Belfius - Transforming a digital workplace to increase customer trust

Discover how Belfius, one of Belgium's leading banks, partnered with Kyndryl to enhance their regulatory readiness in anticipation of the 2025 DORA deadline. By redefining their target operating model and conducting a comprehensive skills audit, Belfius successfully regained control over their IT infrastructure, increased flexibility, and ensured full transparency in their operations. This customer story highlights the practical steps taken by Belfius to strengthen their IT controls and achieve compliance, offering valuable insights for IT leaders navigating similar regulatory challenges.

Business opportunity

As one of Belgium's leading banks and insurance companies, with a history of 150 years, Belfius serves 3.8 million customers, with over 12 thousand in the public sector. The company is embedded in all segments of the Belgian economy and society. Its brand values focus on caring for Belgian society by earning and maintaining the trust of every customer.

With the rise of hybrid work, Belfius recognized their need to transform their digital workplace environment. They needed to develop a secure, mobile, flexible and personalized solution that would enhance employee experience and enable Belfius to better serve their customers. 

Technical challenge

Belfius’ original digital workplace was implemented on premises at a time when dedicated telecom bandwidth was essential to guarantee consistent network performance for banking employees, so they could reliably and securely serve customers, especially in hundreds of Belfius branches. As internet bandwidth expanded, Belfius customers enjoyed fast mobile banking, but the bank’s employee-assisted services, based on a centralized application model, were sometimes hampered by unpredictable disconnections. At the same time, the centralized model faced challenges in keeping up with available technology upgrades and innovations. To address this, Belfius aimed to align its digital workplace with today’s requirements and expectations.

Our solution

Together, Belfius and Kyndryl created a modernization strategy with a phased approach to minimize overall disruption to the business. This strategy supports Belfius in achieving their business goals by enabling faster delivery of new applications and smoother interactions with colleagues and customers.

In the first phase, Belfius designed and rolled out a new corporate device program that includes:

• Direct access to Microsoft Office 365 applications, rather than virtualized access, enabling 12,000 Belfius employees to securely and agilely collaborate across departments to efficiently deliver banking and insurance services.
• Automated cloud-based software updates to increase productivity by proactively reducing technical issues, ensuring the devices are always running at the latest security levels.

The power of partnership

Belfius’ digital workplace transformation is built on leading Microsoft technologies:

• Microsoft Office 365 (including Teams) unifies workplace collaboration on a single platform.
• Microsoft Intune proactively manages software updates across the Belfius device fleet from a landing zone in Microsoft Azure.
• Microsoft Defender implements zero trust security that uses AI to monitor and protect the fleet from threats.

What progress looks like

Belfius has gained increased productivity and engagement with reduced risk as a result of these first phase achievements:

• Belfius employees are able to work anywhere anytime and frictionlessly collaborate with applications on new devices.
• The Digital Experience Management (DEM) environment monitors user experience.
• Fleet-wide zero trust security protects sensitive data both in flight and at rest.

Currently, Belfius is refactoring virtualized applications to directly run on Microsoft Windows 11. This extends the benefits of the new digital workplace to Belfius employees regardless of where they are working.

“One of my favorite features of the Digital Experience Management is that corrective actions are taken even before the users notice a problem.” 

Bart Vercammen

Head of Digital Workplace Services, Belfius

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