Valérie Urbain

As the financial regulatory environment in Europe becomes increasingly dynamic, Belgium-based securities organisation Euroclear is seizing the opportunity to further develop its business relationships within Europe and beyond.

CEO of Euroclear Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, Valérie Urbain, looks at the changes that her organisation and the wider European industry is undergoing, noting the importance of adapting to the shifting market conditions.

The CEO Magazine: Having been with the company for more than 20 years, how have you seen Euroclear grow and develop as an organisation?

Valérie: Over the past 20 years, the Euroclear group has expanded from being an ICSD [international central securities depository]—Euroclear Bank—into a broader market infrastructure incorporating the CSDs [central securities depositories] in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and the UK. We were already an international organisation but these additions to the group helped us become a lot more conscious of our role as a true market infrastructure. We need to be relevant for all sorts of stakeholders, be they clients, other market infrastructures, or market authorities like the regulators and central banks.

We are a market infrastructure whose purpose is to provide the best possible service to our clients. In the past we used our longer term vision of the evolutions that we wanted to deliver for the market as a guide for developing products and services, but as the capital markets have evolved, in particular with the crisis of 2008, we came to realise that our role as a market infrastructure is to deliver not necessarily what we think is good, but more what the clients need.