<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=2528533714139722&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
New call-to-action
be-page-banner (1)

Welcome to CIONET Belgium

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

See what's next

Upcoming Events

 
Banner

Belgium 2-10-25 Squad Only Virtual english

The Career Path of the Architect ;Great architecture begins with great architects

Architecture doesn’t happen in diagrams. It happens in minds, seasoned, curious, sharp minds that understand how the pieces fit. But who’s shaping these minds? Who’s growing the next generation of digital architects? If you’re responsible for complex systems, and for the people designing them, this session is for you.

Read More
Banner

Belgium 9-10-25 Country Members Physical english

Belgium's Got Talent '25 - CIONET Belgium: Community Event

Today’s IT world moves faster than ever. New tools, new ways of working, constant updates!  The real challenge? Making sure your people stay in the loop, up to speed, and ready to move. That’s why this year’s edition of Belgium’s Got Digital Talent is all about mastering knowledge flow, how to share the right know-how with the right people, at the right time. No more teams working in silos. No more vital info getting lost.We’re diving into practical ways to keep your teams smart, agile, and aligned. Whether you're leading an IT team, shaping digital strategy, or hiring tech talent, this event will give you the ideas, tools, and energy to turn fast change into a competitive edge.

Read More
Banner

Belgium 14-10-25 Squad Only Virtual english

Agile Infrastructure ; How to build technical foundations that don’t slow you down

Agile delivery often collides with inflexible infrastructures. One team wants to release weekly. Another is waiting six months for a new test environment. Sounds familiar? If your infra team is tired of being the bottleneck, and your devs are tired of waiting, this session opens a path forward.

Read More

Upcoming TRIBE Events

 
Banner

October 2, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english

The Career Path of the Architect ;Great architecture begins with great architects

Architecture doesn’t happen in diagrams. It happens in minds, seasoned, curious, sharp minds that understand how the pieces fit. But who’s shaping these minds? Who’s growing the next generation of digital architects? If you’re responsible for complex systems, and for the people designing them, this session is for you.

Read More
Banner

October 14, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Virtual english

Agile Infrastructure ; How to build technical foundations that don’t slow you down

Agile delivery often collides with inflexible infrastructures. One team wants to release weekly. Another is waiting six months for a new test environment. Sounds familiar? If your infra team is tired of being the bottleneck, and your devs are tired of waiting, this session opens a path forward.

Read More
Banner

October 17, 2025 Squad Session Squad Only Physical english

Leading Change When Your Organisation Pushes Back ; How to move forward when transformation feels like a threat

You’ve secured the budget. The tech is solid. Leadership has signed off. But the project’s going nowhere. People smile in meetings and ignore you afterwards. Middle managers hesitate. Teams follow the old way, even when a new one exists. Every step forward feels like a negotiation, because it is. You’re not alone. Many digital leaders find themselves in this position. The business knows it needs to change but isn’t ready to let go. This session is about those moments.

Read More

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.”

Partners

CIONET Circles

CIONET Business Circles

Banner
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?

Read More
Banner
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.

Read More
Banner
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 !

Read More
Banner
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.

Read More

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
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
CTO - Technology Services & Practices
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 Technology & Transformation Officer
Krëfel
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
christel-plessers
Christel Plessers
Head of IT European Markets
Mercedes-Benz Europe
bauduin cor
Baudouin Corlùy
Chief Market Development Officer
LCL Data Centers

Team

Luc Hendrikx
Luc Hendrikx
Partner - 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
Partner - Founder
Untitled design (1)-2
Jelte Scheys
Tribes Sales Director Belgium
foto Herman
Herman Roelandts
Tribe Master
Joseph Antoun
Joseph Antoun
Senior Programme Director
1-Dec-16-2021-02-15-57-02-PM
Eman De Sutter
Programme Manager
4-Feb-08-2022-10-22-09-03-AM
Shelly Deracourt
Programme 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
Programme Manager
Vlera Berishaa (1)
Vlera Berisha
Community Manager
ML B-W-1
Martine Lefevre
Financial Controller

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!