Bart Vandekerckhove is the co-founder and CEO of Raito, a company built around a simple conviction: data teams spend far too much time managing data access, and automating that work frees them to focus on innovation. Raito helps organizations handle access requests, approvals, reviews, and revocation at scale, with tactics like time-bound access and revocation workflows that prevent privilege creep before it becomes a security problem.

Bart’s perspective comes from years inside the data governance world. As the former PM of Privacy at Collibra and through consulting work with banks on regulatory requirements such as BCBS 239, he has seen first hand how slow data access management processes can harm innovation. That experience shaped his approach to the broader discipline: understanding the differences between data catalogs, dictionaries, and lineage, navigating ownership models across data teams, governance teams, and data mesh, and balancing GDPR and privacy obligations against the need for engineers to move quickly, including patterns like temporary access for debugging.

Today Bart is an advocate for treating access management as code rather than paperwork, drawing on practices such as automated tagging, active metadata, and access-as-code with Terraform and IAM. For organizations wrestling with governance that slows everyone down, he offers an incremental, pragmatic path to data access controls that teams can actually live with.