It’s life in the fast lane when EY Belgium partners with UGent Racing

EY Belgium proudly announces its partnership with UGent Racing as the engineering students build their next-generation race car.

In brief:

• UGent Racing teamed up with EY Belgium in their quest of building an autonomous race car.
•  As a strategic partner, EY Belgium ensures that everything in the team runs smoothly.
• With partnerships like these EY Belgium is investing in its employer branding as well. 

When students from Ghent University baptised the self-driving, electric racing car project during the 2020 lockdown, they succeeded in harnessing two godparents for this baby: TV celebrity and scientist Lieven Scheire and Peter Hinssen – digital entrepreneur, author, lecturer and speaker. It was through Peter Hinssen that EY came into contact with UGent Racing to support their project. The strong multidisciplinary team, now numbering 70 students, is led by a team captain. The idea is that the engineering students build one new car per year. The accumulated knowledge will also be bundled each year into a dozen Master's theses.

This year the engineering students worked on the second version of their self-driving car. This new car will take part in the international Formula Student competition for the second consecutive year, with events at Silverstone and Assen, among others. There is no lack of ambition at UGent Racing that openly dreams of taking podium positions in this competition within a few years.

Changing the image

For every specialisation in the construction of the self-driving car, UGent Racing can rely on expert technological partners with EY offering support in terms of strategy, cybersecurity and finance. Several EY colleagues and teams will give expert advice to the young UGent Racing team on a number of important topics such as organisational issues, strategic sponsorship deals, financing, and cybersecurity.

For EY’s Consulting branch, this project was the perfect opportunity to change the organization’s image as a purely financial service provider. “We are still largely perceived by our customers as accounting and tax specialists. But today we are also a strong partner in the field of consulting”, says Andy Deprez, partner of EY Belgium Consulting. This statement is backed up by the figures: of the 2,400 employees at EY Belgium, 750 are currently active in business consulting and technology consulting. The latter now accounts for 60% of all employees in consulting, which demonstrates the importance of this branch within the EY services package.

However, EY still has a way to go when it comes to branding that service. Which is precisely why it wants to use the exposure around this out-of-the-box partnership with UGent Racing to attract new relationships and to put technology consulting in the spotlight. Not least for the target group of students and high potentials with a STEM profile. And by doing so it is demonstrating that it is more than just a financial service provider and is also an attractive employer in an innovative and high-tech environment.

Sounding board for just about everything

EY wants to be a sounding board for UGent Racing that will inspire and drive them on. Every two weeks, EY holds meetings with the team captain of UGent Racing to review the organisational section such as planning, challenges, bottlenecks, etc. Work schedules and risks are also scrutinised, and advice is given on strategic partnerships. These are currently spread over one year, but EY recommends turning them into contracts of three to four years, in order to guarantee the future continuity of the project.

It is EY’s Accounting, Compliance and Reporting team that is responsible for the accounting and tax declarations of the non-profit organization. Working closely with start-ups and scale-ups, EY ACR has very broad experience in accounting, tax and legal matters. This experience is also particularly useful in order to give the UGent Racing team total peace of mind, especially in this start-up phase.

Eventually, the young student team will manage their own accounts under the supervision of EY. Johan Verheyen, Associate Partner, leads the EY ACR team. “We run the financial picture past the finance team of UGent Racing. The relationship between our own young team and their student team is particularly good,” Johan Verheyen points out. “It’s nice to see how these young, enthusiastic students studying various courses are building that car as a close-knit team. For us, the assignment will have been successful if UGent Racing meets its targets and doesn't have to worry about the administrative and financial aspects.”

EY’s Consulting branch also plays a role in the area of cybersecurity. This mainly involves risk assessment and coordination in the implementation of a cybersecurity policy, as well as an awareness-raising role.  Since the self-driving car will use the 5G network of partner Proximus, there is a risk of hacking the incoming and outgoing communication. EY must prevent unauthorised signals from reaching the vehicle that could disrupt the drive system.

Sarah Ampe, consultant Cybersecurity at EY: “Cybersecurity is a never-ending story. There’s always something that is changing; so, you can tinker with it endlessly.” This is not something that keeps UGent Racing awake at night for the moment – partly because cybersecurity is not (yet) included in the Competition Regulations for the Formula Student competitions – but that will certainly change with the arrival of the 5G network. “Our role will become much more important in the future, and we must at least ensure that there is a growing awareness within the cybersecurity team,” adds Sarah Ampe. In addition, it is also EY’s task to put cybersecurity on the agenda for the construction of the vehicle, the so-called cybersecurity by design, because data security is a growing issue.

EY’s new partnerships drive market expansion

Now that the partnership with UGent Racing is on track, EY is set to continue along the path it has chosen. Therefore, it wants to focus even more on young people. The traditional partnerships do admittedly ensure particularly successful events, both in terms of visibility and networking, but EY wants to cast its net wider and get young people involved in its story. “To broaden our image to young high potentials and in order to attract these young people as employees and relations , we also need to involve them in our partnerships. UGent Racing has been a successful step in this ambition,” says Andy Deprez, looking back with satisfaction.