This custom solution automates the process for granting the career break benefit – financial compensation for workers nearing retirement who reduce their working hours.
Client name FBZMN
Industry Social Funds
Technology .NET, Angular, Azure
Location Brussels, Belgium
Team size 8
Project duration 2024 – ongoing
The client
FBZMN is a social fund established to support workers in the metal processing industry in Belgium. Every year, FBZMN provides sectoral benefits to over 150,000 workers. Some of the benefits include additional compensation during illness, benefits for pre-retirees, and other sector-specific advantages.
Client Challenge
The main issue with their benefit payments process was the lack of automation. Each worker had to manually submit their own forms to request a benefit which led to frequent and unnecessary back-and-forth communication between the union and the client. As a result, the process involved extensive paperwork and left room for potential manual errors.
Delivering a fully digital process for granting sectoral benefits, built from the ground up
The automation of the whole process from data collection to payments
Implementing an automated data verification system
We solved the problem of duplicated information by centralizing all the information into the booking platform which is accessed by Lazeo employees and admins. Lazeo employees can now schedule appointments, create rooms, create invoices, access calendars for each room, and manage payments. Lazeo admins can assign roles to employees that vary in each center so some can only view, only edit, only delete, or have all permissions.
In the client portal, Lazeo patients can schedule their first consultations and access their customer profile where they can manage their appointments and invoices.
To securely verify union membership statuses we designed the Vault, a stateless system for handling personal data without storing any sensitive information. Each month, the Vault automatically checks eligibility and directs payments to the appropriate unions, based on up-to-date membership data. If a worker isn’t a union member, the benefit is paid out directly by the fund. Once someone doesn’t meet the requirements anymore, payments automatically stop – no manual intervention needed.
We follow the event sourcing pattern to ensure traceability and auditability, especially suited for financial logic. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) orchestrates all containerized workloads, with KEDA used for scaling event-driven components and Argo Workflows handling scheduled background jobs.
The frontend is developed in Angular 18, following a micro frontend architecture using Native Federation, allowing teams to deliver independent features within a unified UI. Secure networking is ensured through Application Gateway for Containers, NAT Gateway, private endpoints, and RBAC. We also use a custom-built Vault service to validate external data securely using hashed identifiers, ensuring privacy without exposing sensitive information.
Now workers eligible for benefits automatically get them without having to apply
Because workers no longer need to apply manually, the introduction of our automated processing system has resulted in more than double the number of workers paid
The new solution minimalizes the need for manual work, reducing the risk of human error
