In early 2016 a former colleague got in touch with me out of the blue. He wanted to know if I would be interested in joining a company called SystemSync Solutions Limited. I had never heard of them and when my ex-colleague described them as a Fin-Tech startup I was essentially none the wiser. I didn’t know anything about API technology, I had never worked in a software development capacity and I wasn’t familiar with the company’s flagship product, PensionSync. This was not an opportunity within my comfort zone. 

In truth, after several years of pure pension scheme implementation, the opportunity for change excited me. They needed an Implementation Manager - that, at least, was a job title I was comfortable with and conjured reassuring images of a repeatable process, a standard implementation, a task that could be learned and refined, ultimately made expert. When I finally joined SystemSync I found something rather different to any Implementation Manager role I had experienced before, with a much wider spectrum of challenges. 

I had to learn quickly. PensionSync was in its infancy. Every payroll software integration had its own very different needs. At the other end of the chain, pension providers have very diverse requirements too. Providing the human link between a team of internal software developers and multiple teams of external software developers was new to me, and challenging. And then there were the end users, who needed to be able to pick up and use the PensionSync tool easily, even though they may not have used a product quite like it before. It has been four years since I joined, and I’m still learning. I’m no longer an Implementation Manager - I am product designer, customer advocate, software tester, marketeer and many other things too diverse for one job title.

Today, PensionSync is an established product with thousands of users and through rapid development it has continually improved payroll-to-pension processing. I’ve been lucky to have many fantastically talented people to work with. The PensionSync developers have achieved miraculous things, connecting many disparate systems and making them flow seamlessly together, each part of a single joined-up process. They couldn’t have done this without the amount of feedback and support we’ve received from partners and in particular from users within the payroll community. 

In 2019, PensionSync was acquired by KeyPay, and that has opened up a new world of possibilities. Having started out as a small team based in Fulham, we now have access to colleagues as far afield as Australia and New Zealand with an amazing range of expertise and experience to help us take PensionSync to the next level.