Best private bank: KBC Private Banking
KBC Private Banking stood out for its ability to scale high-quality advisory services across Belgium without diluting personal relationship management.
A key development during the review period was the maturation of the bank’s straight-through digital investment advice engine, which screened every client portfolio daily against strategy and risk parameters, generating tailored recommendations automatically. This made it possible to provide timely, consistent advice across the entire Belgian client base, greatly enhancing the bank’s advisory reach. By mid-2025, a significant share of private banking investment advice was delivered digitally, including electronic signatures and out of hours access.
This shift substantially reduced manual workload, allowing bankers to devote far more time to deeper, more meaningful client conversations. The impact was also reflected in improved operational efficiency, with a lower cost-to-income ratio despite strong client growth.
KBC also expanded its cultural engagement efforts through its Art Minds club. Clients joined exclusive trips, including recent visits to London and Berlin, and an exchange with the National Gallery showcased Flemish masters.
Digitalisation also further enhanced the client experience. The event-driven engagement model used advanced analytics to identify financially relevant client activity, allowing relationship managers to engage at timely, meaningful points instead of relying on fixed schedules. This enhanced the relevance of the advice provided, supporting an increase in the net promoter score from 79.7 to 81.1 over the period.
A key innovation that deepened the service model was the blockchain-based Gallery feature, giving clients the ability to privately catalogue and document art, jewellery and other valuables within the banking app – meeting a longstanding need among Belgian wealth clients for secure digital oversight of collections.
Best international private bank: BNP Paribas Fortis
BNP Paribas Fortis strengthened its impact on private banking clients in Belgium during the review period, leveraging its scale and digital capabilities to deliver practical, timely support where it was most needed.
Across a year marked by widespread product maturities, the bank used those transitions to steer clients into suitable reinvestment options, ensuring portfolios remained aligned with their objectives rather than disrupted by market-wide shifts.
Information delivery became more focused and effective. The bank’s Earnings and Equity Focus, introduced in 2024 and published on a weekly basis, offered structured updates for active equity investors, enriching their decision-making and giving clearer insight into the drivers of their holdings. Invest Pulse, also launched in 2024, delivered short, personalised videos explaining developments in clients’ own investment solutions, boosting engagement among those who preferred concise, nontechnical formats.
The Private Assets Investor Portal widened access to private equity through evergreen funds and reduced entry thresholds, offering private banking clients a more transparent and manageable route into alternatives.
My Financial Independence, a tool designed to model retirement needs and long-term financial trajectories, strengthened advisory conversations by providing projections tailored to a Belgian context shaped by longevity pressures and pension constraints.
In addition, a new bond mandate framework introduced in early 2025 gave clients a structured way to invest around themes such as European strategic autonomy, reflecting rising demand for targeted fixed income and equity exposures.
Best pure play/boutique private bank: Delen Private Bank
A disciplined, client-centred approach to discretionary wealth management, combined with targeted innovation in planning and digital capabilities, enabled Delen Private Bank to deliver stronger outcomes for Belgian private banking clients during the review period.
Between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025, Belgium remained the group’s primary growth driver, with €47.6 billion in assets under management at end-2024 and exceptionally strong net inflows, largely from new clients. This progress was the result of intensified client proximity efforts – dedicated prospecting, deeper relationship manager engagement, and more efficient onboarding supported by a resilient IT infrastructure.
Investment management remained fully discretionary for more than 90% of Belgian clients, with portfolios constructed through Delen’s fund manager, Cadelam, and its active, forward-looking approach integrating macroeconomic analysis, thematic trends and ESG risk scoring.
This integration had a tangible impact on portfolio resilience: all in-house funds applied the responsible investment framework, influencing companies through a structured engagement programme and ensuring that Belgian client assets were aligned with long-term risk management rather than short-term performance.
The bank also introduced tools that deepened advisory capabilities. The Family & Wealth platform, developed in-house, enabled Belgian clients to visualise their full wealth, run inheritance tax simulations, and model wealth trajectories 20 to 40 years into the future. As a result, abstract planning questions became concrete, data-driven scenarios that informed decisions on spending, retirement and intergenerational transfers.
Complementing this, the Delen app was enhanced with secure document vaulting, improved privacy controls and integrated wealth-planning features. These upgrades strengthened the bank’s hybrid model by bringing personalised advice and operational efficiency together in a way that reinforced client trust.
Best for UHNW: Deutsche Bank Private Bank
Deutsche Bank Private Bank distinguished itself in Belgium’s ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) private banking market by delivering significant gains in client engagement, advisory depth and wallet share during the review period.
The bank reinforced an advisory-led private banking model at a time when much of the local market favoured standardised discretionary solutions. Each UHNW client was served by a dedicated relationship manager operating within a fully open-architecture framework, ensuring advice was driven by suitability rather than product distribution. This approach translated into a 7% year-on-year increase in average assets per client.
Momentum was further supported by Deutsche Bank’s Bank for Entrepreneurs model, which integrates private banking with corporate and investment banking expertise for Belgian family entrepreneurs. By addressing personal wealth, business liquidity and financing needs within a single framework, the model reduced fragmentation and execution risk around liquidity events, succession planning and cross-border activity – areas of heightened complexity for UHNW clients.
Estate-planning innovation delivered measurable impact. The expansion of digital estate-planning services, developed in partnership with Belgian fintech Abbove, resulted in a 120% increase in client usage. By providing a real-time, structured overview of assets, donations and succession scenarios, advisers were able to shift discussions towards long-term family governance rather than transactional decision-making.
On the investment side, Belgian UHNW clients gained enhanced access to private markets through institutional-grade partnerships, including energy transition strategies, while open architecture preserved transparency and governance. Digital tools reinforced the advisory relationship by enabling consistent, personalised recommendations and efficient execution. Client satisfaction with advisory services reached 9.3 out of 10 during the review period.
Best for HNW: Mercier Van Lanschot
Mercier Van Lanschot stood out in Belgium’s private banking market through achieving sustained growth among high-net-worth (HNW) clients, alongside its targeted enhancements to investment access, credit solutions and service execution.
During the review period, the bank increased assets under management (AUM) by 26% to reach $18.6 billion, with growth concentrated in its HNW client base. HNW assets rose 40%, as Belgian families and entrepreneurs consolidated investment management, wealth structuring and financing with the bank. This expansion was achieved alongside improved operating efficiency, with the cost-to-income ratio falling to 49%, supporting scalable growth without diluting relationship intensity.
Investment innovation was closely aligned with HNW portfolio construction. The launch of Mercier Van Lanschot’s first Belgian private equity fund provided clients with access to small and mid-sized private companies in northwest Europe, addressing demand for diversification beyond public markets.
By the first closing in April 2025, Belgian HNW clients had committed €72 million, demonstrating appetite for private markets delivered through an established advisory relationship.
Credit capabilities further strengthened the bank’s HNW proposition, supported by redesigned digital processes that reduced approval and drawdown times to just a few days. This enabled approximately €138 million in Lombard lending production, allowing clients to meet capital calls or act on opportunities without disrupting long-term allocations.
Service improvements delivered measurable client impact. Fully digital onboarding shortened account-opening times from around two weeks to as little as four to seven days, improving the initial experience while maintaining regulatory standards.
Best for succession planning: Puilaetco
Puilaetco stood out in Belgium for delivering a succession-planning proposition that was both technically rigorous and practically transformative for private banking clients.
During the review period, the bank considerably strengthened its succession planning offering through the expanded deployment of its Richer Life Plan, which saw adoption by Belgian private banking families double between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025.
The platform enabled advisers to run detailed, real-time inheritance simulations, allowing clients to quantify the impact of death, donations or changes in family structure on succession outcomes under Belgian civil and tax rules.
Several enhancements introduced during the review period directly improved the quality of succession advice. Automated aggregation of assets held at other Belgian banks, alongside data imports from the National Bank of Belgium (with client consent), gave families a consolidated and reliable view of their total estate. This significantly reduced execution risk in succession planning by ensuring inheritance tax calculations and liquidity planning were based on complete information rather than estimates.
Puilaetco also improved the scalability and consistency of succession advice by embedding structured recommendations directly into planning reports. This allowed senior wealth planners to deliver complex estate and governance advice efficiently across a growing client base without sacrificing technical depth.
The impact was reflected in higher client satisfaction scores among families using the planning framework and measurable net inflows linked to succession-driven mandates.
These capabilities were supported by a dedicated Belgian succession-planning team of senior experts, complemented by cross-border specialists, ensuring that family governance, life insurance structuring and asset transmission were fully integrated within the private banking relationship.
Best for discretionary portfolio management: Puilaetco
A disciplined investment framework and consistent risk-adjusted outcomes, complemented by ongoing enhancements, underpin the quality of Puilaetco’s discretionary portfolio management (DPM) offering.
Between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025, the bank strengthened its DPM proposition by standardising portfolio construction while retaining local investment judgement. A single strategic and tactical asset allocation framework was deployed across mandates, with Belgian investment professionals contributing local market, fiscal and client-specific insights to a central investment committee. This approach improved governance, reduced fragmentation and ensured more consistent results across comparable risk profiles.
The refinements to the investment process were evident in the stability and resilience of portfolio outcomes. Clearer asset allocation conviction, tighter portfolio construction and more proactive downside risk management improved the reliability of returns without increasing portfolio risk. Real-time risk monitoring and enhanced analytics enabled continuous oversight of factor exposures, liquidity and concentration metrics, allowing teams to adjust more effectively to changing market conditions.
Product development was another contributor to the bank’s strengthened proposition. The continued rollout of exclusive multi-manager UCITS funds broadened diversification opportunities while helping to optimise underlying costs for clients. In June 2025, the introduction of European long-term investment funds into discretionary portfolios gave eligible clients regulated access to private markets, supporting long-term objectives without compromising liquidity management or investor protection.
Client engagement remained strong throughout the period, with assets in Puilaetco’s flagship discretionary strategies continuing to grow, supported by sustained net inflows.
