PegaWorld 2025: From Manual to Modern: Accelerating Pension Transformation with Labb, Athora, and Pega Constellation

PegaWorld 2025: From Manual to Modern – Accelerating Pension Transformation with Labb, Athora, and Pega

Hello everyone, I'm Paul Conlin, I'm from Pega and I work in the go to market strategy team.

I have the honor of welcoming our friends from lab and Athora, who are going to tell us a story about their journey with Pega and Constellation.

And one of the key takeaways I had from this story is that the solid partnership that you have with organizations really set the foundation of where you went with Pega.

We'll leave some time for questions at the end, but with that, I'll hand it close to the guys.

Thank you.

Thank you Paul.

Thank you all for having me.

I'm going to tell you a little bit of my trip.

Of our trip with Athora.

And I'd like to start off with a question, because who of you wouldn't probably be very enthusiastic about all the new features coming in in the platform already in there? I think everybody is quite enthusiastic, and it feels to me like being a kid in a candy store.

And, um, I think you all kind of share that feeling.

The thing that I'm going to do today is going to tell you a little bit more.

I'm going to be the nurturing parent.

So I'm going to tell you to first eat your vegetables before you can have the candy.

So bear with me.

Um, because I think, um, you first have to get the basis in order before you earn the treats.

And that's what I'm going to talk about today.

Um, first let me introduce Athora Athora group.

Uh, we are an insurance savings, pension savings company.

Uh, over in Europe.

Um, well, I'm from the Netherlands.

Uh, and within the Netherlands, we have basically 2 million customers. Um, we have two different brands.

Switzerland and real.

Real is more the insurance life insurance company in Switzerland with the pension company.

And we have a couple of strategic partners.

And TCS is one of these partners for our IT operations as well.

If you look at our environment.

Um, well, it's continuously changing for the pension environment.

We have a pension reform in the Netherlands, which means there's a lot of changes in the legislation that we need to adapt to it.

We have our technology advancements, of course.

Um, there's also a very big market consolidation going on.

We are number three in the Netherlands.

We're the only one purely focused on pensions, while the other companies have also the normal insurance products as well.

But we have a unique position focusing purely on pensions.

And of course, there's a lot of uncertainty in the world, but also brings a lot of dimensions to our companies as well.

I'm going to talk about first.

Well, as I mentioned, we have two brands.

I've been working for real from in the past years.

And then we started off with a journey where I'm going to take you a little bit along, because it's the fundamentals that we use also to start a new journey in Switzerland.

Then I'll head over to Switzerland, which is purely focused on the pensions side of it.

So take you along a little bit about the story.

Um, we started off in 2017 with a Pega Customer Service And also with Pega BPMN.

We were at a point in time at a position that we really wanted to focus on one customer aspect of the different brands that we had.

Um, but by looking at a customer service application, we immediately also said, okay, if we have that customer a good service, then we also need to fulfill the promise. So we need to make sure that we really can execute our processes as well.

So we also search for a solution that included the BPM.

And that's why we came up to Pega.

Uh, next steps, uh, over the years, is that we implemented the first process in 2018.

And, well, the different processes, about 20 primary processes to level three.

I will explain a little bit later on what I mean by level three.

Um, and then we went more towards the self-service perspective, the individual live service book.

We stopped selling new products, uh, because it was not profitable anymore.

But we still have a big portfolio that we need to service out.

So we started to really focus on low cost and high self service part of it.

And then in 2022, we made it that far, that we automated all of these processes and we were able to outsource that to our strategic partner TCS as well, who's now running that operations.

But how did we get there? One of the major first steps that we needed to do is to make a decision on how are we going to bring all these processes into Pega.

And basically what we understood is that we have different approaches to get there.

We could say, okay, let's take one process.

Let's make it really a big, great automated process.

And then we take the next process to to do the same steps.

But the other way around could also be why not start with all these processes in the in the first basic setup, and then later on find what we better can improve these each processes step by step.

So that's more.

Difficult world's words.

But I put all these processes into the level one step first.

And that's why we came up with what we call the BPM matrix.

We tried to find a way how we could explain and make clear what our approach will be over these 20 processes to do it step by step.

And we identified that we wanted to go to five levels where the first step, the first level, was really about let's get that process focus to start on the endpoint and get the steps into the Pega Platform. It doesn't matter if it's not fully automated.

If there's out of the ten steps, only 2 or 3 steps automated, that's fine.

But we have that process in Pega and we are able to measure it and we can go to the next steps by doing that for all these processes.

In the first instance, we were able to gather also all the data, and the data helped us to guide us to the next steps, the next steps in level two, for example, further automating on the correspondence on the incoming documents, automation or level three more to the digital input.

So this also helped us to explain to the organization what our approach would be and get the focus on that.

And as I explained, each time we put the process into Pega, we also immediately made sure that we were able to measure it, measure all the throughput times the average handle times on the different activities in the process.

And by doing so, based on that data, we could find out where is the next activity, which will bring us the most of the value if we start automating that.

And so that process which was first a process into ten manual steps became step by step, further more automated, and the automation degree went up.

And we saw a good measure that each of the implementation had an effect on the throughput times and or not.

And then we need to go back to the to the table and try to make a better design out of it.

So having that as a experience with us, we learned in that period a lot of things that we do, but we also found out we were quite focused on that Surface Book and putting all these processes into Pega, and we did that successfully.

That was the reason why we could outsource that as well.

Um, and then for us, the new opportunity came around because we were focusing our attention more towards Switzerland, um, and Switzerland.

Um, well, due to the pension transformations, also the internal organization transformed a lot.

It was a purely business to business focus.

But now due to the legislation changes, the consumer was much more becoming much more important.

And that also caused a lot of transformations in the organization.

And if we look at the question was asked to us as well, can you help us to get to that same level of automation for our business processes as well? I said, okay, we have a lot of experience, so let's try and do that. And came up with the the following steps.

And if we look then at how we use Pega for Athora pensions gives you a little bit of oversight of our landscape.

We use the Pega sales application and Pega Customer Service and also the Pega BPM application.

So when we started off, we started first of course looking into the organization how are people working? So we did our go-sees and we tried to find out what we. are what we're looking at because, well, I was very busy at individual life and didn't have anything to do with Switzerland.

So for me it was like a new company.

So first you put your nose around and you start looking around.

What you see.

And what we saw was an organization with a quite a high amount of manual interactions.

So manual interacting with the different applications I put a picture on there.

So what you actually saw during any operations is that you see people using the applications step by step, bringing information over from one application to another application.

So it was really highly manual.

And we want to bring that to more the BPM kind of approach.

So gather that process, put that into the system, have the system orchestrate the different steps, and only ask the case worker to jump in if the system if the process is not able to continue.

Um, and by doing that, of course, I think most of you will understand.

You get a lot more efficiency, a lot more sustainability.

Um, we were of we are getting ready to increase our sales as well.

Uh, diving into the consumer market.

So that scalability must be able to, uh, process in these volumes into the process as well.

And if you do that in the current, uh, situation, you get a lot of customers or a lot of work where the case workers can't deal with that because it's too much.

So if you scale up, you can't scale up the capacity at the same level.

And it also helped us to this discussions to find out what is our approach more towards the business architecture.

Right. So it's not only about getting that process, but it's also about sharing the language with, uh, your end users and your IT colleagues.

How are we going to talk about the way it is organized? So we shouldn't talk about applications.

We should more talk about what are these objects that we are maintaining by looking at more like an object point of view, it's much easier to understand that you want to share things, that you want to centralize certain way, how you deal with these objects and these objects then of course, need to make sure that it's the data is put in the right place in the system.

And that will also help us then to be able to migrate to different systems as well.

Um, so that is quite a transformation that we are starting since one and a half year now.

Um, and last year we were here at PegaWorld as well.

Um, and we were kind of in the start mode from, how are we going to do this? And we were experienced from what we did for an individual life again.

So it's like it felt like, okay, we are able to do a reset, right? To do another journey.

But how are we going to do that? So we ask ourselves the questions are we future fit for that to do it.

And well what we said okay.

What we do properly is that we put the process in the middle.

Right.

So we have the right discussions with organizations talking about the process, finding the process.

Often what you see is and we also ran into that as well, um, is that these processes are created, I think don't mention that as well today are created around the way the organization is structured.

Right.

So you have managers creating their own departments with their own processes in there.

But that's not the way how you want to design the process at the end.

So first grab that process.

I think we did that very good at individual life, but we needed to do that here.

We are doing that also here at Pensions Switzerland, because the insurance company itself, if you think about it, the only thing that we produce is data.

So data coming in, data going out. So it's we're not creating any physical product.

So it's the ideal situation to really process a lot of this data through a good efficient work processes.

And I think it's very important to have that common process as a start point in your discussion discussions and how you design your processes.

The second thing is the conceptual thinking.

I think also we had the right mindset and the right topics that we discussed.

How are we going to deal with that? Things like, uh, the Center-out approach.

So we make processes.

We design processes without, uh, channel logic in it, channel agnostic.

Uh, that was that is highly appreciated also within our company, so we continue to do that.

Um, defining more of the business objects that we just talked about, it really helps in talking to people.

It makes it more functional.

Right? So you don't have to talk about an application, but it's more like common sense.

Um, it's it's the language that you can talk about with the people who use that language all the time, all day.

Um, so I think that's a good thing to do.

Um, so we're trying to do that as well.

Um, also think about the, uh, decomposing the process into subprocesses, making it reusable, um, finding what are your main processes and things like KYC, for example? Well, that's not really a main process.

It's more like part of a process for onboarding a new customer.

And by doing that and chopping that up into right pieces, you enhance your reusability.

Um, and um, Well, all those kinds of things that we discussed about.

It's when in our heads doing here at the PegaWorld as well.

And we needed to try and find out how we're going to do this in the future.

Step the approach of focusing the different levels.

Um, that's well, what we want to do as well, because we truly believe that you first have to put your base in order before you start enhancing that with the new, uh, features like, like AI, for example.

Because if your process is not in place or you don't know what your process is about, how are you going to make sure that it will run at scale and how to manage that? So that's why we also said we shouldn't get caught into the candy, because we first need to focus on our actual baseline foundational work, because otherwise we'll run in that sugar crash.

And I think what is very important as well is what's mentioned today as well is you need the sheet music to get the flow going right.

So that process, you still need to design that process, although you are step by step enhancing each of these process steps and further making it improving it with all kinds of features, whether it's automatic document processing or any AI decisions, you still need to know what are you doing it for? What is the part of the process itself? So being here at PegaWorld, um, yeah, we started to wonder, how are we going to do things differently? And one of the major things that we found out is that we were although our principles, I think conceptually were very correct and we still embrace them, we also found out that we were quite focused on getting our job done and having less focus or less attention to what Pega has to offer in new versions.

So we were really doing our job and not taking care of.

Well, what are the new things that we could use? So it gave us also a little bit of feeling like.

Okay, we are running behind.

We need to make a step up.

Um, so that was one of the important things.

But the other important thing also that we found and we struggled already along the way during the implementation with individual life as well, is that you can have a good conceptual thought and from an architectural point of view, do it nice and smooth.

But in the end it's really about how it's implemented.

And we had already a couple of situations where we said, okay, we draw things out on paper and designs, but if you look them back in the code, how is it developed? You don't find that flexibility that you had in your design back in your application.

And that's also where we said we need to really stop designing or building our own code.

We really need to start using the low code approach.

So that was our idea also to get into more of the Constellation point of view.

So getting the opportunity to do something for the second time, we better do it on the on the right and the latest technology.

So we are we made a decision to step over and start doing it again in the Constellation version of it. But we also understood that by doing that, you need to have a lot more knowledge on the topic.

And although we are very appreciated by our colleagues at TCS, we also together discussed that we need additional inputs to really make this step up into the Constellation environment.

And that's where we found lab to support us in this journey towards the more Constellation approach.

And I'll hand over my mic.

Thank you Mark.

Thanks.

Amazing journey so far.

Um, so let me let me quickly introduce myself.

My name is Merijn van den Dungen.

Sorry for the difficult Dutch name.

I can't help it.

I have my parents to blame for that.

I guess I'm the MD for for Benelux.

So let me introduce LEP as well to you.

Um, so we we have offices in, uh, well, all over the globe.

So, uh, an office in Manila in the Philippines.

There's an office in Hong Kong, there's an office in London, there's an office in the Netherlands, there's one in the States as well.

So we have a global presence, but we're we're able to deliver, uh, locally on that global presence.

We are, uh, DX API and customer service expert.

Um, we have, on average, ten plus years of experience Pega experience in our teams.

And, um, Athora Constellation project was the fifth Constellation project that we were working on.

So, um, we are a oh, sorry, that was a I'm looking at a different slide, this one.

Um, we are a Pega first Pega partner.

That means that we, um, know a lot about Pega. Of course, it's the only thing we do.

But we also understand the broader landscape of our clients, the broader IT landscape.

Um, we are mastering omnichannel.

We're breaking the silence, breaking the silos.

Sorry.

Design seamless and joined up customer journeys.

We're also at CX experts.

Um, we're designing we're designing fast and elegant experience and not breaking the.

And that's really important.

Not breaking the Pega out of the box.

We consider ourselves Pega medics as well.

Um, so, um, maybe familiar to you as well, the implementation that have spiraling costs, spiraling costs that have long time to markets.

Um, this is these are difficult typical the situations that we bring our paramedics in to to the rescue and not only to the rescue.

Um, we're reviving that implementation, but also speeding it up and getting the the business value out of it.

That was foreseen in the first time when the first implementation was done.

So what did we do for Athora? So we, uh, we're working on three pillars.

One is modernization.

Another one is governance and strategy.

And the third one is delivery for modernization.

Um, we started the Constellation journey with Athora in with a series of workshops, um, in the workshops.

We discussed how Constellation is different than the UI kit.

Uh, or or, uh, theme, cosmos design, um, approach.

We discussed.

How do you what do you do with modules? How do you define them? What is a module? Actually things like that.

Just to prepare everyone in the context of getting Constellation ready.

We also provide guidance uh, in and to the teams.

So we have our, our own Constellation experts in the teams.

Um, and this all helps us and us, but Athora, um, to get ready for future change.

Next to that, um, we do modular design, modular approach.

Um, so we try to identify business objects, turning them into modules, which makes for efficient change, because if you have those business objects encapsulated in modules, it's way easier to maintain them.

And, um, have have the teams work with that as already existing modules for reuse.

Then we supply help in governance as well.

Uh oh.

Sorry.

Skip one.

The, uh, the architectural runway.

So it's something that we provide as well for them to make a solid solid base for, for future change.

On the governance side, um, when we started, there was already a co Athora.

It was just starting.

Um, it was sort of self inventing, uh, what its purpose should be.

Um, and we're accelerating that, uh, that co to become efficient, to really, really help the teams to do co-design with teams, uh, educate the teams.

Um, and by that making sure that the policing part of the, of the Co or maybe even the platform is, uh, not needed as much and it's much more doing things together.

Co-creation.

Furthermore, we are working on a roadmap, translating a clear vision also into a clear roadmap so everyone knows what's going to come.

Uh, and then, uh, we, uh, we use our best practices that we build up in our former Constellation projects to help Athora in theirs. And then, um, last but not least, we do this together.

Uh Athora.

And so together, we tame the chaos and lead the change.

Thank you very much.

Um, one of the things I enjoy about that story is how you do you brace App Studio in best practice? It's many conversations.

I've had many clients about that and how that's key to the story of moving to Constellation.

Other than that, what is the key benefits you saw from Constellation? And what are the lessons that you can give to others to learn in terms of best practice and maybe prerequisites you need for moving Constellation? Yeah, so maybe your prerequisites are a good question for you to answer.

For me, if I look at Constellation, I think what it will bring us is, well, what I find is that sometimes Constellation is more about the UI side of the story.

While I think it's much stronger to look at it more like the low code reason why you do it, because what I really see is that if you really want to gain everything out of the platform, you really need to have a solution which is seamlessly integrating with that platform.

And if you start building your own code, that will break.

So the only way forward is that you as much as you can generate the code, which is really seamlessly integrated with the platform.

If you want to use all the upcoming features at this point or in the future.

So that's the way one of the important reasons why we choose to really go for the Constellation approach.

Yeah, there may be on the on the best practices.

There's one that springs to mind.

So, um, I'm a guy, I buy funny stuff.

Um, I never eat the menu.

I just start playing with it, and I assume that I know everything already.

And I see this approach for Constellation quite often as well.

Where, um, we say, well, we know Pega.

How hard can it be? It's probably UIKit on steroids.

So let's just do the same thing and we'll be okay. Um, and like me and not reading the manual, after a time you find out that RTFM, you should have done that Most of the time that is too late.

So one of the best practices is to with the workshops or in some other form, think about what you're going to do.

Think about the the the the change in approach.

Think about the the different designs that you're going to do about the modular approach before you actually just start doing stuff, and only to find out later that we could have done that a lot better in the starting off.

And of course, get some get some experienced guys in to help you with that.

And one more question from me.

Um, working for Pega, it wouldn't be remiss of me not to mention Blueprint.

I've not had it today in the session.

Have you any plans to use Blueprint to accelerate your transformation going forward? I hope you have.

Yeah.

Well, really, to be honest, uh, I think maybe a little bit.

Until today, I looked at Blueprint as being a nice application which you could use to experiment around.

But yeah, it was always struggling in my head.

How am I going to use the outcome out of it to build that application? Because in our situation, we already have a running application, so we're not constantly building new applications, we're just adding processes to it.

And that's a different ball game.

So how are you going to do that? Although I see the benefits in designing together with your end users more like a process approach.

But when I hear now in PegaWorld what you can do also to disclose your legacy systems by putting videos into their documentation, into their really start me thinking.

And I think one of the things we're going to do once we are back is look how we're going to use that for our journey for that purpose, because we also have a lot of legacy systems where knowledge is dripping away, and we need to understand what these processes are about to bring them into Pega.

So I think we'll try and see if we can use Blueprint to really do that together with our end users. Get there.

So really enthusiastic about it.

Yeah.

Any more questions from anyone else? No, it's done in silence.

Okay.

There's one question.

Thank you.

Hi.

Thanks.

Uh, if I understood correctly, in your first implementation with riyal, I think you have used RB.

But for your second implementation, are you using APIs so to fetch data into the Pega application.

I can't to to enrich your Pega application layer.

Have you used APIs in your second implementation? In the first one I think you have used RPA.

Is that right? No, no, that's not correct.

And also in the first implementation we used APIs to disclose the systems as well.

We actually never used RPA as well.

No because we actually our strategy was more like, if we can use an API, we'll use the API.

If not, then maybe at the last option will be an RPA solution, because we already saw that.

In the end you need to migrate it to a core system, a core process anyway.

So that was not our approach to look at it.

We choose to do a further design of the process itself.

Thank you.

Paul, I've already asked my second question, which is what Blueprint I understand you haven't used it in anger yet.

No, we haven't used it.

Yeah, we experimented with it, but not seriously used it. But like I mentioned, I got the inspiration more today than I think with the current enhancements.

I think it will be really, really stupid not to do so.

So we're going to try and do it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

I think that's the case with most of us.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I think when Blueprint one point to mention is that it's weekly release cycles.

So if you keep in touch Well again.

Every week we see what new capabilities is coming.

Yeah, yeah.

That's actually if I may, may just hop on that bus.

So, um, I was having a conversation with Mark, I think a couple of days ago about doing Blueprint sessions in one of their innovation sprints coming up.

And I know that you were a bit doubtful with the experience that you had from maybe half a year ago where where we all know Blueprint wasn't as great as it is currently, and not even as great as it will be in two, four, six weeks from now.

Um, so Kerim does a lot better job than I do in persuading people, it seems.

So I try to persuade you we're still like, yeah, maybe.

Um.

And I can remember that while we were in the session, one of the keynote sessions about Blueprint, I got a nudge.

I said we should do it.

So I encourage everyone to just.

If you haven't, please do have a look at Blueprint. It's it's an amazing tool.

Um. it doesn't cost you a lot.

It's just a couple of hours to invest.

Half a day.

A day maybe, and you'll be amazed by what it does.

Yeah.

A little to add on that is that we were or are already trying to reverse engineer a couple of these systems using our own AI solutions.

And that really works.

So we had a workflow created just to test and see if we can generate these processes out of these systems.

And we got it into a BPM kind of notation coming out of the GenAI.

And then we bring it back into Blueprint.

But that lost a lot of details information, because the step from the documentation to the BPM loses a lot of contextual information.

But if we now can immediately upload all this information into a Blueprint, that will help a lot.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thanks everyone.

Thank you.

Thank you.