Retirement Fund Solutions (RFS), a Pretoria-based pension and provident fund administrator, has implemented MIP Holdings` AstraPen pension administration application, along with the AstraFin2 financial management system, to assist it in streamlining the administration of its various funds.
With clients such as the National Fund for Municipal Workers, Capital Alliance, Pretoria International Airport Company and others on its books, RFS was looking for an IT solution that would ease its administration chores, allowing its staff to concentrate on adding value to individual clients.
Braam Coetzee, admin manager of RFS, says AstraPen was initially chosen because "we were not interested in an Africanised version of an overseas product, but wanted a locally developed solution that was flexible enough to quickly adapt to our needs without waiting for approval from the US".
"AstraPen is a fully Web- and e-commerce enabled application that is 100% South African-developed," says Don Elliott, marketing director of MIP Holdings. "AstraPen provides all the tools required by an administrator to manage employee benefits. MIP has designed the software to cater for all the intricacies of managing a pension fund - from the collection of monthly contributions, to the reinvestment of funds to ensure maximum returns, to the payment of benefits to retired members."
AstraFin2 is a complete accounting module, offering flexible functionality such as the consolidation of multiple companies in a single database and multiple account structures for all trading partners in a company. It also has a self-contained application programming interface (API), which provides information transfer while maintaining data integrity. It is fully GAAP-compliant.
RFS has now outsourced its software development and maintenance to MIP. The administrator retains possession of its servers and data, and has full-time MIP staff on board to administer the Astra systems.
"We run on dual-processor Sun servers using the Solaris operating system and the Progress relational database," says Ian van der Walt, technical manager at RFS. "With MIP`s solution, we only use 18% to 20% of our maximum capacity at peak processing times, leaving us plenty of room for growth with our current systems."
The growth Coetzee anticipates should arrive next year when the local government organisation is expected to lift the moratorium on pension fund movement, allowing members to move and manage their own funds as they wish.
AstraPen is now the sole source of fund data at RFS. The flexibility of the system means that the company`s call centre does not need an add-on application or database to serve the needs of the operators, but delivers data directly from the system to provide real-time answers to customer queries.
"The most impressive benefit the system delivers is that it does 80% of the fund administration work, requiring staff to make up only the remaining 20%," notes Coetzee. "This has resulted in a solution requiring less resources - human and IT - than our previous solution. We now require fewer people to handle the same workload - and we are therefore perfectly positioned for growth."
The next step for RFS is to accelerate the full use of AstraPen`s Web-enablement to facilitate easier communications with clients through easy-to-use self-help solutions on its Web site. In the past, communications were directed at the employer who was the conduit to the individual; in future, the company will have direct access to the customer.
The IT department of RFS has noted that, after bedding down the system, it has been very stable with no unforeseen problems. "It`s like driving a Rolls," says Van der Walt.
The company operates in line with philosophy of not being the biggest, but the best. With AstraPen, Coetzee says, the company is able to deliver a benchmark of excellence that differentiates it from its competitors in the market.
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