Abstract. In this paper we develop the vectorial Ribaucour transformation for Euclidean submanifolds. We prove a general decomposition theorem showing that under appropriate conditions the composition of two or more vectorial Ribaucour transformations is again a vectorial Ribaucour transformation. An immediate consequence of this result is the classical permutability of Ribaucour transformations. Our main application is to provide an explicit local construction of an arbitrary Euclidean n-dimensional submanifold with flat normal bundle and codimension m by means of a commuting family of m Hessian matrices on an open subset of Euclidean space R n . Actually, this is a particular case of a more general result. Namely, we obtain a similar local construction of all Euclidean submanifolds carrying a parallel flat normal subbundle, in particular of all those that carry a parallel normal vector field. Finally, we describe all submanifolds carrying a Dupin principal curvature normal vector field with integrable conullity, a concept that has proven to be crucial in the study of reducibility of Dupin submanifolds.An explicit construction of all submanifolds with flat normal bundle of the Euclidean sphere carrying a holonomic net of curvature lines, that is, admitting principal coordinate systems, was given by Ferapontov in [8]. The author points out that his construction "resembles" the vectorial Ribaucour transformation for orthogonal systems developed in [13]. The latter provides a convenient framework for understanding the permutability properties of the classical Ribaucour transformation. This paper grew from an attempt to better understand the connection between those two subjects, as a means of unravelling the geometry behind Ferapontov's construction. This has led us to develop a vectorial Ribaucour transformation for Euclidean submanifolds, extending the transformation in [13] for orthogonal coordinate systems. It turns out that any n-dimensional submanifold with flat normal bundle of R n+m can be locally transformed by a suitable vectorial Ribaucour transformation to the inclusion map of an open subset of an n-dimensional subspace of R n+m . Inverting such a transformation yields the following explicit local construction of an arbitrary n-dimensional submanifold with flat normal bundle of R n+m by means of a commuting family of m Hessian matrices on an open subset of R n . Notice that carrying a principal coordinate system is not required.