focus. FundApps specializes in shareholding disclosure and position limits monitoring across 90-plus jurisdictions. AQMetrics offers broad regulatory reporting services for MiFID firms. RiskConcile concentrates on fund-specific regulatory requirements, particularly the mathematical complexity of PRIIPs calculations and the detailed risk reporting demands of AIFMD Annex IV.

While broader enterprise software providers offer modular compliance solutions, they lack the specialized knowledge that comes from working exclusively with fund managers. RiskConcile’s team includes mathematicians who genuinely enjoy tackling structured product calculations, an unusual combination of technical skill and domain passion that shows up in product quality.

Regulatory Pressures Create Recurring Demand

Multiple regulatory developments support RiskConcile’s trajectory. The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation requires detailed ESG disclosures from asset managers. AIFMD Annex IV mandates comprehensive risk reporting for alternative investment funds. MiFID II’s transaction cost analysis requirements add another reporting layer. These obligations get updated quarterly or annually, creating steady demand for sophisticated compliance infrastructure.

European fund managers face an additional challenge: regulatory fragmentation. Each market maintains distinct reporting requirements alongside EU-wide directives. Luxembourg and Dublin-domiciled funds, which dominate European asset management, need compliance systems that span multiple regulatory regimes. That’s precisely where RiskConcile’s cloud-based architecture delivers value.

Traditional on-premise compliance systems require costly infrastructure upgrades as data volumes expand and reporting frequency increases. RiskConcile’s software-as-a-service model lets clients scale computational capacity dynamically. During periods of market stress, when risk calculations intensify and reporting demands spike, that flexibility matters.

Building a Pan-European Platform

With Main Capital’s backing, RiskConcile has outlined a strategy encompassing product innovation, international expansion, and selective acquisitions. The Fitz Partners transaction demonstrates execution, combining geographic reach with complementary capabilities. The company is expanding into France, building on strong positions in the Benelux and UK-Ireland corridors.

That geographic expansion follows the money. Cross-border fund structures dominate European asset management. A Luxembourg SICAV marketing shares across multiple EU countries needs compliance infrastructure that handles varying disclosure requirements, different tax regimes, and multiple regulatory touchpoints. RiskConcile’s integrated platform addresses that complexity.

The company’s trajectory from university spin-out to private equity-backed acquisition platform illustrates how specialized RegTech firms can scale despite Europe’s market fragmentation. While regulatory differences across jurisdictions create complexity for fund managers, they also create opportunities for providers that understand how to navigate them.

What This Means for Asset Managers

As regulatory technology matures from back-office cost center to strategic capability, fund managers increasingly recognize that compliance infrastructure influences competitive positioning. Efficient regulatory reporting frees up capital and management attention for investment activities. It reduces operational risk. It enables faster response to regulatory changes. Those advantages compound over time.

RiskConcile’s expansion suggests the market is favoring specialized, domain-expert providers over generalist enterprise software vendors. Deep regulatory knowledge translates directly into better product design, fewer implementation headaches, and more reliable ongoing support. For asset managers choosing compliance infrastructure, the question isn’t just what the software does today but how well the provider understands tomorrow’s regulatory challenges.

The company serves a market segment facing persistent pressure. Regulatory requirements aren’t getting simpler or less frequent. Fund managers need partners who can absorb that complexity and translate it into workable systems. RiskConcile, now backed by institutional capital and expanding through acquisition, positions itself as exactly that kind of partner. For an industry navigating the intersection of regulatory complexity and operational efficiency, that positioning carries weight.