Jerome Leclanche

Jerome Leclanche's public commentary circles back again and again to one frustration: Europe, and Belgium in particular, has built an economy on top of paperwork that assumes a world of stamps and envelopes, and this friction is not cosmetic but structural. His most pointed example is the Belgian requirement that employers notify the Social Inspectorate "BY REGISTERED PHYSICAL LETTER" about where payroll records are kept, a rule from a 1980 Royal Decree still on the books with "no digital procedure" to replace it . He is careful to generalize the point rather than treat it as a curiosity: "Belgium's digitalisation problem is not limited to outdated websites or forms that have to be downloaded as PDFs," he writes, arguing instead that it is "embedded in thousands of small legal requirements and internal procedures that still assume paper, printers, envelopes, stamps and manual processing" . The financial plan requirement for incorporating a company gets the same treatment: he describes it as "a confusing step" that costs founders "300-900 euros" for a document they "generally don't even end up using ... in any other way than as paperwork" . Across these posts the throughline is the same: administrative friction is largely invisible to people who don't run companies, but it is a real tax on founders, and he positions his own work as a direct response to it .

That response is concrete rather than rhetorical. With Financica he built an AI advisor to generate an "incorporation-ready financial plan in less than 10 minutes," explicitly framed as reducing the cost of incorporating a company in Belgium, a goal he says he has also pursued through BelDoc, Beci and Partena Professional . He extends the same bookkeeping-as-infrastructure logic into product architecture: "I think every engineer should learn the principles of double-entry," he argues, criticizing the accounting software industry for using ledgers only to store "transactional data" rather than as the actual source of truth . His stated design principle is to derive rather than sync: "There's no such thing as a 'Paid' status on an invoice," he says, because status should be computed from the ledger, and he applied the identical philosophy to a depreciations module, storing only the policy and deriving everything else . This is less a product pitch than a genuine belief about how financial software should be built, and it recurs as a coherent technical worldview rather than a one-off feature announcement.

Open source and interoperability are treated as near-ideological commitments, tied explicitly to his own history: "My first open source contribution was 22 years ago, to the Wine project. My entire career was built on open source foundations," he writes, presenting Ingram Technologies' release of eight financial libraries (for e-invoicing, UBL, XBRL, ECB exchange rates, and Peppol tooling in TypeScript) as a direct continuation of that debt . He frames the release partly as filling a market gap, noting that the Peppol ecosystem is largely Java-based and lacks "frontend-friendly tools," and says he intends to grow that TypeScript tooling further . The same instinct for building connective infrastructure shows up in his account of the Stripe Community Hackathon, where he describes porting a "Stripe-Peppol bridge" called Peppost to run on e-invoice.be, crediting collaborators by name and treating the hackathon itself as evidence that people could build "completely naturally" on Ingram Cloud .

On European policy, his tone sharpens into open irritation, particularly around EU-INC and the involvement of notaries. He calls unwatered adoption of EU-INC non-negotiable: "Europe cannot afford to have EU-INC fail to be adopted cleanly," and singles out resistance from "NOTARIES" with visible incredulity, urging his network to "make it your #1 priority" if they can help . He repeats the notary complaint days later in starker terms, saying European founders will remember that Germany offered them "absolutely nothing," and that it's time to move forward "without German notaries dragging us down, for the sake of protecting a dying line of business" . He casts the EU-INC fight in existential terms for the continent's tech ecosystem, calling it "our last shot at being relevant, autonomous, and actually regaining our sovereignty" .

His critique of European venture capital follows a similar structural logic to his complaints about paperwork: it's not that individual actors are wrong, but that incentive structures produce systemically bad outcomes. He argues that European investors price on "proven potential" rather than "actual potential," in contrast to a US mindset willing to "take a high-risk high-reward bet," and that this gap causes Europe to "lose out on a ton of commercial potential" from founders who don't yet have hard KPIs . He is blunt about the consequence: this caution "makes many EU investors nothing more than glorified bankers," immediately following with a rhetorical challenge, "what's the point of risk capital without the risk?" . He also credits one European mechanism with doing something right, saying the EIC (European Innovation Council) fills the high-risk R&D funding gap that in the US falls to the DoD, calling it "the class where we truly do it better" even as he insists it's a separate category from the venture-backed startups he's otherwise discussing .

Taken together, his commentary reads as a consistent, if informally expressed, theory of why Europe underperforms relative to its talent and ambition: legacy legal and procedural assumptions never updated for a digital economy , founder-facing costs that exist mostly to generate paperwork rather than value , incumbent professions (notaries) protecting themselves at the expense of collective upside , and capital allocators who hedge away the risk that risk capital is supposed to take . His practical takeaway is not despair but building around the obstacles: shipping tools that collapse bureaucratic cost (financial plans in minutes) , open-sourcing the connective tissue he thinks the ecosystem lacks , and treating specific policy fights like EU-INC as winnable if enough people treat them as urgent . He also keeps a lighter register alongside the structural critique, weighing in on ECB banknote designs and Goodhart's Law playing out in a Brussels infrastructure project where hitting a square-metreage target "made completion of the paved surface the overriding priority" at the expense of the actual goal, which he sums up as "Brussels, you played yourself" , suggesting the same skepticism about proxy metrics that shows up in his ledger-first accounting philosophy.