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Danish software specialist Festina Finance's UK subsidiary, Festina Life and Pension Platform, is now fully operational, saying it is open to defined benefit, defined contribution and collective DC pension schemes, as well as to life insurers, and can operate at megafund scale.
The company is currently active in Denmark and the Netherlands, counting PensionDanmark and APG among its clients and serving more than 8m members.
The platform is a purpose-built, cloud-native administration system. Festina said it offers a modular, pace-layered architecture, integrating into existing ecosystems and delivered at the client’s pace of change. In addition, administrators can create and modify schemes, fees and rules through configuration, without the need for additional coding or software development.
Entering the UK market was “a natural and important step in our evolution as a company”, said UK country head Dan McLaughlin, a former director of international at Smart Pension. Among others, the firm has financial backing from Netcompany, which took a 20% stake in Festina in 2023.
“Over the past few months, we’ve been quietly laying the groundwork – listening, collaborating and adapting to local needs. Today, we’re proud to pick up the pace of our UK roll and bring our proven, transformative and trusted administration technology to help build a more agile and response pension ecosystem in the UK,” he added.
Festina became a member of the Pensions Administration Standards Association in March this year.
McLaughlin said the system would allow clients to design a new CDC scheme or tweak existing DC or DB rules “without long delays or costly change requests”.
“The UK pension landscape is at an inflection point, with increasing complexity and member expectations colliding with legacy tech constraints. We want to break that cycle with a new era of pensoin innovation – where providers have the tools to deliver efficiently and members get the experience they deserve,” he said.
The Pensions Regulator recently urged trustees to go beyond data cleansing for pension dashboards and consider investing in digital infrastructure to support automation and reporting, discussing options with their administrators.
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