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Based in Leuven, Belgium, Acerta offers a comprehensive range of payroll services for start-ups, self-employed people, employers and accountants. To support companies and entrepreneurs through every stage of their business growth journey, the company also offers HR services, legal advice, and access to Belgian social insurance and pensions savings funds.
Acerta is on a growth journey of its own, expanding its share of Belgium’s payroll services market by around 10 percent a year. Today, the company delivers payroll services for 60,000 customers across the country, which involves more than 600,000 payroll calculations each month.
Johan Guelluy, CIO at Acerta, says: “Our customers trust us to handle their payroll calculations on time, every time. To deliver those services, we need to exchange data with a large number of stakeholders. For more than 20 years, we’ve leveraged Axway Managed File Transfer to help us streamline those mission-critical data transfers, which include receiving payroll data from customers and sharing payment files with banks.”
Developing next-generation services
Acerta is always looking for innovative ways to enhance its services. The organization is preparing to replace batch-based payroll calculations on the mainframe with a brand-new payroll engine, which will enable it to deliver real-time services to customers.
“One of my favorite quotes is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, who said: ‘Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,’” continues Guelluy. “We want our customers to benefit from the new real-time services without changing the way they share data with us. To achieve that goal, we decided to augment our existing MFT capabilities with an API-driven architecture.”
Cliff Haerden, Infrastructure Director at Acerta, elaborates: “We had already been using Axway Managed File Transfer to share high-value data for many years. So, it made perfect sense to explore the other integration capabilities Axway could offer.”
Driving API innovation
To realize its vision for real-time services, Acerta selected Amplify API Management, an open, secure API platform that offers a single point of control for API management.
“One of the main reasons we chose Amplify API Management is the trust we have in Axway,” Haerden continues. “Axway builds extremely resilient, available and scalable solutions, which are all vital capabilities for processing large volumes of payroll data. We also knew that Axway has a strong technical support organization. Whenever we ask Axway for help, we always get the assistance we need quickly.”
Working with Axway, Acerta configured Amplify API Management as its central API gateway, enabling the company to integrate and govern internal and external APIs across its hybrid cloud environment. Alongside Axway Managed File Transfer, Amplify API Management is now a key component of the new real-time payroll service.
“By combining Amplify API Management with Axway Managed File Transfer, we can bring customer data into our real-time processing engine and share the payroll calculations with the relevant counterparties,” explains Guelluy. “Market-standard integrations from Axway also allow us to exchange data with cloud solutions from SAP, Workday and many other providers. Orchestrating these workflows from a central, strategic platform makes it easy to implement effective audit and governance controls — that’s vital in a highly regulated industry like ours.”
Haerden adds, “Another thing we value about our relationship with Axway is that they put a big emphasis on personal service, just as we do with our customers. We’re working with Axway consultants that we’ve known for many years. The Axway team knows our business and our IT environment very well; it’s a true partnership.”
Scaling seamlessly
Since it began developing its next-generation payroll engine, Acerta has driven massive growth in managed file transfer (MFT) and API transactions. In just three years, the annual number of MFT transactions exploded from 9 million to over 228 million, while annual API transactions grew from 18 million to more than 115 million.
“Axway solutions scale extremely well, which is vital as we move from batch-based jobs on the mainframe to real-time workloads on distributed platforms,” says Haerden. “One of our main objectives is to move our customers to the real-time service without them noticing the switchover. Thanks to our API-driven architecture, customers can continue to use Axway Managed File Transfer to send us their payroll data. Behind the scenes, we will leverage Amplify API Management to bring that data into the real-time payroll engine, and then send the output back to the customer via MFT or API.”
Preparing for the future
Next, Acerta plans to build on its API capabilities with Amplify Engage, a custom-branded storefront that allows enterprises to package, categorize and monetize APIs.
“We’re very excited about Amplify Engage because it aligns with our all-important goal of simplicity,” says Guelluy. “From a single storefront, we can empower developers to quickly and easily access and adopt our APIs. And if we choose the API monetization route, Amplify Engage will make it easy for us to implement that strategy.”
Guelluy concludes, “We chose Axway for the same reason our customers choose us: trust. As we continue to grow our business and innovate our offering, we know we can trust Axway to support us.”
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