Founded in 1961, Crédit Logement Social (CLS) is a non-profit association uniting over 30 credit institutions in Belgium. Its mission is to make home ownership accessible to low- and middle-income families. By providing social housing loans supported by regional public funds, CLS acts as a central coordination and technology body for all its underlying regionally specialized credit institutions, ensuring that all member institutions can deliver fair and affordable financing within their respective regional frameworks.

The background

Belgium combines one of the highest home-ownership rates in Europe (around 70 percent) with one of the most complex financial environments. Flanders, Brussels, Wallonia, and the German-speaking Community each operate under their own regulations and languages, including French, Dutch, and German. For institutions active nationwide, this means constant adaptation to differing rules and expectations, while still uniting all operations under one digital umbrella.

In this already fragmented landscape, CLS pools the resources of 25 specialized credit institutions, each operating in a region with its own language and regulatory framework. It plays a vital role in enabling access to social housing finance, but the tools to manage this mission had not kept pace. For about four decades, CLS operated on a legacy system developed in the late 1980s, before launching its modernization project.

The Challenges

The former platform, developed and maintained by a small managed company, handled around 60,000 contracts over its lifetime but offered little beyond repayment scheduling. Key processes such as validation, reporting, or compliance checks were carried out manually or outside the system.

Each member institution had developed its own way of working. Wallonia was still heavily paper-based, while Flanders was moving ahead digitally – reflecting the broader north-south divide in Belgium’s digital maturity. This disparity made consolidation and compliance particularly difficult. CLS’s additional heavy dependency on one person to maintain the system further increased the structural risk.

The challenge was clear: unite all organizations, regions, and languages on a single, future-proof and digital-native platform that could support the mission of financing affordable housing on a national scale.

The solution

In 2023, CLS and Basikon started working together in agile workshops to harmonize processes across institutions while respecting regional specificities. Basikon’s low-code configurability and flexible workflow engine enabled the project team to adapt quickly to each organization’s requirements without custom development, allowing greater autonomy.

Basikon’s ambition was to cover the full credit lifecycle: from application and validation to contract generation, SEPA payments, collections, and after-sales. Thanks to the commitment of the dedicated pilot institution Onesto, which tested deployment, migration, and back-office operations, a reliable framework was created for all other CLS members to follow.

The result

With Basikon’s 100% API architecture, intuitive configurability, and long-term scalability, CLS fundamentally transformed its 40-year-old legacy system and the way social housing loans are managed in Belgium.

Today, CLS manages around 33,000 active contracts worth €2.5 billion on its overarching platform, with 1,500 to 2,000 new loans added each year. For thousands of households, this represents the difference between exclusion and access to home ownership.

With Basikon, CLS has created a consolidated backbone system that spans all regions and operates in four languages. Processes are now standardized across its 25 institutions, ensuring compliance with regional rules while reducing complexity. CLS now profits from a reduction in the processing time of its credit requests, which can now be reviewed in a few minutes, a subsequent improvement of 30% in approval rates, and 90% fewer errors and easier data access among employees.

This laid the unified digital foundation that strengthens the mission of CLS and positions it as a cornerstone of housing finance for low-income families in Belgium.