Delaware Luxembourg: From Integration to Operational Impact

In an environment where financial institutions have to reconcile operational efficiency, regulatory requirements and technological innovation, certain areas of expertise are becoming crucial. By joining the Hubfinance community, delaware Luxembourg has become part of an ecosystem of players committed to concrete transformations, in close touch with business challenges.

We spoke to their teams to decipher their positioning and their view of the market.

delaware supports numerous financial players in their technological and operational transformations. How would you sum up your mission and your specific added value in the Luxembourg marketplace?

delaware Luxembourg has been supporting financial institutions in their digital transformation for over 10 years. There are three things that set us apart in the marketplace.

• Integrator, not publisher: We don't impose a proprietary product. We integrate the best bricks on the market - Euroclear's FundSettle and CSD services for securities operations, Microsoft Azure (Data Factory, Fabric, Power BI) for cloud and analytics, SAP for ERP - and integrate them directly into our customers' business processes.

• Tailor-made co-creation: Each Luxembourg player has its own specificities. We work closely with business teams to adapt our solutions to their workflows, not the other way round. For example, for a Transfer Agent managing over 200 funds, we co-constructed an investor portal integrating FundSettle data in real time, reducing subscription order processing time by 40%.

• Simplified access to innovation: Thanks to modern cloud tools, our customers can access capabilities in just a few clicks that were previously reserved for the largest institutions: real-time dashboards via Power BI, conversational agents for reporting via Copilot Studio, predictive models on liquidity via Azure Machine Learning. We have already deployed AI agents in production in other sectors (retail, industry), and we are transposing this experience to the financial world.

Unlike the big consultancies, delaware is a mid-size firm on a voluntary basis. This means that the consultants who design the solution are the same ones who deploy it. No team turnover between pitch and delivery, no superfluous layers of management. For our customers, this translates into shorter time-to-value and a close relationship that the Big4 cannot offer on projects of this size.

In a market where asset managers, private banks and institutions are facing increasing pressure (data, regulation, operational efficiency), what do you see as the priority issues on which they need to accelerate?

Today, the competitive advantage of Luxembourg's financial players is based on two key areas: reducing operating costs and creating a differentiating customer experience. In concrete terms, we have identified four priority challenges.

• Improving margins through automation: Low value-added manual tasks (reconciliations, NAV calculations, regulatory reporting) still account for 30-50% of the time spent by operational teams in some structures. Automating them via Euroclear-integrated workflows frees up resources for analysis and consulting.

• Differentiating the customer offering: End investors now expect fluid interfaces, real-time access to their portfolios and personalized reporting. Players who fail to upgrade their digital experience will lose market share.

• Masteringregulatory complexity: SFDR, DORA, MiFID II, PRIIPs... The superposition of regulatory frameworks demands systems capable of automatically generating the required reports, with an integrated audit trail. DORA in particular imposes stringent requirements for IT resilience, third-party risk management and penetration testing, all areas where a well-designed cloud architecture makes the difference.

• Harnessing data as strategic leverage: Too many institutions still treat data as a by-product of their operations. Those who centralize it in a unified data lake (via Azure Fabric) and exploit it (risk analysis, performance attribution, ESG scoring) are ahead of the game.

What made you want to join the Hubfinance community, and how do you see yourself contributing to, or benefiting from, an ecosystem focused on wealth management and financial innovation?

Hubfinance brings together exactly the profiles we work with on a daily basis: ManCos, private banks, family offices and transfer agents. For us, this community is a two-way gas pedal.

What we bring to the table

• Technical integration expertise: FundSettle, reference data and Euroclear CSD APIs, Azure environments (Data Factory, Fabric, Power BI, API Management), BI connectors. We can help members rapidly prototype concrete solutions.

• Feedback from the field: We have deployed data platforms and digital portals for Transfer Agents, ManCos and asset servicers in Luxembourg. These concrete cases enrich the community's exchanges.

• Ability to co-construct: We are ready to set up pilots with interested members, for example on an automated NAV Oversight use case or a cross-fund ESG dashboard.

What we expect: real proximity to business decision-makers to understand their concrete challenges, and the development of synergies between members around high-impact projects.

Which of your solutions (data & analytics, cloud, ERP finance, automation, security...) do you consider to be the most decisive in meeting the concrete needs of financial players today?

Our offer is built around five modules, designed to integrate natively into the customer's technical environment via the Azure stack and Euroclear APIs (FundSettle, CSD settlement, corporate actions).

Our integration approach is based on an API-wrapper model that enables our modules to be connected to existing legacy systems without disruptive migration.

1. Fund Services & Oversight
   Automated NAV calculation and validation, data reliability, fiduciary compliance. Regulatory reporting (UCITS, AIFMD, PRIIPs, SFDR) with automatic generation and integrated audit trail.
   Results in the field: for an asset servicer managing 120+ funds, NAV control automation eliminated 15h of manual checks per week and reduced reconciliation errors by 60%.
2. Securities Settlement & Custody
   Direct integration of Euroclear's FundSettle and CSD settlement services for DvP, cross-border and OTC settlement. Securing assets, automating corporate actions servicing. This integration is a continuation of the Euroclear × Marketnode × Microsoft partnership, which develops AI agent-based automation solutions for fund and credit flows, a roadmap in which our integration capabilities fit directly.
3. Data & Analytics Platform
   Aggregation of multi-source data in a unified data lake via Azure Fabric. Real-time dashboards via Power BI on flows, risks, performance and liquidity. Performance simulation and attribution engine.
   Result on the ground: a family office now consolidates data from 4 custodians into a single dashboard with automated alerts, reducing monthly reporting time from 3 days to 4 hours.
4. Digital Front-End & Workflow Automation
   Unified portal for transaction management, monitoring and customer communication. Automation of subscription workflows, order management and investor register updates, with direct FundSettle connectivity via Azure API Management.
5. Compliance, Risk & ESG
   Integrated audit trails and suitability checks. ESG module for sustainable data extraction, mapping and reporting. DORA-compliant cybersecurity and business continuity: resilience testing, third-party risk management, continuous monitoring via Azure Security Center and Key Vault.

What makes the difference
These modules are not off-the-shelf products. We tailor them to each customer by co-creating them with business teams, and connect them natively to Euroclear services via API. The API-wrapper model guarantees seamless coexistence with legacy systems - no big bang, just gradual, controlled modernization.

When you look at the evolution of the Luxembourg market (product sophistication, consolidation, pressure on margins, rise of ESG), what technological transformations do you see as unavoidable in the coming years?

We observe a three-stage maturity trajectory that Luxembourg financial institutions are currently traversing. Each stage corresponds to a technological transformation.

Stage 1: AI amplifies the individual
This is the stage most players are at today: a co-pilot that helps an analyst produce a report faster, an assistant that summarizes regulatory documents, a code generation tool that accelerates developments. The gains are real, but individual. The risk: shadow AI, where each team adopts its own tools without governance.
Key transformation: deploy governed data self-service (Power BI + Azure Purview) so that business teams can create their own dashboards within a secure framework.

Stage 2: AI that makes the system run more smoothly
AI ceases to be an ad hoc tool and becomes the connective tissue of the organization. Data flows between systems, processes are orchestrated end-to-end, silos fall away. This is the stage when API interoperability redistributes the cards: players with an open architecture (API-first, Azure API Management) absorb acquisitions and regulatory changes in weeks, not months.
Key transformation: adopt an API-first architecture and leverage Euroclear's Open API initiative to standardize access to post-trade services.

Stage 3: AI that acts autonomously
This is today's frontier: specialized agents that plan, decide and execute. Whether for NAV control, compliance or ESG, they detect anomalies, analyze and propose actions, while initiatives such as the Euroclear × Marketnode × Microsoft partnership already illustrate this evolution in post-trade. However,these agentsoperate in a supervised mode (Human-in-the-Loop): the human validates critical decisions, the AI executes and alerts.
Key transformation: laying the foundations of trust (audit trails, supervision, EU AI Act compliance) to make this autonomy deployable at scale.

The Luxembourg financial center doesn't need yet another speech on digital transformation. It needs measurable results: less time spent on manual tasks, greater transparency for end customers, compliance that doesn't slow down business but speeds it up.

This is what delaware Luxembourg delivers every day, combining the power of the Azure cloud, advanced analytics and native integration of Euroclear services. Not on a slide, but in the systems that run every day.

Our approach is based on the principle of Minimum Viable AI (MVA): the simplest AI solution that works in production, deployed with its monitoring indicators from day one. No big foundation program that promises to "prepare everything before you start". Measurable results within the first few weeks.

Our proposal to HubFinance members is based on three steps:

• Identify: a high-impact use case in your organization

• Prototype: a functional solution in 8 weeks, with metrics integrated right from sprint 1

• Measure: results and decide what to do next based on evidence, not promises

To find out more about this approach, we invite you to contact Benjamin Hourte, or to consult their website directly if the subject resonates with your challenges.

This article has been automatically translated using Breeze, powered by DeepL.