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CIONET - What's next

Connecting ambitious digital leaders and businesses around the globe.

Catch up on the upcoming CIONET Events

             
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Germany Aug 27, 2025 Country Members Virtual german

Online: Wine Tasting - Unified Operations & Security

Die neuen geo-politischen Veränderungen und unvorhergesehene wirtschaftliche Anforderungen stellen Digital Leader vor neue Herausforderungen. Immer öfter wird in den Vorstandsetagen die Frage gestellt, wie der (IT) Betrieb sicher und ungestört weiter funktionieren kann, wenn regionale Rechenzentren und Infrastrukturen plötzlich nicht mehr verfügbar oder nur teilweise noch einsatzbereit sind. Der CIO muss für diese neue Welt resiliente Strategien parat haben, die für Business Continuity in bisher nicht vorstellbaren politischen und wirtschaftlichen Szenarien ermöglichen.

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Belgium Aug 28, 2025 Country Members Physical english

Summer Festival - Advisory Board

With the theme “The Power of Connection,” we’re embracing the essence of meaningful connections within IT and beyond. To honour our tradition, expect an unforgettable evening featuring keynote presentations, open bars, a summer BBQ, and a special experience designed to bring our vibrant community together.

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Belgium Aug 28, 2025 Country Members Physical english

20 Years CIONET - CIONET Belgium: Summer Festival

A special celebration marking 20 years of CIONET—two decades of empowering digital leaders and driving innovation in the technology landscape. This exclusive event will bring together our members to reflect on the incredible journey we've shared and look ahead to the future of digital leadership.Featuring keynote presentations from visionary CIOs, industry pioneers, and founding members, we’ll explore how far we’ve come and what lies ahead in the ever-evolving world of technology. Together, we will honour the contributions of our members who have shaped CIONET’s legacy while offering insights into how the community will continue to lead in the years to come.This is more than a celebration—it’s an opportunity to reconnect, reflect, and recharge with your fellow digital leaders. Don't miss this exclusive experience packed with inspiring talks, networking opportunities, and special recognitions that highlight the best of CIONET’s history and future.Let’s celebrate the past, present, and future of the digital community you helped build.

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Poland Aug 28, 2025 Country Members Physical Polish

SUMMER MIXER

SUMMER MIXER

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Germany Sep 9, 2025 Country Members Physical german

Frankfurt: AI Driven Logistics

Vom ersten Use Case zur strategischen Neuausrichtung CIONET lädt bereits zum vierten Mal zu einem exklusiven Roundtable für CIOs und Digitalverantwortliche aus Logistik und Handel ein. Im Mittelpunkt des Abends steht die Frage, wie Unternehmen ihre KI-Initiativen erfolgreich skalieren und aus ersten Use Cases echten strategischen Mehrwert schaffen. Microsoft 365 für Frontline Worker: Moderne Tools, die Mitarbeitende im Tagesgeschäft entlasten ServiceNow für Prozessintegration: Automatisierte End-to-End-Workflows – vom Schadensfall bis zur Retourenabwicklung KI-gestützte Disposition und Planung: Mit smarten Algorithmen zur optimierten Supply Chain Digitale Lieferketten und letzte Meile: Transparenz, Effizienz und Kundenzentrierung durchgängig gedacht

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Belgium Sep 13, 2025 All Members Physical english

CIONET Cycling Event

Join us for a wonderful ride. The ride is accessible to all levels of riders and doesn't require extensive technical skills. More information will follow soon. Looking forward to ride together!

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Recent Cases

Please Log In with your CIONET account first

Belfius uses Microsoft Azure Machine Learning to help detect fraud and money laundering

Belfius recognized the opportunity of its cloud transformation to further scale up technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Lacking an overview of all features, data scientists struggled with repetitive code. Azure Machine Learning, Synapse Analytics, and Databricks helped improve development time, efficiency, and reliability.

Continually progressing towards a more sustainable society is an essential tenet for Belfius. Belfius offers a full range of banking and insurance products for retail customers, small and medium-sized companies, public institutions, non-profit organizations, and large enterprises. The organization invites every customer—personal, business owner, government agency, municipality, or company—to actively participate in this effort. 

Eager to explore new ground and push boundaries, Belfius approaches all its activities with passion, purpose, and integrity. Customer satisfaction is at the core of Belfius’ mission. This includes ensuring that its products and solutions balance the interests of all stakeholders. Belfius strives to create long-term value for its customers and for the company, as well as for the community and the environment. 

Belfius recognized the shortcomings of its existing systems and the need to increase synergies to further scale technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Belfius had been deploying AI tools to help with risk assessment and identifying unusual behaviors. It had also begun its digital transformation, moving key functions to the cloud to adapt to the changing needs of its customers. Its future cloud-based infrastructure will allow a dynamic and flexible use of AI and ML applications within the stringent privacy, security, and compliance requirements of the financial industry.

Lacking an overview of all features, Belfius data scientists were rewriting the same code repeatedly for different data models. “There was no versioning control and no search,” says Thibaut Roelandt, Lead Engineer for the Central AI team at Belfius. “Without versioning control, coding took longer, making it very challenging for us to act quickly to seize new opportunities,” explains Julie Dedeyne, a data scientist on the banking side of Belfius. “The bank was eager to have consistency between its various operational models and its training by using the same feature pipeline for both.” 

An opportunity for transformation

Belfius was keen to improve development time, become more efficient, and gain reliability. To do this, Belfius built on the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform using services including Azure Machine Learning, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Databricks. An early adopter, Belfius used Azure Machine Learning managed feature store, then in public preview, to operationalize ML features for an end-to-end ML operations workstream. At its core, managed feature store empowers machine learning professionals to collaboratively develop and use features in production. “Azure Machine Learning managed feature store holds a lot of promise,” says Roelandt. “Our data scientists can simply provide a feature set specification and let the system handle serving, securing, and monitoring of the features. This frees them from the overhead of setting up and managing the underlying feature engineering pipelines. They can also perform local development and testing of features.” Feature store can consume features from Azure Machine Learning, Azure Databricks, and more.

Managed feature store increases agility in building models because users can discover and reuse features instead of starting every time from scratch. It encourages faster experimentation with the ability to do local development and testing of new features. Consistent feature definition across the organization increases the reliability of ML models and supports versioning, just as Belfius had imagined. As features can be reused and materialization and monitoring are system managed, feature store reduces costs.

Expecting results with impact

Belfius initially identified two use cases for the new solution: Fraud detection and anti-money laundering. Fraud detection, under the auspices of Belfius insurance company, is an example of the importance of the online feature store, where the company needs quick access to the features to calculate a fraud risk score. Today, this calculation takes place via nightly batches. In the future, by using real-time scoring with the online feature store, the insurance company will be able to detect deceitful claims within minutes. “We are looking to build more models like this every year, gaining efficiency, meeting stringent regulatory standards, and offering more personalization to our customers,” says Roelandt.

Every year Belfius bank processes hundreds of millions of transactions, checking each one for potential money laundering activities. For suspicious transactions, an alert is generated. ML models are used to calculate risk scores on these alerts, allowing Belfius to have analysts focus on high-risk alerts and automatically close false positives. 

With Azure Machine Learning managed feature store reaching general availability (GA), Belfius can take advantage of industry-leading AI and ML technology. The cloud-scale data and app platform allows Belfius to deliver adaptive, responsive, and personalized experiences through intelligent applications built with Azure. As Roelandt says, “We want our data scientists to focus on creating transformative features rather than waiting for data engineering. We’re excited to provide them best practices and standardized processes across the company on our new corporate data platform.”

Partners

Checkout our CIONET COOKBOOK

cookbook

Embark on a culinary journey through the ever-evolving world of digital leadership with our third edition of the CIONET Cookbook: Recipes for Digital Success. Unveiling the intricate trilemma faced by today’s Master Chefs, our trailblazing European CIOs address a challenge at the nexus of customer interests, digital transformation strategies, and IT modernisation. Their secret? Synchronising the gearing between customer, business, and technology to create a frictionless movement through the digital landscape.

The CIONET Cookbook uses the analogy of a five-star restaurant to explain the importance of optimally integrated technology, with the CIO as Master Chef. In order to provide the best service to its customers, a top restaurant must have the right atmosphere, an inviting menu, a well-equipped kitchen, talented and committed front-of-house and kitchen staff and smooth-running processes that ensure an enjoyable experience for diners.

CIONET TV

 
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Kalman Tiboldi - CTO & Founder at GemOne-TVH - Simplify or Die: Why Complexity Is the Real IT Challenge

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Isabelle Droll - CIO for Airline, Corporate, Hotels & Resorts and Sustainability at TUI - Data, Diversity, and Destinations

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Sharon Prior - CIO in transition - How Great Tech Leadership Begins with Business Thinking

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José Antonio López, Group CIO at TOUS - Jewels, Data & AI: Inside the Digital Transformation of TOUS

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Tom Tanghe - General Manager ITC EMEA at Daikin Europe - Reinventing the CIO Role

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CIOFEST 2025 - From Order Taker to Proactive Disruptor

CIONET Reports

 
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Cybersecurity in critical infrastructure

Geopolitical tensions have dominated the headlines for over two years now. In this context, the cyber threat landscape is also evolving rapidly. The protection and security of critical infrastructure – both physical and digital – is becoming increasingly important.

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HDS - From Hype to Reality Navigating the Challenges of GenAI

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Integration In An Era Of AI: Challenges And Opportunities

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Latest CIONET News

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Discover the CIONET app

Staying ahead of trends and connecting with other CIOs was never easier.

In our new app, our members connect with other digital leaders from around the world to find better solutions to their challenges.

Connect with digital leaders like you

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Experience inspiring and thought-provoking content and conversations you can’t find anywhere else

Make better, more well-informed decisions about the topics that are most important to you

Anna Kopp (1)

Anna Kopp

Head of IT Germany and Regional Office Lead Munich, Microsoft

“The CIONET App allows us to learn from eachother and and find the courage to be authentic by hearing stories from others! Thanks to Tobias and the whole team for bringing us together:-) ”
Mauricio Amaro

Mauricio Amaro

IT Director, IT Thinker

“The main things that I would like to get from our community of Digital Leaders are: networking, share experiences, share best practices and successful cases, and comments and recommendations about providers.”
Vijay Anand

Vijay Anand

Vice president IT & Compliance, VisionaryRCM (A Carlyle Grp Company)

“The CIONET app provides a really cool platform to network and share insights.”

About CIONET

CIONET’s mission is to help IT executives become more at ease and above all more successful in their jobs. So they can do more than just keep up with change but ultimately define it. CIONET opens up a whole new universe of opportunities in IT management.

With the largest membership of corporate digital leaders across Europe, Latin America, US and Australia, CIONET has the expertise and pioneering vision to solve or address any IT management challenge.

Why join CIONET?

From our local and global events, from our publications and research to our executive education programmes, everything we do is aimed at making sure digital leaders maximise their potential.

Connect

with digital leaders who share your interests, who face the same challenges, who care about the same topics.

Share

stories, experiences, and ideas around our shared mission.

Learn

from our exclusive events, publications and research.

Find

inspiration, thought-provoking conversations, expert perspectives and exclusive first-hand content each and every day

Grow

and make better, more well-informed decisions on how to lead your digital business.

Maximise

your potential. Realise your ambitions.

About CIONET

Join CIONET

We'd love to welcome you as the newest member of our CIONET community where Digital Leaders unite. 

You can either send us a registered handwritten letter explaining why you'd like to become a member or you can simply talk to us right here!

Contact us

Would you like to know more about CIONET, membership or partnership opportunities? Do you have feedback or any other question? Send us a message!