How Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France Launched a Corporate Banking Offer in the Netherlands in Under a Year

Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France: A Regional Bank with International Ambitions

Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France is a mutual bank operating in the Hauts-de-France region in northern France, an area of 6 million inhabitants covering 32,000 square kilometers.

A shareholder of Groupe BPCE and a long-standing regional player for over 200 years, Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France serves more than one million retail, professional and corporate clients.

In recent years, the bank has accelerated its international expansion with the launch of Caisse d’Epargne Belgium and Caisse d’Epargne Netherlands, both dedicated to serving large corporate clients. In 2025, Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France acquired Nagelmackers, Belgium’s oldest private bank founded in 1747, providing wealth management services to 110,000 clients and managing close to €5 billion in assets under management.

Launching a Corporate Branch in the Netherlands in Under One Year

Following its initial commercial success in Luxembourg and Belgium in the corporate banking segment, Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France decided in 2023 to open a branch in the Netherlands.

The strategic ambition was clear: complete the launch in less than a year in order to support an ambitious growth plan targeting large corporate clients. The offering included account services, European and international payments, savings products such as term deposits, and syndicated lending.

Beyond setting up the Dutch branch and establishing a business center in Amsterdam staffed with experienced senior bankers, Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France also needed to deploy a modern, real-time banking infrastructure. The platform had to meet both local requirements, including multilingual capabilities and Dutch IBAN issuance, and Groupe BPCE’s group-level IT standards, such as deployment within the Group’s private cloud, strict cybersecurity frameworks, connectivity standards, and full compliance with group requirements in accounting, risk management, and regulatory reporting.

In short, the challenge was to roll out a new banking technology platform with both speed and control, while ensuring it would support future growth.

As part of a broader efficiency strategy, the new platform was also designed to host, through migration, the bank’s existing activities in Belgium and Luxembourg. The objective was to mutualize technology, back-office operations, and connectors, while maintaining clear segregation between the different legal entities and branches.

A Next-Generation Core Banking Platform at the Heart of an Integrated Ecosystem

With a team of highly skilled internal experts, the IT department of Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France assembled a modern, modular, real-time solution designed to meet Group standards, local regulatory requirements, and the need for speed to ensure a short business time-to-market.

At the core of this architecture is Skaleet’s next-generation core banking solution, real-time, API-driven and easily integrable. In this context, the core banking system supports corporate account management, savings products such as multi-currency term deposits, and payments, both European via SEPA and international via SWIFT.

The platform is fully integrated into a broader ecosystem of external and internal solutions. On the external side, it connects in particular with Finastra’s syndicated lending software LoanIQ, distributed and integrated by our partner Tesselate. On the internal side, it interfaces with CEHDF’s general ledger system, as well as Groupe BPCE’s shared services for compliance and payment processing, including BPCE Payment Services.

A Fast and Strategic Entry into the Dutch Market

The IT teams at Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France successfully deployed the new real-time, modular solution within the planned timeframe of one year. The platform is operated by the bank’s own teams and hosted in Groupe BPCE’s private cloud, while remaining aligned with Skaleet’s continuous delivery cycle to benefit from an evergreen, continuously evolving value proposition.

This new infrastructure enabled Caisse d’Epargne Hauts de France to achieve a rapid and strategic commercial entry into the Dutch market. The launch was marked by the onboarding of dozens of large local corporates and the underwriting of hundreds of millions of euros in syndicated loans, supported by a local business center staffed with senior bankers based in Amsterdam.

Now live in the Netherlands, the platform will soon host, through migration, the bank’s pre-existing activities in Belgium and Luxembourg. Leveraging Skaleet’s multi-entity capabilities, the bank will be able to generate economies of scale through shared technology, while maintaining segregated flows and processes that reflect the presence of distinct branches across multiple markets.