C4T appoints new CEO

Customs4trade, one of Europe’s leading SaaS platforms for customs management solutions, has strengthened its management team with the appointment of Rupert Spiegelberg as its new CEO. Chief Revenue Officer Jo Buvens, ex-Salesforce and Chief Product and Technology Officer Oliver Conze, ex SAP join Spiegelberg to drive C4T management and its digital platform CAS in a new direction to accelerate growth in 2023.

Spiegelberg succeeds Pieter Haesaert, who founded C4T together with Ilse Vermeersch as a customs consultancy in 2004 before developing the CAS platform ten years later. Founders Haesaert and Vermeersch will no longer be involved in the day-to-day operational management and strategy of C4T, but remain invested in the company as shareholders together with 83North, Hi Inov, 42CAP and 10x Group. Werner Koninckx will represent the founders on the board. Werner is chairman of 3E and DeltaQ and has extensive experience in scaling SaaS businesses.

“We are extremely proud of all the C4T’ers and our partners who have been relentlessly contributing to the progress we made at C4T the last years,” Haesaert and Vermeersch said. “We thank our clients and partners for the trust they put in our hands to service them in the complex and time critical world of customs compliance. C4T is now with CAS in a fantastic position to take advantage of all the changes in the customs world that we will see in coming years.”

CEO is SaaS veteran

Spiegelberg is a 20-year veteran of SaaS (Software as a Service) scale-up businesses in the UK, mainland Europe and the US. Buvens joins him as CRO, formerly Salesforce’s Regional Vice President and Country Leader for Belgium and Luxembourg, and by Oliver Conze as Chief Product and Technology Officer. Conze has spent 15 years at SAP – most recently as the German technology giant’s Chief Product Officer for Marketing Cloud.

“C4T is leading the way in driving down costs, speeding up turnaround times for UK and European importers and exporters and simplifying the hugely complex world of online customs management,” said Spiegelberg. “In taking up the role to lead C4T’s ‘A-team’ of customs experts, I will support their tireless dedication to transform our company into a champion of the sector. We will help our customers go beyond compliance to make customs and trade a strategic component of their growth.”

C4T, whose CAS digital platform manages more than one hundred thousand customs declarations every month for major brands such as Honda, Mizuno, Agristo, and many others, and delivers to customers the benefits of the increased digitisation of the customs sector as national governments across Europe move to upgrade customs systems over the course of the next couple of years.