The Belgian bank reports a record organic growth in savings and investments in 2018

Belfius has reported that investments by retail customers rose by €3.5 billion in 2018, an increase of 46%, the highest level ever recorded. The total volume of savings and current accounts rose by 8% to €57.1 billion while the sales of accessible investments with capital protection continued to grow, with the bank’s market share in structured products – both notes and Class 23 life-insurance – rising sharply.

Belfius had a market share of 28% from 53 structured products worth €991m in 2018, up from a 19% share of the Belgian market the previous year (€835m from 53 products), according to SRP data. The bank is currently the number two distributor in Belgium, behind KBC (35% market share) but well ahead of BNP Paribas Fortis (12%) and Deutsche Bank (9%).

Belfius’ issuance for 2018 included 36 products (€718m) linked to a single index and 17 products (€273m) linked to the interest rate.

Thirteen of the bank’s products, which sold €438m, were tied to the iStoxx Europe Demography 50 Index, while another six products, worth approximately €165m, were linked to the Solactive Digital Economy Index. The interest products were linked to the constant maturity swap rate (€254m from 14 products) and the Libor (€31m from three products), respectively.

Belfius’ bestselling product for 2018 was Invest Accelerator 06-2026. The eight-year life wrapped product collected €82m during the subscription period.

Fourteen products matured during the year. Of these, the appropriately named Belfius Funding (NL) Top Performance was the best performer. The medium-term note (MTN), which was linked to the Eurostoxx Select Dividend 30, returned 186.6% after five-years, or 13.28% pa.

Primary market platform

The Belgian bank has launched Dot-Capital, the first 100% digital platform for bond issuers and investors on the primary market in Belgium.

The objective of the platform is to offer investors and issuers ‘direct and fully secure’ access to primary market bond issues set up on behalf of companies and public (and semi-public) entities in Belgium.

Since 2013, Belfius has issued approximately 400 long-term issues (bonds and MTNs) for a total amount of €18.9 billion on behalf of more than 90 issuers and with Dot-Capital, investors and issuers have now multiple functionalities made available to them including personalised real-time alerts when new issues are available, online document storage and consulting, online order entry, transaction tracking, and maturity date management.

Although the sales team offers a range of financial products to institutional, corporate and public sector clients in terms of fixed-income products, money market products, structured products and hedging solutions, Dot-Capital is currently focused on plain vanilla commercial paper, “with institutional investors as the main target investor base,” according to a spokesperson of the bank.

In 2018, Belfius confirmed its leading position in debt capital markets issues for (semi-)public customers by taking part on 86% of the mandates available on the Belgian market. The bank issued €3.7 billion of innovative finance means in the form of short-term and long-term issues.

Click the link to view the full-year 2018 results for Belfius.