14 February 2020
The Swiss population wants a secure and transparent retirement provision system. The current system achieves this to a limited extent only. Some necessary adjustments require a lengthy political process, e.g. balancing conversion rates, contributions and retirement age with life expectancy and financial market returns. But transparency does not have to wait, it can be achieved quickly. This is why Acrea has launched the OpenPK Project.
The Swiss population wants a secure and transparent retirement provision system. The current system achieves this to a limited extent only. Some necessary adjustments require a lengthy political process, e.g. balancing conversion rates, contributions and retirement age with life expectancy and financial market returns. But transparency does not have to wait, it can be achieved quickly. This is why Acrea has launched the OpenPK Project.
The project's vision is for pension funds to offer standardized APIs (programming interfaces), enabling applications that provide each person with transparency about their own pension provision and motivate them to take greater responsibility for their provision. The aim is to improve retirement provision in Switzerland as a whole.
Thanks to OpenPK, the following applications and many more will be possible in the future:
- Couples can use an app to gain an overview of their financial situation after retirement and simulate scenarios for early retirement.
- Insured individuals improve their pension with small recurring payments into the pension fund – directly from the mobile banking of their house bank.
- Before securing a mortgage, a web app makes it easy to check in advance how much money could be withdrawn or pledged from the pension fund and how it would affect taxes.
- In preparation for a detailed investment advice, the bank directly queries the pension fund data – with prior consent of the insured person.
- An accountant can report salary changes and employee mutations directly from his HR software to his clients' various pension funds.
- A young family uses an app to learn about the death or disability benefits of a partner and receives suggestions for closing any gaps.
This is made possible by all pension funds offering open, standardized interfaces (open APIs) so that insured persons and employers can access their data. In order to do so, they use web and mobile services to which they individually grant rights of access.
In the OpenPK specification, Acrea placed great emphasis on ensuring that applications can easily use the open interfaces and that pension funds can implement them with little effort. This is achieved through low complexity and the use of proven technical standards (such as OpenID Connect and RESTful APIs). In a typical Swiss style, the architecture is based on a decentralized, federated model without central data storage and without a central data hub. Data protection enjoys high priority: each person has full sovereignty over his or her own data.
The OpenPK project itself is also open. Currently, a proposal for the architecture and APIs is available. Everything is public and under an Open Source license. Acrea does not plan to commercialize this, but invites all interested parties to discuss and improve the proposals or even participate in a first pilot project. It is planned to transfer the sovereignty over the specification to a broad consortium.
Acrea is already in discussions with pension funds, asset managers, banks, providers of pension fund software and interest groups, e.g. the working group "Pension Cockpit" of Swiss Fintech Innovations (SFTI). The discussions have shown that the time is definitely ripe to bring more transparency to pension provision through clever digitalization solutions. In Switzerland, similar discussions are underway in the 1st pillar (AHV) and across all pillars. Other countries in Western Europe are even further ahead and have already introduced solutions, e.g. Mijnpensioenoverzicht.nl in the Netherlands or PensionsInfo in Denmark, or are about to do so, e.g. Rentencockpit in Germany and PensionsDashboard in the UK.
But the OpenPK project is more open and goes further. Instead of a governmental application, there should be a variety of applications that are implemented by different companies and organizations. The aim is to create a real ecosystem whose benefits grow through the diversity of participants and in which innovative solutions can be particularly successful.
More information about the OpenPK project can be found on the OpenPK Project website. Additionally, a sandbox is available in the F10 Fintech Incubator & Accelerator to allow startups to test the OpenPK APIs.
Are you interested in playing an active role in shaping the future of Swiss pension provision or contributing to a pilot project? Please contact the Acrea experts at .
