Partner profile: Rijk Broekhuis
Blue Hat Associates partner Rijk shares his insights on financial technology.
In this blog series, we introduce you to each of our Partners.
Blue Hat Associates is a collective of entrepreneurial technology leaders who’ve all lived through the challenges of scaling SaaS businesses. Working across Finance, Health, Media, Advertising and the Public Sector, we help clients achieve tech and product goals quicker and more cost-effectively. Combining strategic leadership, with a nearshore talent pool of over 1600 consultants, means we provide the flexibility, innovation and pace that scaleups need to grow.
Introducing Rijk.
Rijk has spent over 20 years in the Financial Services industry.
His delivery experience spans commercial banking and capital markets, including regulatory reporting programmes, cloud data transformation and governance, payments and core banking transformation, as well as hands-on programme rescue and turnaround.
Rijk offers our clients interim CIO and CTO Support where he has been instrumental in delivering more effective project outcomes.
How has the pace of technological change influenced the way you do your job?
Like many technologists in financial servies, focusing solely on solution delivery is no longer sufficient.
We need to be able to deliver outcomes in complex environments which means being absolutely clear on what clients really want to do. It’s never just about technology; a successful solution incorporates changes to business processes, teams, navigating regulatory changes and cultural shifts.
How do you help your clients build an organisation that can keep up with the pace of change?
My job is very much about helping our clients navigate the future of financial technology. The pace of technological change in financial services isn’t just accelerating - it’s redefining the rules of engagement.
As a Blue Hat partner focused on banking, payments, data and IT modernisation, my role has evolved from technical solution delivery to a more holistic capability-driven delivery that typically also covers teams, skills and ways of working.
What technologies do you think stand the most chance to change your clients businesses in the next 3-5 years?
I see four key levers:
generative AI for productivity and customer engagement,
real-time data platforms to enable intelligent decisioning,
low-code/no-code for faster time-to-market, and
quantum-safe cryptography as institutions plan for the next era of trust.
Each of these can fundamentally reshape cost, capability, and compliance postures across the Financial Services industry and at Blue Hat we are actively exploring several of these levers in Blue Hat Lab deep-dives.
What kinds of technology problems do you think will drive the next wave of innovation?
We’re hitting limits with monolithic architectures and brittle integrations. The next wave will be driven by solving fragmentation - of data, of process and of customer / employee experience.
It can be very hard to make the business case to rebuild and address these challenges – often it just doesn’t stack up (the risk and costs are just too high). So, one has to be pragmatic about legacy transformation; every time we need to bolt on or make changes we try to do it in a way that makes the whole ecosystem better (and slightly less brittle).
AI tools are fantastic at software engineering and offer a real opportunity to address some of ‘legacy spaghetti’.
It means less focus on building legacy teams (which can be challenging and expensive) and more exploration of as we can use AI tools and frameworks to refactor/re-engineer towards a more modern codebase.
How do you help your clients’ teams advance existing products and create new ones?
Our most effective engagements focus not just on solving technical problems, but on building clients’ capacity to change.
That means aligning business and technology leadership, adopting agile operating models, and ensuring that architecture and governance enable evolution, not entropy. We help clients shift mindset and method—towards modularity, data-first thinking, and ecosystem integration.
Why did you join Blue Hat Associates?
Like the other partners, the main reason I joined is to work with likeminded individuals and very experienced technologists – who all ‘say it as it is’. This is very much my style. We’re not constrained by corporate structures and politics, which means we can be honest about what will (and won’t) work. We can provide a truly independent perspective for clients.
Another benefit of being part of Blue Hat is sharing cross industry experience and learning from each other. A broader perspective is always a better perspective
What's next for Blue Hat?
For our specialisms - particularly system integration and IT simplification - the future is composable.
We’re investing in capabilities that help clients move from complexity to clarity: through standardised interfaces, smart orchestration layers, and AI-assisted operations.
At Blue Hat, we’re scaling our reach and refining our playbooks to support global clients looking to modernise without disruption. The next chapter is about making transformation not just possible - but sustainable.
Thanks for reading! We hope you’ve found it insightful to get to know Rijk’s perspective on the tech landscape. You can connect with Rijk on Linkedin.
Learn more about our other Partners and get in touch for a free, friendly chat anytime.
