APG has taken the Festina Life and Pension platform into live operation for the new Dutch pension system

As the very first pension provider in the Netherlands, APG has gone live in January 2025 with the Festina Finance Life and Pension platform. APG has transitioned the two first pension funds PWRI and PPF APG, with more than 200.000 participants, to the new Dutch pension system.

This is a very significant milestone for APG and for the entire pension market in the Netherlands. After a political debate in the Netherlands for more than a decade, the law on the new Dutch pension system (Wtp) came into effect in July 2023, and pension funds currently have until 2027 to switch to the new system, moving from Defined Benefit (DB) to Defined Contribution (DC). For this transition, around 1800 billion Euro pension money in collective pension pots must be divided between personal pension pots and collective reserves, in a process called ‘invaren’.

APG is the biggest pension administrator in the Dutch market, serving 8 pension funds, with 4,5 million participants and with total assets of more than 600 billion Euro.

APG, as the first pension provider in the Netherlands, selected Festina Finance Life and Pension in 2022 as the new pension administration software platform, which was already in commercial operation with a DC system for leading Danish pension providers, including PensionDanmark.

APG is the biggest pension administrator in the Dutch market, serving 8 pension funds, with 4,5 million participants and with total assets of more than 600 billion Euro.

(See customer case on the Festina Finance web site, and Homepage | PensionDanmark).

APG and Festina Finance have worked closely together and have in less than three years, 2022-2024, implemented the new system, integrated this into the APG landscape and migrated the data of the first two pension funds – on time.

Even though the new Dutch pension law was less than two years old (and many detailed regulations have been finalized even later) the system has been completed in time for the pension funds to get the necessary approvals from the Dutch authorities for the transition. APG has gone through many months of very careful and thorough testing and trial migrations in preparation for the go-live.

Festina Finance will assist APG in configuring the system for the other six pension funds APG works for, and transition their 4,3 million participants to the new pension system. In January 2026, three pension funds are scheduled to go live with more than 1 million participants. And one year later the final three pension funds will do the transition, including ABP, one of the largest pension funds in the world, with more than 3 million participants.

The Festina Finance Life and Pension platform is a modern, cloud-based and very flexible pension administration system. A very significant part of the system is standardized, in a general layer and a country layer, and can easily be configured for pension providers, both for Defined Benefit (DB) and Defined Contribution (DC) applications.

Festina has selected partnerships with leading IT- and consulting business partners (including Netcompany, Colosseus, Ensur and Accenture) to provide maximal continuity in implementing customer projects – and share our success.

Apart from APG, Festina is providing the Festina Finance Life and Pension platform to several other customers in the Netherlands and Denmark.