A leading Belgian bank unlocks innovation in IT and cybersecurity

Belfius Bank, an integrated bank and insurer serving more than 3.8 million people in Belgium, wanted to make sure that its IT, including its cybersecurity solutions, could evolve quickly enough to help the bank stay ahead of today’s rapidly evolving financial industry and continue to deliver the best banking and insurance services to its customers.

By contracting with IBM for IBM Security® services and software and IBM Z® mainframes, Belfius has visibility and control over its technology while improving its ability to innovate.

By shifting to a direct managed-services relationship with IBM, Belfius tapped into advanced security capabilities augmented by AI and machine learning (ML), and it opened its core IT systems to ongoing innovation.

The partnership offers:

24x7 centralized security operations: From an IBM security operations center (SOC), IBM® Threat Detection and Response (TDR) Services provide real-time incident management around the clock.

Efficient, automated threat detection and response: The IBM team leverages IBM Security software for single-pane-of-glass visibility across Belfius’s on-premises and cloud infrastructure. The software automatically analyzes and correlates thousands of security events per second and helps orchestrate and, where appropriate, automate incident response activities. Belfius has full visibility into a security information and event management (SIEM) dashboard and all actions and statuses related to incident response, and it can collaborate with the TDR team to refine use cases and response rules over time.

AI and ML-driven efficiencies: The security platform within TDR includes ML-based analysis and classification of every security event—including those from endpoints. Approximately 73% of alerts are automatically processed, with false positives quickly discarded and benign or standard issues assigned to automated resolutions, saving human analysts’ bandwidth to focus on more serious issues. The platform also applies AI to threat intelligence collected from across IBM’s global network of SOCs—to continuously and transparently tune, adapt and improve detection capability.

Managed mainframe and storage: Belfius and IBM migrated Belfius’s core banking and insurance applications to two new Z mainframes, and connected the company’s distributed computing environment to software-defined storage. Finally, the agreement gives Belfius direct access to the IBM software catalog, enabling it to incorporate solutions for modernizing its platform on demand, without dependence on typical procurement processes.

“The tighter integration between the Belfius and IBM security teams, combined with the additional AI components of the IBM platform, provides Belfius with enhanced visibility and control over our risk and security posture,” says Karine Goris, Chief Security Officer at Belfius.

Belfius can also strengthen compliance reporting. In fact, a new European Union regulation, the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) (link resides outside of ibm.com), and the EU’s 2023 NIS2 Directive (link resides outside of ibm.com) on cybersecurity, are creating significant new reporting requirements for financial institutions. By gaining greater visibility into its core IT platforms and its security solutions through the direct engagement with IBM, Belfius can more readily access the information it needs to submit to regulators.