We’ve spent a combined 50+ years solving complex problems with code and financial expertise — from Excel macros on trading desks to AI agents that run entire back-offices. We don’t just understand the technology. We understand your business.
Business meets code. 50+ years of combined experience.
Business, Finance & Operations
From ABN Amro’s trading floor to the CFO chair at Dutch SMEs — Bart has spent 20+ years in the trenches of financial operations. He has managed €35 billion in collateral portfolios, implemented CCP Triparty Repo systems that increased liquidity by several billion euros, and served as the crisis team at Fortis Bank during the 2008 financial crisis.
In the MKB world, Bart has been the CFO who reconciled 1,000+ financial discrepancies in a single year, the Finance Manager who led ERP migrations across multiple countries, and the controller who reduced outstanding invoices by €100K and order errors by 85%.
As an independent consultant since 2018 (Finbar Consultancy), he has built custom Power BI dashboards, reduced reporting time by 95%+ through automation, and led debt restructuring projects achieving 70%+ reduction for MKB clients.
Bart speaks the language of your accountant, your bank, and your operations team — because he’s been all three.
Dutch (native) · English (fluent) · Spanish (advanced) · German (basic) · French (basic)
Architecture, Engineering & AI
Florent is a formally trained engineer (ESIEA Paris — specialisation in Mathematics, Computer Engineering, and Finance) with 15+ years of professional software development across the full stack.
He spent a decade at ABN Amro and Interactive Brokers building real-time risk, P&L, and position-tracking systems for non-linear derivatives trading desks. He engineered proprietary pricing libraries, VBA-based position management tools, and automated volatility analysis systems — all in environments where a bug means real money lost.
Since 2020, Florent has been the lead full-stack developer and agile project manager at Engie (Italy), where he architected a centralized telemetry and remote-control platform managing distributed heating infrastructure across Italian cities. He built municipal management systems for Rome, Milan, and Bologna, integrating live urban telemetry including traffic and CCTV data streams — all with real-time WebSocket notifications and interactive mapping.
His current independent work pushes further into AI: automated invoice processing with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), real-time WebSocket messaging bridges, and async-first orchestration platforms that coordinate AI agent teams to deliver complete software projects.
Florent builds the systems that don’t go down at month-end.
French (native) · English (bilingual) · Italian (fluent) · Dutch (fluent)
The business knows what to build. The engineer knows how.
We both come from ABN Amro’s trading floor — Bart in Collateral Finance, Florent in Quantitative Trading Systems. We understand finance at an institutional level, but from complementary angles: business controls and risk management on one side, system architecture and real-time data engineering on the other. No translation layer needed.
From the first intake meeting to the deployed application: Bart scopes the business requirements, manages the client relationship, and handles the BI/reporting/ERP layer. Florent architects and builds the web applications, APIs, and AI integrations. No handoffs to unknown third parties. You always know who’s working on your project.
Most developers don’t understand the difference between a grootboekrekening and a kostenplaats. Most finance consultants can’t write an API integration. We do both. When you explain your problem, you don’t need to simplify it. We get it — because we’ve lived it.
Everything we sell, we use ourselves. Our own invoicing, reporting, and client management runs on the same automation tools we build for you. Smart Booking processes our own invoices. Our dashboards track our own KPIs. If it’s not good enough for us, we don’t ship it.
Our backgrounds are in high-stakes environments: trading floors, derivatives desks, enterprise infrastructure. We bring that rigour — audit trails, human-in-the-loop, proper error handling — but we deliver at startup speed. Short sprints, weekly demos, no six-month roadmaps that never arrive.
Bart is based in Haarlem, on-site in the Randstad for every client meeting. Florent works remotely from Italy — the same distributed model he’s used successfully at Engie for 5+ years. You get a local partner for trust and face-to-face, with international engineering capacity behind it.
Clear roles. No overlap. Full coverage.
| Capability | Bart | Florent |
|---|---|---|
| Client relationship & business analysis | Lead | Support |
| Finance & compliance domain knowledge | Deep (20+ yr) | Strong (10 yr quant) |
| Full-stack web development | Basic | Lead |
| Cloud architecture (AWS, async, microservices) | Familiar | Expert |
| Power BI / dashboards / Excel | Expert | — |
| AI agents & LLM integration | Growing | Building now |
| Python development | Intermediate | Advanced |
| ERP systems (Exact, NMBRS, Loket) | Expert | — |
| Hardware / IoT / edge computing | — | Unique niche |
| Database & API architecture | Basic | Expert |
| Project scoping & estimation | Lead | Support |
| Dutch market knowledge | Native | Fluent |
From trading floor to AI automation.
Cash Management Officer. First exposure to large-scale financial systems, managing Nostro/Loro accounts and liquidity forecasting.
Bart: Management, Economics & Law (HvA). Florent: Engineering degree with specialisation in Mathematics, Computer Engineering, and Finance (Paris).
Begins building quantitative trading and risk systems for the derivatives desk. Both now at the same bank in Amsterdam.
Bart serves on the crisis team at Fortis Bank during the collapse. Florent manages counterparty risk systems through extreme market volatility. Lesson learned: systems need controls.
Collateral Finance at ABN Amro. Manages €35B+ in portfolios. Implements CCP Triparty Repo. Excel macros and VBA scripts become daily tools.
Bart in Collateral Finance, Florent in Trading Systems. Same instinct: if it’s repetitive, automate it. A professional friendship forms around shared frustration with manual processes.
Bart spends a year in South America — language acquisition (Spanish), cultural immersion. Florent deepens his independent engineering work.
Independent finance and data analysis for SMEs and accounting firms. Power BI dashboards, process automation, debt restructuring. The seed of what would become the maikers.
Architects enterprise telemetry platforms managing distributed infrastructure across Italy. Builds municipal systems for Rome, Milan, Bologna. Proves that complex, real-time systems can be built by a small team.
Finance Manager at Massarius (NL & Spain), CFO at Lumex Zon (raised €1M, delivered €2.5M growth), Finance Manager at The Collection (premium real estate). Every role reinforces the same insight: SMEs desperately need better technology.
Florent builds AI-powered invoice processing with RAG, real-time messaging bridges, and AI agent orchestration platforms. Bart sees the opportunity: this technology can finally be made accessible for MKB.
Two finance veterans, 50+ years combined experience, one mission: make smart technology accessible for Dutch SMEs. No more excuses. Time to build.
We’re not a big consultancy that charges €200/hour for a discovery phase. We scope fast, build fast, and deliver results you can measure in weeks — not quarters.
Our finance background taught us that powerful systems need controls. Every trade needs approval. Every transaction needs an audit trail. We apply the same discipline to AI.
Too many tech projects fail because developers don’t understand the business problem. We start with your workflow, your pain points, your reality — then we build.
We build on open standards and give you full ownership of your code, data, and infrastructure. If you want to walk away tomorrow, you can. That keeps us honest.
We’re always interested in hearing about new projects — especially if they involve making something manual disappear.
Get in Touch