For years, the European debate on innovation has focused on the continent’s capacity to generate more startups. The acquisition of Leocare by Belfius Insurance invites us to look at the problem from another angle. The question is perhaps no longer whether Europe knows how to create technological players, but who will be able to bring them together and finance them on a continental scale.
By announcing the acquisition of the French insurtech Leocare, Belfius is carrying out its first external growth operation outside Belgium and openly displaying its European ambitions, already committed with the acquisition of a stake in ALAN. The Belgian group, owned by the federal state, considers France a priority market for developing its expertise in digital insurance. With nearly 200 billion euros in premiums collected each year, France constitutes the second largest European insurance market, while maintaining a level of digitalization that Belfius considers still below consumer expectations.
The operation also marks the start of a new phase for European insurance, that of consolidation.
Leocare is not a young startup in the experimental phase. Founded in 2017 by Christophe Dandois and Noureddine Bekrar, the company has raised more than $133 million from investment funds and has established itself as one of the most visible players in French digital insurance. In 2022, it claimed 160,000 insured customers for 44.2 million euros in turnover. At the time, the company aimed to quickly reach 100 million euros in annual revenue. Like many players of her generation, however, she had to deal with an environment radically different from that which prevailed during her first fundraising: rising interest rates, scarcity of risk capital and rising customer acquisition costs.
This development probably explains why the acquisition deserves to be analyzed from a financial as well as an industrial angle. The press release published by Belfius highlights a spectacular figure: 1.3 million users of the Leocare application. However, another indicator has disappeared from official communication: the number of active policyholders. The nuance is far from being anecdotal, especially since in insurance, the economic value is based less on the number of downloads than on the number of contracts in the portfolio, the volume of premiums collected and the profitability of the customer portfolio. Between the 160,000 policyholders claimed in 2022 and the 1.3 million users announced today, the gap is significant enough to raise questions.
By applying to historical figures the growth rates observed among the main European players in the sector, Leocare could today have between 250,000 and 400,000 active policyholders. Such a range would remain consistent with its development trajectory and would make it possible to approach or exceed the 100 million euros in turnover targeted a few years ago. However, no recent financial figures have been communicated, and this absence is all the more notable as Belfius has not further revealed the amount of the acquisition.
This discretion fuels another question about historical investors? Leocare is part of this generation of insurtechs which benefited from the abundance of capital during the years 2018-2022. For the funds which participated in its financing, this operation now constitutes a full-scale test. Will the transaction generate attractive multiples? Is this an exceptional outing or simply honorable? Without public valuation, it is impossible to measure the value creation generated over the nine years of the company’s existence.
The acquisition also raises a recurring question in the French ecosystem. Why does France regularly produce companies that are attractive enough to be acquired, but relatively few players capable of carrying out this type of operation themselves?
Leocare joins an already long list of French technology companies that have reached significant size before joining a foreign group or being financed mainly by international capital. In this case, the buyer is neither American nor British, but Belgian. The symbol deserves to be highlighted. While debates on technological sovereignty often focus on cloud infrastructures, semiconductors or artificial intelligence, this operation reminds us that another dimension of sovereignty lies in the ability to consolidate markets.
Belfius plays precisely this role; the group does not just buy a brand or a technology. It acquires a customer base, regulatory knowledge of the French market, a network of more than 750 partners and brokers as well as an already operational distribution platform. Even more, it gets its hands on a strategic asset: data. The announced synergies mainly relate to risk pricing, data exploitation and the development of new products.
This dimension is essential because insurance is gradually becoming an industry driven by algorithms. The quality of pricing models, the ability to detect fraud, the personalization of contracts and the automation of claims management increasingly rely on data control. In this context, achieving European size is no longer just a commercial question, but a condition for remaining competitive.
The operation could thus be interpreted as the first visible movement of a more ambitious strategy. Belfius presents Leocare as a first step in its European development. Nothing indicates today that this expansion will stop in France. On the contrary, the economic logic underlying the acquisition suggests that a player seeking to pool data, technology and subscription capabilities could be tempted to reproduce this scheme in other European countries.
The story of Leocare thus tells less about the future of French digital insurance than the emergence of a new generation of European consolidators. For two decades, Europe has sought to create more startups. The decade ahead could be that of actors capable of bringing them together. From this angle, the acquisition of Leocare is perhaps less the end of an entrepreneurial adventure than the beginning of a continental strategy of which Belfius hopes to become one of the main architects.
