Navigating change: Financial Services Regulatory & Tax Seminar 2025

Our DORA session covered three topics:

1. Exit strategy and plans

Under the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), financial institutions must ensure business continuity even when critical third-party ICT providers fail or contracts are terminated. This session explored how to design and implement effective exit strategies and exit plans that meet regulatory expectations while maintaining resilience and minimizing disruption.

Through practical insights and case examples, we discussed:

• Key DORA requirements and supervisory expectations on exit planning
• Governance, testing, and documentation best practices
• Integration with outsourcing and third-party risk frameworks
• Lessons learned from regulatory reviews and market practices

2. Practical insights on DORA contract review

DORA requires financial entities to include specific provisions in their contracts with ICT third-party service providers. Consequently, financial entities must review and, where necessary, update their existing contractual arrangements with these providers. In this session, we explored practical challenges in the review process, focusing particularly on its scope, complexity, and potential costs.

3. DORA assurance

Under DORA, financial institutions seek assurance over the quality of operations performed by their critical third parties and their alignment with the legislation.

But how can financial institutions leverage existing assurance reports (ISAE) or certificates (SOC) to reduce the monitoring activities required? Where do ISO/ISAE standards align with DORA, and where do they not? In this session, we explored how financial institutions can leverage existing assurance products to determine what they can—and cannot—do under DORA.

The retail investment and savings market is facing challenging times, with a younger investor population exploring social-media-advertised investment alternatives (such as crypto investments and money market funds on payment platforms as interest alternatives), alongside continued growth in ETF adoption and increased use of low-barrier digital tools. On the other hand, household portfolios remain cash-heavy, structural barriers continue to limit broader market participation, and the general public’s financial literacy is limited. At the same time, public authorities are confronted with the financial challenges posed by the energy and technological transition, investments in defense and security, and the sustainability of welfare state systems (in particular, the affordability of pension systems).

The March 2025 European Commission’s Savings and Investments Union Strategy aims to address these challenges by incentivizing a conversion of the deep retail savings base into investment products. After discussing the macroeconomic trends of the investment market, our speakers Michiel Dobbelaere and Laurent Godts provided insights into the various policy and legislative initiatives that have emerged in recent months, deep-dived into the very recent Markets Integration Package (which also reforms the funds distribution regimes), and updated participants on the status of the Retail Investment Strategy initiative.

With all indications pointing to the new Belgian capital gains tax taking retroactive effect from 1 January, despite the legislation not yet being published, uncertainty is mounting regarding the pre-publication period and the associated obligations. The recent requirement for financial institutions to apply an equivalent withholding tax during this pre-publication phase, upon explicit client request, adds significant complexity to implementation. This necessitates a reconsideration of previous strategic decisions regarding the ‘opt-in’/‘opt-out’ approach, related communications, and the implementation timeline initially planned by financial institutions.

Launched in 2021, the SFDR is currently one of the key sustainability regulations for the FS sector, imposing a considerable degree of ESG transparency on financial market participants and financial advisers with regard to the financial products being offered. The EU’s Omnibus package, presented as part of broader legislative reforms, seeks to rationalize and harmonize sustainability-related reporting duties. For the SFDR, the package proposes a number of simplifications by aligning definitions and disclosure requirements across various regulations, potentially reducing inconsistencies and overlap. It also suggests clarifying sustainable investment categories, standardizing principal adverse impact (PAI) indicators, and enhancing the interoperability between the SFDR, the CSRD, and the EU Taxonomy.

In this workshop we provided an overview of the current state of play with regard to the legislative agenda for the SFDR reform, including a summary of the main areas of simplification. In doing so, we also addressed the main risks associated with these reforms. By way of example, simplification of the current regulation could lead to a loss of granularity in available data, resulting in less transparent reporting and less differentiated products for end-investors. There is also a danger that simplification could lead to an increase in boilerplate disclosures. Measures must therefore be carefully assessed to ensure the SFDR maintains an added value.

This workshop focused on the fast-growing market of crypto assets and provided practical insights into evolving tax regulations, regulatory frameworks such as MiCA and its pending implementation in Belgian legislation, as well as emerging business opportunities in this digital asset landscape.

We explored the options for your organization if you are considering offering crypto asset services to your customers, ranging from crypto ETPs/ETNs to partnering with a specialist provider or building the infrastructure for crypto trading and custody yourself.

Corporate tax

The corporate tax landscape for banks and insurance companies is constantly evolving. This brings complexity but also creates opportunities, such as the innovation income tax deduction, a partial exemption from wage withholding tax and potentially the application of the favorable copyright remuneration regime for employees. Innovative (data- and IT-driven) banks and insurers that invest heavily in IT and IT-related R&D may indeed benefit from these tax incentives.

Operational taxes

Operational taxes have increasingly come to the forefront as a major source of revenue for the treasury, impacting banks and insurance companies in their roles as (i) taxpayers, (ii) data collectors, and (iii) tax collectors on behalf of the government. The numerous pending and upcoming changes must be monitored closely and addressed promptly to effectively manage the challenges that these developments present.

VAT and structured e-invoicing

The shift to mandatory structured e-invoicing and near real-time reporting will fundamentally transform how VAT must be managed in practice. By 2030, tax authorities will have (near) real-time access to detailed and uniformly structured transaction data, making high-quality VAT data not just important, but essential for compliance and risk management.

Companies struggling with VAT data quality should act now to address these issues. Proactive preparation will be critical for meeting future requirements and avoiding increased scrutiny from tax authorities.