Kyrgyzstan's Social Fund Moves to Automatic Pension Assignment Without District Office Visits

Kyrgyzstan's Social Fund is gradually rolling out an information system that allows pensions to be assigned automatically - without a citizen having to apply to a district office. This was reported by Ruslan Asanbekov, head of the Digital Development Department of the Social Fund.

Previously, to retire a person had to come in person to the district office, write an application, open a pension account and hand the details back to the fund. On average the procedure took from 10 to 30 days, and in some cases stretched to five months.

The new system identifies citizens who have reached retirement age automatically. It calculates work record and insurance contributions, and requests passport data and information on place of residence from other state systems. A notification is sent to the citizen through the Tunduk app offering a choice of bank - and once the choice is made, the details are transmitted to the fund's system without any involvement by an employee. According to Asanbekov, the work begins roughly a month before the citizen reaches retirement age, and all procedures can now be completed in one day.

The rollout took place in two stages. In the first, payments were converted to electronic format through the Tunduk system: previously the lists were compiled manually and sent to banks on paper. In the second, a new web platform was created in the Java programming language, uniting 53 district offices into a single database. Synchronization, which previously took up to 10-12 hours, now takes 3-5 seconds.

The platform is integrated with 18 banks in the country and OJSC Kyrgyz Post. From January 1 a cybersecurity enhancement system is due to be launched; installation and configuration work is currently under way. Data exchange with the district offices is carried out over secure VPN channels.