At Sibos, Sterling Commerce, an IBM company announced that the Croatian Pensions Insurance Institute (Hrvatski Zavod za Mirovinsko Osiguranje HZMO), the agency responsible for handling the pensions of Croatias 4.4 million citizens, has implemented Sterling Business Integration Suite. The Suite helps HZMO meet secure data exchange and compliance requirements necessary for international data exchange on behalf of Croatia, which has been a candidate country for European Union (EU) membership since 2004.
HZMO needed to automate the exchange of critical information about the contributions made to and the benefits to be paid out from the pensions insurance fund. HZMOs previous processes relied on the postal system and manual data entry, carrying the risk of human error. Any failures led HZMO to incur excessive costs due to erroneous payments, the need to collect back monies paid and the reconciliation of expenses. With Sterling Business Integration Suite, HZMOs data is now more up-to-date and error-free, enabling the institute to prepare for international data exchange by reaching the same standards that most other government-owned organizations for pension processing within the EU, as well as non-member states, have achieved.
By improving the speed and accuracy of its data processing, HZMO is not only providing a valuable and essential service to the citizens of Croatia in receipt of pensions payments, but also preparing the country to align its standards internationally with the EU, said Jim Gahagan, global financial services industry executive at Sterling Commerce. Ease of payments processing and international business collaboration are the basis for any national economy to thrive in a global marketplace.
Sterling Business Integration Suite provides an integration gateway and secure file transfer capabilities that act as a central hub for the automated and secure exchange of information between the pensions insurance fund and the financial institutions authorized to make pension payments on its behalf. Automating data transfer has freed-up resources and cut costs. By enabling multi-platform support and any-to-any IT standards translation, the Suite also provides the flexibility to help integrate partner financial institutions inside and outside Croatia.
Sterling Business Integration Suite ensures HZMO complies with data integration standards required by all relevant financial institutions, but more importantly, enables our partner agencies to use whatever protocol they want, said Sanja Grković-Hrabar, IT Systems & Communications Department, HZMO. This is important for us in this difficult economic climate – we cant expect our partners to invest in new software to be compatible with us. With Sterling Business Integration Suite, they can receive the data we send them without any upgrades to their systems.
Sterling Commerce will be demonstrating Sterling Business Integration Suite and other financial services solutions at stand C216 at Sibos.
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