Binck Clients: “Vincent, Give Us Back Our Stand”

Deutsche Bank platform here stone age sun“,” BinckBank Belgium CEO Vincent Germyns noted in his well-known style in 2010 when Deutsche Bank wanted to seduce a stock market investor at an astonishing rate. After 11 years, Germyns became Binck Chairman, Binck is part of Saxo Bank and many Binck clients feel that their platform has deteriorated for several years after moving to Saxo.One of the many negative reviews of the SaxoInvestor app on Google Play reads: “Vincent, give us back our platform.”

In the SaxoInvestor app, you will see columns that partially disappear behind the screen. As a result, the app appears as a website packed into the app. Anyone who wants to send an angry message via the chat function suddenly sees a keyboard appear on the input screen and has to type blindly. These are things that need improvement. “We won’t rest until things get better,” says Dieter Heyerns, CEO of Saxo Bank Belgium. The SaxoInvestor program is specifically designed for Binck clients for fund investing and asset management (Laten Beleggen), among others. In addition, the customer also has access to the international and English-language Saxo TraderGo app, which gets better reviews, but is less manageable for some customers.

Also annoying: a Saxo client can only consult their old transactions by logging into the old Binck platform. We will not merge old data. This relates to data dating back 20 years. But there is a path to the data that you can take and we have to inform our customers enough,” says Hayren.

In the reviews we read complaints about unreachable customer service. If we send a blind chat message at 9 PM, we will immediately get a friendly answer. If we call customer service in the morning, the phone is answered within 22 seconds. With other brokers, it is not uncommon to wait for more than 10 minutes at these popular trading times. Haerens: “We are switching from Binck to the Saxo platform in tranches of 500,000 customers. At the time of the main migration it might have happened that the customer had to wait a little longer on the phone. But it should be like you’ve gone through it. Of course it’s busy. Madly in customer service, compared to the period during the Corona outbreak. So we are already a bit normal. Since the beginning of this year, customer service in Antwerp has grown 2.5 times.

in a Article in Het Financieele Dagblad A Belgian client certifies that the transfer of shares to Bolero was not done properly. Haerens: ‘I distinguish between complaining about something that didn’t do well on the one hand and getting used to problems on the other. To complain we have a complaints registration system. This is a legal requirement.

About three quarters of Belgian customers are now on the Saxo platform. All should be transferred by the end of November. Haerens states that despite the negative reviews, the number of clients who leave the broker is “not much higher than other times”.

But there is clearly a lot of nostalgia for Binck’s easy-to-use platform that Germyns was so proud of. BinckBank has been a house where nothing has changed for 15 years. The clients got the keys to another house that no one asked for. This requires modification.

Haerens says going back to the old app is out of the question. But BinckBank’s known DNA has not changed. People with long seniority work here. After sales service must be perfect. Over time, it will be clear that the merger with Saxo Bank was convenient, not only for the buyer, but also for the customer. It provides access to new markets, new products and new applications, and defines Haerens.