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Welcome to CIONET Belgium

Realise your ambition! Connect with your local community of digital leaders.

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Upcoming Events

 
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Belgium 28-8-25 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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Belgium 2-9-25 All TRIBERS Virtual english

What Does It Cost to Host an App? ; A practical guide to calculating hosting costs across infra, licenses, and operations

You’ve been asked a simple question: “What does it cost to host this application?” But the answer is anything but simple. The platform sits across multiple data centres. The app spans a few VMs, shares a backup system, uses licensed monitoring, and touches five different teams. Your CMDB should help, but it’s rigid, outdated, or incomplete. And yet, you still need to provide a number, clear, explainable, and grounded in reality.

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Belgium 9-9-25 Squad Only Physical english

Fixing the Data Foundations ; Making data trustworthy, consistent, and ready for action

As Belgium navigates the complexities of GDPR and various data sovereignty regulations, organizations across multiple industries face both challenges and opportunities in managing their data across borders. The quest for compliance often intersects with the need for business growth, raising questions about the balance between protection and progress. How can companies effectively own and safeguard their data while ensuring compliance without stifling innovation and expansion in a multi-industry landscape?

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Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
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July 14, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Platforma KSEF – Krajowy System eFaktur

Ministerstwo Finansów zapowiedziało wdrożenie platformy KSeF na 2026 rok. Przygotowanie firm i ich systemów wymaga wiedzy o zakresie KSeF i elementach integracji na poziomie IT. Zapraszamy na kontynuację spotkania z udziałem przedstawicieli Centrum Informatyki Resortu Finansów (CIRF) i Ministerstwa Finansów.

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July 16, 2025 Squad Session Physical polish

TRIBES LEADERSHIP CIRCLE

Tribes Leadership Circle to cykliczne, wysokopoziomowe spotkania wyłącznie dla dyrektorów obszarowych, posiadających dostęp w ramach wykupionego członkostwa.

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July 22, 2025 Squad Session Invitation Only Virtual polish

Droga Rabena: od prostych procesów RPA, poprzez hiperautomatyzację, aż do systemów agenckich.

Grupa Raben od siedmiu lat rozwija własny ekosystem automatyzacji, przechodząc od pierwszych wdrożeń prostych procesów RPA, przez etap hiperautomatyzacji, aż po eksperymenty z systemami agenckimi. W trakcie sesji Zbigniew Kępiński przedstawi, jak wyglądała ta ewolucja – jakie podejścia i technologie były stosowane na kolejnych etapach oraz jakie wnioski płyną z dotychczasowych doświadczeń.

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CIONET Partner Updates

CIONET Partner Updates

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.”

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

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Healthcare Circle

Digital Transformation is redefining the future of health care and health delivery. All stakeholders are convinced that these innovations will create value for patients, healthcare practitioners, hospitals, and governments along the patient pathway. The benefits are starting from prevention and awareness to diagnosis, treatment, short- and long-term follow-up, and ultimately survival. But how do you make sure that your working towards an architecturally sound, secure and interoperable health IT ecosystem for your hospital and avoid implementing a hodgepodge of spot solutions? How does your IT department work together with the other stakeholders, such as the doctors and other healthcare practitioners, Life Sciences companies, Tech companies, regulators and your internal governance and administrative bodies?

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Telenet Business Leadership Circle

The Telenet Business Leadership Circle powered by CIONET, offers a platform where IT executives and thought leaders can meet to inspire each other and share best practices. We want to be a facilitator who helps you optimise the performance of your IT function and your business by embracing the endless opportunities that digital change brings.

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Les Rencontres

Découvrez la dynamique du leadership numérique aux Rencontres de CIONET, le programme francophone exclusif de CIONET pour les leaders numériques en Belgique, rendu possible grâce au soutien et à l'engagement de nos partenaires de programme : Deloitte, Denodo et Red Hat. Rejoignez trois événements inspirants par an à Liège, Namur et en Brabant Wallon, où des CIOs et des experts numériques francophones de premier plan partagent leurs perspectives et expériences sur des thèmes d'affaires et de IT actuels. Laissez-vous inspirer et apprenez des meilleurs du secteur lors de sessions captivantes conçues spécialement pour soutenir et enrichir votre rôle en tant que CIO pair. Ne manquez pas cette opportunité de faire partie d'un réseau exceptionnel d'innovateurs numériques !

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Female Leadership Circle

CIONET is committed to highlighting and celebrating female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, creating a leadership programme that empowers and elevates women within the tech industry. This initiative is dedicated to showcasing the achievements and successes of leading women, fostering an environment where female role models are recognised, and their contributions can ignite progress and inspire the next generation of women in IT. Our mission is to shine the spotlight a little brighter on female role models in IT, Tech & Digital, and to empower each other through this inner network community.

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Check out our latest news

Testimonials

Geert Goethals
Geert Goethals
CIO
Sibelga
Bahadir Samli
Bahadir Samli
CIO
ING Belgique
2-Feb-29-2024-11-35-00-9309-AM
Bart Kerkhofs
Vice President & Head of IT
Bridgestone EMIA
Untitled design (1)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-57-AM
Michał Paprocki
Group CIO
Euroclear
1-Feb-29-2024-11-34-59-8990-AM
Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer
Chief Information Officer
NATO
Untitled design-Nov-22-2023-08-42-05-3178-AM
Annick Faes
Vice President IT and CIO Medical Devices EMEA
Johnson & Johnson
Piet_De_Ceuleners
Piet De Ceuleners
Global IT Director
Melexis
1658251930890
Dirk De Bevere
Large Enterprise Sales Leader
Telenet Business
Untitled design-7
Stef Schampaert
Country Managing Director BeLux
Red Hat
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Geert Lejon
Geert Lejon
Vice President Head of Belux / Head of Comms Benelux
Cognizant
Kevin_Ledegen
Kevin Ledegen
Group IT director
SDWorx
Gunter-Van-Craen_Small
Gunter Van Craen
Chief Digital & Information Officer
Bekaert
Thomas Kessler
Thomas Kessler
Partner | CIO Programme Leader
Deloitte
Emmanuel Gob
Emmanuel Gob
CIO
DPD
pascal pauwels
Pascal Pauwels
CIO
Colruyt
Untitled design (4)-Dec-13-2023-10-53-15-5032-AM
Koen Segers
Managing Director Belgium and Luxembourg
Dell Technologies
benoit dewaele
Benoît Dewaele
Group IT Directo
Vandemoortele
Dirk Deridder-1
Dirk Deridder
Director IT Infrastructure, Systems, Services & Support (CIO / CTO role)
SMALS
Thierry Driesens
Thierry Driesens
CIO
TVH
Untitled design-Sep-18-2023-11-59-29-7866-AM
Koen Vandaele
CIO
Delen Private Bank
Untitled design (4)-Jun-12-2023-01-23-11-7540-PM
Liesbet D'hoker
Managing Director
Kyndryl BeLux
steven-vermeulen
Steven Vermeulen
CIO
Digitaal Vlaanderen
Jack Hamande
Jack Hamande
Director General Digital Transformation
Federale Overheidsdienst Beleid en Ondersteuning
Tom Tomczak
Tom Tomczak
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
NRB
1726588748718
Cassandre Laurent
Directeur général
Agence du Numérique
an swalens
An Swalens
Head Of IT (CIO)
National Bank of Belgium
Untitled design (2)-Apr-01-2022-10-58-34-68-AM
Elke Laeremans
Chief Digital & Supply Chain Officer at Casa International
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Koen Van Loo
Koen Van Loo
CIO
Group S.
Peter Sany
Peter Sany
Executive Advisor
Zoom
CIONET Belgium - Advisory Board Member - Steven De Haes
Steven De Haes
Dean
Antwerp Management School
Marleen Thorré
Marleen Thorré
Head of Digital EMEA
Mitsubishi Chemical Group

Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
CEO
Inès De Bien
Inès De Bien
Partner - CCO
1-Feb-08-2022-10-22-08-68-AM
Daniel Eycken
Partner - COO
Hendrik Deckers
Hendrik Deckers
Founder - MD
Untitled design (1)-2
Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Program Director
1-Dec-16-2021-02-15-57-02-PM
Eman De Sutter
Program Manager
4-Feb-08-2022-10-22-09-03-AM
Shelly Deracourt
Program Manager
Untitled design (5)-Sep-01-2022-02-47-55-60-PM
Charlotte Coen
Partner Success Manager
Untitled design (1)-Nov-22-2023-08-56-42-6802-AM
Ivana Bradvica
Junior Event Manager
ML B-W-1
Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller
Vlera Berishaa (1)
Vlera Berisha
Junior Community Manager
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Phaedra Vanhaeren
Programme & Event Manager

Contact us

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