Context
APG is one of the world’s largest pension providers, administering over €500 billion for a large share of the Netherlands under heavy regulation. Written pension communication is hard to follow for members who are not native Dutch speakers. As APG’s own write-up puts it, participants “have difficulty with the Dutch language” and “are embarrassed about that”.
Business problem
Members needed to understand what a letter says, what the difficult terms mean and what they have to do, in a language they read comfortably, without a call-centre interaction for every letter. The tool that came out of it lets a participant scan a letter from Pensioen Schoonmaak and “have it translated, simplified and read to them”.
My mandate
I designed the solution architecture and the AI processes, wrote the prompts, and was accountable for design quality and for delivering to the customer’s expectations.
Decisions
- Assemble the first prototype in one day from standard platform components, then dedicate the project to system integration and user experience.
- A conversational interface backed by a six-step process (audio transcription, text generation, translation, text-to-speech) and a retrieval pipeline that parses incoming letters and pulls supporting context from a vector store.
- Twelve two-week sprints with tight coordination with the validation groups, so adoption problems surfaced before go-live.
Delivery
The work ran from 2023 into 2024, twelve iterations from kick-off to the system running in the on-premises environment. It was developed by Pensioen Schoonmaak together with APG’s GroeiFabriek innovation hub, and unveiled on 8 November 2023 during the Pensioen3daagse event with four languages — Dutch, Polish, Turkish and English — and the potential to scale to over a hundred.
- Day 1 — Working prototype (from platform components)
- 12 sprints — On-premises production (integration, validation, environment)
- Handover — Run by the client (under Dutch financial regulation)
Outcome
It started as a proof of concept and went to production. APG’s write-up quotes the effect on participants directly: “the app really does remove barriers. They now understand the point being made.” A Dutch ministry recognised it as one of the best examples of impactful AI integration. It has since been replaced by another solution — a normal end to a first-generation system, and the reason this case is written in the past tense.
It ran in production under Dutch financial regulation, was recognised by a Dutch ministry as a best-practice example of impactful AI integration, and has since been superseded.
Reuse
The assistant process pattern, the ingestion and retrieval pipeline and the multilingual output components became reusable platform capabilities.
Evidence
Prototype and sprint timelines are project records. The launch date, the four launch languages, the participant quotations and the development partners are from APG’s own publication, linked in the facts panel. That it has since been replaced is the client’s status as reported to me.