The eCustoms People.

Vivansa was founded in Belgium in 2001. For most of that time we were a consulting practice: the people you called when a customs regime changed, a filing backlog wouldn't clear, or a modernisation programme needed someone who'd actually done it before.

Our people's story starts earlier, on the engineering side. When CCN/CSI — the network that still connects Europe's customs and tax administrations — was built in the 1990s, the people who would later create Vivansa were part of that effort: Vivien ran its physical deployment across the EU countries and its acceptance testing, Olivier served in its first support centre. Our co-founder Jacques Piret was Chief Architect of EMCS, the trans-European excise system — in production since 2010, carrying hundreds of millions of messages between administrations every year. And the thread never broke: CUST-DEV2, CUST-DEV3, CCN2, SOFT-DEV. We were IT people before we became specialists in digitalising customs, tax and trade compliance, and that combination has shaped everything since.

That work took us deep into the machinery of global trade — from a single importer's declarations to the systems that run customs for entire national administrations and the European Commission. Along the way we kept meeting the same friction, and kept solving it the same painstaking way.

So we built it into software. Today Vivansa is both an advisory practice and a product company — Viictor, our orchestration robot; ViCS, our compliance services; and lxr.CCN, our certified EU connector — with the same people, and the same standards, behind all of it.