BiPRO RNext company pension scheme: the next step

BiPRO e.V. sees itself as the insurance industry’s institute for standardisation. Having been successfully implemented standards in the technical world of BiPRO RClassic, these standards have been used productively in the market for various processes and data exchange for quite some time. With RNext, BiPRO isn’t just taking a technological step forward. New standards are being developed for different sectors in agile groups driven by domain and implemented in REST-based API architecture.

Since the end of 2019, a group consisting of pension providers and insurance companies (called providers) and consumers, including brokers and IT service providers, has been developing a standardised company pension interface that expands the standard BiPRO range.

A step ahead

Every planned business transaction has already been implemented in Version 1.0 – from a simple change of name and address for an insured person to changes in contributions and reinstatement to information on employee deregistrations. Furthermore, the RNext bAV (Betriebliche Altersversorgung – company pension scheme) group has realised its first implementations for policy data. The consumer can use various selection options to prepare policy data requests. For example, the consumer receives a list of policy numbers – in the best case, with the associated framework or group policy ID of all policies in the consumer’s portfolio that have been added since the beginning of the year or have changed since then. The complete policy data can be requested in a subsequent business transaction. As a result, the consumer can synchronise their policy portfolio.

As a final highlight, yet another feature was implemented, thus exceeding the target that was set for the first version. After a transaction has been successfully processed by the provider, the consumer can access the updated status of the policy associated with it. The response times of the providers can vary and, in the best case, only takes a few seconds. Insured persons can thus be informed of a successful policy change in the shortest possible amount of time.

In the fast lane

While the release candidate is still in the standardisation committee’s (Normungsauschuss, NAUS) approval process, the provider’s and customer’s team is seamlessly implementing additional service features of the bAV interface.

The RNext group’s agile approach continues to produce new results quickly – versions 1.1 and 1.1.1 were made available to the active members in next to no time at all.

The capabilities for extensive querying of existing active policies in particular have been expanded in the RNext company pension scheme standard. These are divided into the following four areas:

Policy information available policy information, including guaranteed values on the status of the respective policy information

Reference date values usually requested by the consumer once a year

Model calculation values including selected values for possible services

Fund information information on a policy’s current fund assets and the allocation of contributions to different funds.

Various business transactions relating to the pay-free period, from premium exemption to reinstatement, have been implemented and the possibility of suspending or excluding a dynamic has been created.

The newly integrated method of document handling is a special feature that involves ongoing business transactions or existing policies.

For example, the consumer can request a copy of their policy from the provider or access information about the entire year, fund overviews or an annual Riester certificate.

The provider can request that the consumer send in the necessary transaction documents (cover letter, SEPA mandate or addendum) so that the transaction can be carried out or completed. The transfer of documents to the provider is currently still done via alternative channels – in the best case, via RClassic. A further step will be the implementation of scenario calculations that can be retrieved from the respective provider.

Taking the next step together

As an active BiPRO member for many years, adesso is already familiar with BiPRO standards in the RClassic environment and offers a tool for creating customised connections to existing customer systems – the BiPRO Tool Suite. This offer is supplemented by the in-house RNext Connector, which serves as a link between the provider connections and adesso’s portfolio management software in|sure CollPhir © including broker management and is based on the BiPRO API. The RNext connector takes over the respective providers’ authentication process, manages asynchronous processes and learns to react adequately to various response messages from provider interfaces. The behaviour of the RNext Connector, which is adapted to the respective provider, is not a feature of the BiPRO API, rather a special service of the adesso RNext Connector.

The existing business processes of the Insure CollPhir application can be prepared for the standardised REST interface and transmitted directly to the responsible provider via the adesso RNext Connector and ensure that communication is sped up. Together, they can make the daily company pension business more efficient, accelerate processes and save time and money. The inventory data can be automatically reconciled at any time and ensure consistency. As an experienced IT partner, adesso can accompany the user along every step of the journey toward comprehensive digitalisation.

More about our offer regarding the BiPRO, and specifically information about RNext, can be found on our website.

As always, you’ll find more exciting topics from the world of adesso in our latest blog posts.