Smart Company Project:
SynerSec

SynerSec, part of the Alimento group, manages the supplementary pension plans for six sectors: fisheries, private education, hospitality, food, green services, and real estate.

Their core responsibility is calculating supplementary pensions and related benefits for employees. These include career break allowances, maternity benefits, unemployment premiums, time credit, and early retirement schemes. Once calculated, payment instructions are sent to insurer AG, who executes the payouts.

What was needed?

SynerSec was using a legacy application to perform these calculations, but required a modern, more scalable solution to support its growing and evolving needs.

What did Sirus do?

Sirus developed a new, fully functional calculation tool for SynerSec’s case managers. As part of this project, we migrated all data from the legacy platform to the new solution.

The platform contains highly sensitive and critical information – including salary records, C4 forms, and death certificates – relating to more than 2 million individuals. All this information must be validated before any payments can be processed.

Because of the sensitive nature of the data, we collaborated with The Master Labs on this project, as we do for other Alimento initiatives. They were responsible for the functional analysis and coordination with the business stakeholders. In addition, they support us in ensuring the highest standards of data security and privacy, guaranteeing that all information remains properly protected.

What does the application do?

The application receives data from multiple sources, including employee and employer records, data from de kruispuntdatabank, the national social security office (RSZ), and various company entities.

The platform we developed enables case managers to efficiently process and validate all incoming data. They verify that all required documents are present to enable payment. The calculation of the supplementary pension and benefits is fully automated within the platform.

Once the case manager approves the file through a structured validation workflow, it is forwarded to the insurer – AG in the case of SynerSec – who then completes the payment.

Challenges

Each sector has its own specific benefits, rules, and calculation methods. In addition, legislation is constantly evolving – such as the phasing out of early retirement schemes, the increase in retirement age, and the introduction of transparency regulations.

This requires the platform to continuously adapt to remain compliant.

Given the significant financial responsibility associated with managing supplementary pensions and benefits, the platform is strictly controlled. Software quality and accuracy are absolutely critical.

Technicalities of the project

Because the tool was designed to optimally support case managers, functionality and reliability were the top priorities during development.

What's next?

Because legislation continues to evolve, this project remains ongoing. Together with The Master Labs, we developed a three-year roadmap for the platform. The main objective is to create a highly automated portal for employees, employers, unions, and other stakeholders. Today, many certificates are still sent by post, scanned manually by case managers, uploaded into the system, and entered manually. By fully digitizing this process, employees will be able to log into the platform and immediately see which information or documents are still required to receive their supplementary pension. This allows case managers to focus more on quality control and less on manual administrative tasks.

In addition, at the request of SynerSec’s Managing Director, we will provide greater insight into the platform’s data. The large volume of data enables the creation of powerful reports that deliver valuable business insights.

Questions such as ‘Are wages increasing sufficiently within a particular sector?’, ‘Is a specific sector under pressure?’, ‘Are there anomalies in the data?’ can be answered quickly and clearly using Power BI dashboards.

What did our Sirus developers think?

“It is very interesting to see how the payment processes and legislation behind supplementary pensions and benefits work, as well as the collaboration between the RSZ, the funds, and SynerSec. So far, this project has been a success story. We aim to deliver top-quality software and respond quickly to external changes and requirements. We do this together with The Master Labs, who closely monitor legislation and software quality. It is also great to see how well collaboration between different IT partners can work. One team, one shared goal: a satisfied client.”

Andy Scherpereel

Project Lead